Learning AI Poorly: What is Kaggle?

(originally posted to LinkedIn)

You probably have heard of Kaggle when reading about AI and ML. Keep reading if you don’t really know what it is.

Kaggle is a website owned by Google that hosts a data science community. Started in 2010 to host contests for machine learning, it has evolved into an entire community of learners, developers, and researchers. It hosts datasets, models, and even lets you run your own code in notebooks using Python or R for free.

Mostly known for its code competitions, Kaggle offers cash prizes:

full-scale machine learning challenges which pose difficult, generally commercially-purposed prediction problems […] Featured competitions attract some of the most formidable experts, and offer prize pools going as high as a million dollars. However, they remain accessible to anyone and everyone. Whether you’re an expert in the field or a complete novice, featured competitions are a valuable opportunity to learn skills and techniques from the very best in the field.

Speaking of learning skills, Kaggle offers free courses ranging from beginner computer programming to advanced SQL, computer vision, and even AI ethics. They provide excellent Learn Guides which are “collections of high-quality learning resources authored by the Kaggle community.”

Is this a paid advertisement? I wish! But seriously, Kaggle is an excellent place to look around if you are interested in getting better at ML. You should check it out.