Kaggle makes it easier to "enter" AI (by reading about competitions, looking at successful approaches, and eventually implementing your own approaches). You me

Kaggle makes it easier to "enter" AI (by reading about competitions, looking at successful approaches, and eventually implementing your own approaches). You mentioned that Kaggle competitions can be solved "without requiring deep learning". This benefits Google because Google doesn't need a world where every developer is a deep learning expert. Instead, Google needs a world where developers have a little experience with AI, enough that they can look at Kaggle as a friendly, non-intimidating way to get started solving problems with AI. And fundamentally, more people are interested in "solving problems with AI" than "building AI to solve problems from scratch", which will lead to more customers for Google's AI/ML based APIs. In my limited past experience, I've liked the fact that on Kaggle, I can understand the marginal benefits of different approaches. I can try a naive approach with simple ML techniques, and achieve a score of say ~60. I can see (after the competition is complete) that an optimized version of my same ML solution can score ~70 from some clever tricks. And perhaps I can see that the winning solution added a lot of complexity to achieve a score of ~75.