Last Updated on November 2, 2021 by Henry John
Machine learning (ML) is the science of getting computer systems to learn from data, improve their learning and perform tasks effectively and autonomously using algorithms and statistical models.
This science of machine learning (deep learning) has transformed computing drastically over the past decades, ML algorithms/systems are prominent features in today’s most advanced technologies.
Everyday applications of machine (deep) learning include its adoption in the development of modern search engines, fraud detection, online advertising, autonomous vehicles, and dynamic pricing, among numerous others.
Checkout: 15 Everyday application of Machine Learning.
The hottest thing in tech today and in the medium-term future is and will be artificial intelligence (AI), which is mostly ML/DL systems.
Companies that want to stay at the top or want to get to the top are heavily developing and deploying ML/DL systems, igniting massive interests in the science.
The global interest in machine learning has created a market that is projected to reach $152.24 billion by 2028.
I must confess that I’m optimistic about the prospects of ML/DL both as an investor and a tech enthusiast. And that’s why I took the time to write this article about the companies that are leading the way with machine learning, making the technologies of tomorrow practical today.
Also Checkout: What is Artificial Intelligence? A Deep Introduction
Here are the top 5 machine learning (ML) companies that are leading the way:
Amazon is best known as the world’s largest online marketplace and cloud computing platform. The company was founded in 1994 as an online bookstore and over the years, it’s has risen to become one of the topmost influential technology companies on the planet.
The tech giant is an early adopter of machine learning, they began deploying the technology on their eCommerce website, Amazon.com, in the 1990s, starting with product recommendation systems.
Amazon has since branched out its development and deployment of ML into creating game-changing products and services. Alexa (the world’s #1 AI assistant), Amazon Go (cashier-less convenience stores), AWS Robots, and AWS Machine Learning Services are all products of the company’s ML prowess.
AWS Machine Learning Services is packed with a host of ML/DL packages including Amazon Augmented AI, Amazon Sagemaker, TensorFlow on AWS, AWS Deep Learning AMIs, Amazon Rekognition, and Amazon Fraud Detector to mention but a few.
Checkout more AWS ML services, here.
Whether you are an ML/DL developer looking for the best ML platform or a great tech company that will pay well for your skills, Amazon is one of the very best.
Projects carried out with AWS ML Services:
- Priceline uses Amazon Connect to creat an AI-powered customer center experience, cutting significant call backlogs.
- Foobot uses AWS ML services to optimize temperature and air quality in its customers’ building.
- Volkswagen Group built an intelligent Sign Inspection (iSI) workflow using AWS ML services.
- Pinterest built its renowned visual search engine using AWS ML services.
Checkout more projects carried out with AWS ML services, here.
Prominent AWS ML Customers:
Alphabet is the parent company of Google, the world’s #1 search engine. The company has its hands on numerous ‘new technologies’ beyond Google Search, so much as to warrant a change of name from Google Inc to Alphabet Inc in 2015.
Google, X, Intrinsic, Calico, Waymo, Verily, Wing, and Deepmind are all subsidiaries of Alphabet. These subsidiaries are themselves leading players in their space.
For instance, Google’s YouTube is the #1 videos sharing platform by a wide margin, and Waymo’s self-driving technology, arguably, makes it the #1 self-driving car company today.
This company is a leading force in the development of almost all new revolutionary technologies. Alphabet literary created an R&D company for ‘moonshot’ technologies and called it, X. X is where Alphabet develops new technologies for fun.
At Alphabet’s rate, it is safe to say that everything they do has a lot of ML/DL involved. And if not for Amazon’s AWS ML services, they’d easily be crowned the #1 Machine (deep) learning company in the world.
Alphabet’s in-house machine (deep) learning capacity and capabilities are up there with the very best on this planet. And I don’t think I can cover everything Alphabet does with and on ML/DL in an article like this, so forgive me if I don’t mention some details because they’re that big on ML/DL.
Nonetheless, let’s rendezvous to Deepmind. Deepmind is one of the top artificial intelligence companies, the company is focused on developing AI systems capable of creativity and problem-solving (the holy grail of ML/DL).
Deepmind is renowned for developing the AlphaGo program and its successors (AlphaStar, AlphaFold, and AlphaZero) that beat a human professional Go world champion, Lee Sedol, as well as the most powerful programs playing go, chess, and shogi. These are feats that go down in the history of artificial intelligence development with ML/DL.
Alphabet through the Google Cloud Platform also offers a wide range of ML/DL products and services which includes Vertex AI (an ML platform for building AI models), Conversational AI (Natural Language processing, Diaglogflox, and Contact Center AI), and Recommendations AI among others.
Checkout more GCP ML products and services, here.
Top Alphabet Opensource ML/DL Projects
- Deepmind Lab
- Open Images Database
- Google Dialog Flow
- Google Cloud Datalab
Checkout more Google Opensource ML projects, here.
Prominent Google Cloud AI Customers:
- Home Depot
- Blue Apron
Microsoft is the world’s largest software company and is best known for its line of operating systems, Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft Office Suite. The company sells personal computing devices and offers a host of cloud computing products and services, among other products/services.
Over the past decades, the company has steadily transformed itself into a cloud computing powerhouse. Its cloud computing platform, Microsoft Azure, is the second-largest cloud computing platform, second only to Amazon AWS.
Through Azure, the company offers an “enterprise-grade machine learning service to build and deploy ML models faster”. Azure AI + Machine Learning products and services position it as a major player in the development and deployment of machine (deep) learning systems today.
Azure ML platform enables developers to create ML/DL models with low-code and no-code with tools like ‘automated machine learning’ and drag-and-drop interface. These features have made Microsoft’s platform one of the very best for ML/DL developers.
Microsoft was late to the ML/DL party, however, it came in strong and in style, with a plan, that is seemingly working, to democratize machine learning.
The company’s foray into ML/DL did not begin with Azure. It has for long introduced ML in its products such as Bing (the second biggest search engine), Xbox games, and Windows 8 – 11 to name but a few.
Azure AI + Machine Learning is feature-packed and some of its features include Anomaly detector, computer vision, Azure bot services, Azure cognitive search, Face API, Content moderator, Kinect DK, Azure video analyzer, and Azure metric advisor.
Learn more about Azure AI + Machine Learning services.
Prominent Azure ML Customers:
- AGL Energy
- Ernst & Young (EY)
IBM, as a company, is a machine learning pioneer, they were instrumental to early developments in machine learning and remain a major force in the development of machine and deep learning today.
The company is 110 years old and has brought about numerous revolutionary inventions including Watson, ATM, Floopy and Hard disk, and DRAM to mention but a few.
IBM tops the US patent list for 28 consecutive years, establishing itself as the most innovative company in the world. Over the past decades, it has reinvented itself from a computer hardware company to a major cloud computing and artificial intelligence company.
In 1985 the company started the development of Deep Blue and two decades later, it became the first computer to win both a chess game and a chess match against a reigning world champion under standard chess tournament time controls.
Building on its Deep Blue success, the company developed Watson, an AI system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, in 2010. And in 2011, Watson competed on Jeopardy! and won the first-place prize of $1 million Against champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings.
Since then IBM has gone all-in on artificial intelligence (cloud computing, big data, machine/deep learning, and computer vision) as it believes therein lays its future.
However, the decade that followed IBM Watson’s introduction saw the company struggle immensely to find the best way to utilize and monetize the power of the AI system.
Nonetheless, IBM has seemingly found a way to get Watson firing, it has positioned Watson as an AI for business that helps organizations build AI-based applications.
Watson is today a portfolio of AI products/services such as Watson Assistant, Watson Naural Language Understanding, Watson Language Translator, Watson Natural Language Classifier, Watson Works, and Watson Care Manager.
Checkout more AI/ML Watson products/services offered by IBM, here.
Organizations using IBM Watson:
- Mizuho Bank, Ltd
- The American Red Cross
- Lumen Technologies
- Credit Mutuel
- Korean Air
- Woodside Energy
Nvidia is a leading graphic processing unit (GPU) company with a massive customer base in the gaming, crypto mining, and deep learning space.
Deep learning is a subset of machine learning, it is considered an advanced form of machine learning that uses multi-layered artificial neural networks to perform intelligent tasks.
State-of-the-art artificial intelligence technologies such as autonomous vehicles and intelligent robots are developed using deep learning algorithms and Nvidia is one of the major companies that made deep learning practicable.
You see, the theories of deep learning have been around long before Nvidia came into existence, but training large neural networks was ridiculously slow making the whole process impractical.
Everything changed when Nvidia pioneered GPUs and AI researchers began using GPUs to speed up the training process of neural networks.
The company also developed CUDA and cuDNN, a GPU-accelerated library for deep neural networks, cementing its name in the history books of AI development and positioned itself as a major player in the contemporary development of advanced AI systems.
Nvidia’s Deep learning GPUs are not just used for training (development), they are also used for inference (deployment).
The best GPUs for deep learning in the market today are Nvidia’s. NVIDIA GPU for deep learning is also available as a cloud service from Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and IBM.
Top Nvidia GPUs for Deep Learning
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 1080
- NVIDIA Tesla V100
- NVIDIA Tesla P100
- NVIDIA Tesla K80
- NVIDIA Titan RTX
- NVIDIA A100