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

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.

Comments

An open source NN library. How novel!

[dinfinity]

"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.

Re:An open source NN library. How novel!

[Dutch Gun]

Let's just say that the ethics preamble (at five lines) is longer than the library's current documentation.

You're not making sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Until the BSD guys pick up on doing a project like this, I won't care.

The only major difference between BSD and GPL licenses is that BSD allows open software to be closed, so really you're arguing in favour of closed software. Whatever are you doing on Slashdot?

But the illogic of your position runs deeper still. The whole point of TFA and of Gneural is to provide an open neural net because closed ones are already plentiful , so the only perceived "benefit" of BSD (using the term loosely) is precisely what Gneural is trying to balance. This makes your desire for BSD licensing so that even more proprietary software can be made totally miss the point of the project.

Re:You're not making sense

[Megol]

Until the BSD guys pick up on doing a project like this, I won't care.

The only major difference between BSD and GPL licenses is that BSD allows open software to be closed, so really you're arguing in favour of closed software. Whatever are you doing on Slashdot?

Implying one have to be a GPL fanatic to see any value of /.? That's of course bullshit bordering on trolling.

But you are also wrong about the BSD licence, it doesn't allow open software to be closed - it allows open software to be _forked_. That property it shares with the GPL where the copyright owners can fork their code to be licensed however they want. So the difference is who can fork the code, all (BSD) or the copyright owners (GPL). So which is more free?

But the illogic of your position runs deeper still. The whole point of TFA and of Gneural is to provide an open neural net because closed ones are already plentiful , so the only perceived "benefit" of BSD (using the term loosely) is precisely what Gneural is trying to balance. This makes your desire for BSD licensing so that even more proprietary software can be made totally miss the point of the project.

And you plainly doesn't understand the BSD licence thus missing the point of the post.

Re:You're not making sense

[Wycliffe]

So paraphrasing:

BSD license = you are free to do with the software what you want.
GPL license = we are going to dictate what you may do and what you may not, which products it is acceptable to build, etc.

Sounds like one of those is much freer than the other...

BSD is freer in the first generation sense but when someone takes BSD and expands on it (for example MacOS), other people are then cut off from those added improvement. It would be like a free public library where no one was required to return the books. Yes, the books are more free for the first person that checks them out but if the first person puts them on their shelf at home, those books are now a lot less free for future users. In this case, they are obviously worried that as machine learning becomes more and more important they don't want the market cornered by a handful of commercial companies negating the last 20 years of their progress. If instead of paying a "microsoft tax" to use windows everyone has to start paying a "google tax" for the machine learning to make their computer usable then we are back where we have started from.

"Ethical Motivations"

[nickovs]

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.

Re:Vapour?

[serviscope_minor]

If it's anything like the utter embarrassment of HURD (w.r.t. Linux kernel)

The HURD ceased to be a prority GNU project decades ago. The Linux kernel meets the FSF requirements (GPL) and so completes teh GNU operating system. What's left the the research project of a few people who want to see if they can make a super-unix with a microkernel.

That is not in any way shape or form embarressing.

I think GNU themselves are too slow, dumb and doctrinaire to ever produce anything of value or impact ever again.

I, for one want to see concepts in C++ as soon as possible. Gue'ss who's leading the charge on that one?

common open source deep learning libraries

[ooloorie]

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.