In July, Uber released a new open source AI library called the Plato research dialogue system. A couple of months ago, Cisco open-sourced its MindMeld conversational AI platform, after acquiring the company of the same name in 2017 for $125 million.
Why are so many new libraries being announced? There seems to be a trend of developers adopting open source conversational AI and leaving behind closed-source alternatives. Most of the key tooling for building conversational AI that has been developed in the last three years is open source. And companies like Uber and Cisco want to be in the running to define the standard conversational AI stack.
In fact, the whole field of AI has seen a strong shift toward open source infrastructure in the past few years. The initial spark may have been Google’s decision to open-source TensorFlow in 2015. At that point, many businesses started paying attention. Google Search data shows that interest in open source libraries like TensorFlow and PyTorch has grown at the expense of closed platforms such as IBM Watson and Amazon’s Sagemaker.
