Google is looking to acquire Kaggle, a social network of sorts for data scientists: Report

The future is AI, we know that, but who will make the breakthrough that will redefine AI as we know it? Someone will, eventually, and that someone is likely to be a data scientist.

Google, with fingers deep in the AI pie, now appears to be looking to get more deeply involved in the community. Rumour has it that Google will acquire Kaggle, one of the largest communities of data scientists around. Kaggle routinely hosts competitions in data science and machine learning and had recently partnered with Google to host a $100,000 competition for classifying YouTube videos with AI.

The news was revealed to TechCrunch by unnamed sources and is expected to be announced as soon as tomorrow. TechCrunchreached out to both Google and Kaggle for more information, but none was forthcoming.

TechCrunch’s sources lead them to believe that Kaggle will mostly be allowed to run as it is currently running and that the acquisition is more about the community anyway.

Kaggle is more than just a community of data scientists in the same way that GitHub is more than a community of developers. There’s a lot of code flying around and many of the building blocks for basic machine learning algorithms can be found there.