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Facebook Open Sources AI Hardware Design (facebook.com)

UnknowingFool writes: Facebook has released specifications on their newest Open Rack-compatible hardware server they named Big Sur. It is for AI computing at a large scale. Using eight 300W GPU slots the server is touted to offer more efficient neural network training by using GPUs. The announcement reads in part: "We plan to open-source Big Sur and will submit the design materials to the Open Compute Project (OCP). Facebook has a culture of support for open source software and hardware, and FAIR has continued that commitment by open-sourcing our code and publishing our discoveries as academic papers freely available from open-access sites. We're very excited to add hardware designed for AI research and production to our list of contributions to the community. We want to make it a lot easier for AI researchers to share techniques and technologies. As with all hardware systems that are released into the open, it's our hope that others will be able to work with us to improve it. We believe that this open collaboration helps foster innovation for future designs, putting us all one step closer to building complex AI systems that bring this kind of innovation to our users and, ultimately, help us build a more open and connected world."

2 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. The AI fanatics must be getting really desperate by gweihir · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Calling neural nets "AI" is about as far removed from what that term implies as possibly without leaving the area of classificators. The only thing neural nets do is if you show them enough examples from a specific thing, they eventually have a good chance to recognize other instances of that thing. No intelligence involved, just pattern matching were you can train the patterns instead of having to configure them.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  2. Re: The AI fanatics must be getting really despera by joaommp · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Isn't that exactly how our brains work? Hmmm... I wonder why they call them "neural nets"... Isn't it reasonable, then, to regard it as a (even if very primitive) form of artificial intelligence, or at least, a component of it?