Google seeks to influence AI research by giving software away

Washington

GOOGLE, seeking to influence how people design, test, and run artificial-intelligence systems, is making its internal AI development software available for free.

The Alphabet Inc-subsidiary is releasing a program called TensorFlow as freely available open-source software, it said on Monday. It's based on the same internal system Google has spent several years developing to support its AI software and other mathematically complex programs.

Artificial intelligence enables products such as personal assistants, including Google Now and Microsoft's Cortana. It also lets Facebook and Google's software automatically identify and tag th…