He saw it as a triumph of data.

That's how you'd expect him to see it. He's the CEO of the San Francisco startup CrowdFlower, which helps online companies like Twitter juggle massive amounts of data. But after spending time at the Stanford AI Lab, he knows artificial intelligence. And his point is a good one.

'What they're not opening up is their data. They would never do that.' Lukas Biewald, CrowdFlower

In open sourcing the TensorFlow AI engine, Biewald says, Google showed that, when it comes to AI, the real value lies not so much in the software or the algorithms as in the data needed to make it all smarter. Google is giving away the other stuff, but keeping the data.