As we’ve seen in our past articles, both artificial intelligence and open source software are two big trends that will radically change how we build things today. To spice things up a bit, we at Wiredelta® thought that it would be cool to combine both in one power punch! Actually, we’re not the first to do this, but open source and AI are increasingly intertwining and it’s becoming more exciting than ever!
Open source is transforming AI
We’ve already talked about open source and its benefits to the community. But also AI has been involved in the open source movement; as explained in this article, companies like H2O.ai are bringing machine learning within every business’ reach. New, open source tools are arriving that can run on affordable hardware and allow individuals and small organizations to perform prodigious data crunching and predictive tasks.
Companies like Cisco, for instance, use the source code made available by H2O.ai to analyze their huge data sets that track products purchased by customers — such as routers — and when they might logically be due for an upgrade or checkup.
Big companies are contributing to the trend as well. Facebook has open sourced its machine learning system such as SharpMask designed for artificial intelligence tasks at large scale. Google has open sourced a program called TensorFlow that it has spent years developing to support its AI software and other predictive and analytics programs. Even the Chinese search giant Baidu has open sourced its deep learning software.
By making all of these resources public, it’s clear that the main focus for most companies is reach. They don’t aim to make a few extra bucks trying to sell closed boxes, they aim for the winner-takes-all segments where they are the underlying platform. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, on a recent conference call, said “I think it’s possible to get to the point in the next five to ten years where we have computer systems that are better than people at [perceiving some things]”.
How Wiredelta is taking advantage of AI + OSS
Here at Wiredelta we’re super excited about the incredible combination of artificial intelligence and open source. In our case, we’re taking advantage of both to provide users with an amazing experience when you want to create your personalized website, and eventually, app!
What we’ve been developing here is an assembling tool, which collects the wealth of plugins and themes from open source frameworks like WordPress, Magneto, Prestashop, and more. Wiredelta initially starts with the most popular framework, WordPress, and gives the user a personal aid thanks to an AI working behind the scenes.
As we’ve seen in the previous blog post, WordPress is so awesome that it powered 28% of the Web in November 2015, thus making it the most popular open source Content Management System on the internet.
With massive success within open source comes a nearly endless amount of development options. WordPress offers 4000+ themes and 45,000+ plugins that you can use for free! Our tool intelligently selects the very best among them and allows the user to install with just a few clicks!
The big difference between open source frameworks like WordPress and other, more closed frameworks, is its incredible community. In fact, no other closed source framework can match the power of thousands of skilled developers working around the clock. This is why Wiredelta’s assembling tool is so powerful.
What does this mean in practice?
Let’s pretend for a moment that Snapchat had just come out. You have a feeling that this social network will become the next big thing. At the same time, Snapchat has been building open APIs to allow any third-party developer to integrate with Snapchat. If you don’t use open source frameworks like WordPress you will have to build the integration yourself, or pay someone to do it. If you use WordPress, all you have to do is wait for a contributor to build a plugin that integrates with Snapchat. The question is then whether you can find this plugin, and that’s what is so great about Wiredelta’s assembling tool, because chances are that you will almost certainly find this plugin sooner or later.
Imagine just a search bar, more or less like Google’s. In this search field, you simply type keywords on what you want your website to focus on! For example, you type “science”, and the search algorithm provides you with a list of themes that match the keyword. Once you choose a theme, it’s time to add some functionality to your website! Again, the user types in various keywords like “newsletter” in the search bar and simply adds whichever functionality they desire; all of which are sourced from open source frameworks like WordPress.
In many ways, you can compare this open source development process to how Dell managed hardware building; they asked customers to set up their computer online, then they assemble it, and then ship it. Wiredelta is doing exactly this, but with software.
Conclusion
To sum up, open source is boosting AI development and it will continue to present new technological innovations into our daily lives. Wiredelta seeks to take advantage of both, creating an assembling tool commonly known as “software building software”. We can’t wait to show our users what we’ve been crafting and we eagerly await feedback from the open source community!
