Vowpal Wabbit was created in response to an internal contest at Yahoo! Research in 2007. It performed well and developed into an active open source project — the first of its kind for online interactive learning. The momentum from open collaboration helped Vowpal Wabbit develop structurally with a reduction stack, improve performance with parallel learning, and added unique interactive learning capabilities.
The Vowpal Wabbit open source project aspires to enable anyone in the world to perform interactive online learning. With ongoing contributions and open research collaboration, the project continues to create new interactive machine learning approaches that expand the possibilities of what people and machines achieve together.