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GNU Project Introduces Gneural Network AI Package (gnu.org)

Posted by timothy on from the thinking-all-your-best-thoughts dept.

jones_supa writes: The GNU free software project is introducing a new neural network computation package called Gneural Network. The GNU project has been impressed by the work of Google, IBM, AlphaGo and Watson on the field of artificial intelligence. However, the GNU project sees that the fact that only companies and labs have access to this technology can represent a threat: "First of all, we cannot know how money driven companies are going to use this novel technology. Second, this monopoly slows down Progress and Technology." This is why the author, Jean Michel Sellier, decided to create Gneural Network and release it under the GNU GPL license. In the current release (version number humbly set to 0.0.1), it is a very simple feedforward network which can learn very simple tasks such as curve fitting, but the development team plans to deliver more advanced features very soon. They are already spending efforts to implement a network of LSTM (long short term memory) neurons for recurrent networks and deep learning. Learning reinforcement techniques are also planned.

3 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. An open source NN library. How novel! by dinfinity · · Score: 4, Informative

    "However, the GNU project sees that the fact that only companies and labs have access to this technology can represent a threat"
    That is not a fact at all. There are tons of open source neural network libraries and tools and even tons of open source neural network libraries that provide recurrent network and deep learning features. Just a 30 second search gives me this list:
    http://deeplearning.net/softwa...

    "a very simple feedforward network which can learn very simple tasks such as curve fitting"
    This is NN101 stuff and I'm sure hundreds if not thousands of college students have made something similar.

    Nothing to see here. Move along.

  2. "Ethical Motivations" by nickovs · · Score: 5, Informative

    The idea that "the fact that only companies and labs have access to this technology can represent a threat" is patently absurd. Theano, Caffe and Torch are all open source and even Google has open-sourced its Tensor Flow platform which makes it easy to build new tools and run then, fast, on all the GPUs you can find. If you need to do this at scale and you're not the size of Google or IBM you can use Amazon's Machine Learning for AWS. There are many, many higher level toolkits out there that are available under licenses that are much less restrictive than GPLv3.

    --
    If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
  3. common open source deep learning libraries by ooloorie · · Score: 5, Informative

    But the fact that only companies and labs have access to this technology can represent a threat. First of all, we cannot know how money driven companies are going to use this novel technology. Second, this monopole slows down Progress and Technology.

    The GNU project should do a bit more background research before starting new projects. Here are some links to open source deep learning tools. These are the same tools and libraries used by those "money driven companies" in their projects, including AlphaGo:

    Caffe, widely used C++ deep learning framework.

    Theano, widely used Python deep learning framework.

    Torch, the software used by Google, AlphaGo and Facebook.

    TensorFlow, Google's large scale machine learning framework.

    CNTK, Microsoft's deep learning toolkit.