At the peak of the Japanese harvest, Makoto Koike’s mother spends around eight hours a day sorting cucumbers from the family farm into different categories—a dull, time-consuming task that her son decided to automate. Although Makoto wasn’t a machine learning expert, he started playing around with TensorFlow, Google’s popular open-source machine learning framework, and developed a deep learning model that could sort cucumbers by size, shape and other attributes. The system isn’t perfect (it has an accuracy rate of around 75 percent). But it’s a sign of how AI could soon transform even the smallest family-run business.
Giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook are, of course, well-aware of this transformative power. Deep learning underpins Amazon’s recommendation system, Google’s search and translation tools, and Microsoft’s Cortana personal assistant, as well many other widely used applications and services.
