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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."
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.
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?
Onda Technology Institute
I wonder if anyone has calculated how many parallel processes and how much instantly accessible RAM would be needed to simulate the human brain. I'm guessing the compute power needed would be jaw dropping.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163051-simulating-1-second-of-human-brain-activity-takes-82944-processors
"It took 40 minutes with the combined muscle of 82,944 processors in K computer to get just 1 second of biological brain processing time. While running, the simulation ate up about 1PB of system memory"
A friend of mine works at a company where the lawyers reviewed Facebook's "open source" licensing terms (surreptitiously buried in a text file entitled "Additional Grant of Patent Rights") and concluded that it isn't safe. They issued a company-wide order that all projects must immediately remove any Facebook open source with these license terms. The terms basically allow Facebook to unilaterally terminate the open source license if you take "any action" against their patent claims. The exact wording is:
In this thread, a Google employee says that their lawyers came to the same conclusion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
If so, why would Facebook do this? Why isn't it more widely discussed?
Those terms seem perfectly reasonable to me. If you want to cling to your patents, don't use their code. We could do with a few less patents in the world.
Suing someone over patent infringement while taking advantage of code they've freely contributed for everyone's use, on the other hand—now that would be evil.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat