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Baidu Open-Sources Its Deep Learning Tools (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon have all done it -- and now Baidu's doing it, too. The Chinese tech giant has open sourced one of its key machine learning tools, PaddlePaddle, offering the software up to the global community of AI researchers. Baidu's big claim for PaddlePaddle is that it's easier to use than rival programs. Like Amazon's DSSTNE and Microsoft's CNTK, PaddlePaddle offers a toolkit for deep learning, but Baidu says comparable software is designed to work in too many different situations, making it less approachable to newcomers. Xu Wei, the leader of Baidu's PaddlePaddle development, tells The Verge that a machine translation program written with Baidu's software needs only a quarter of the amount of code demanded by other deep learning tools. Baidu is hoping this ease of use will make PaddlePaddle more attractive to computer scientists, and draw attention away from machine learning tools released by Google and Facebook. Baidu says PaddlePaddle is already being used by more than 30 of its offline and online products and services, covering sectors from search to finance to health. Xu said that if one of its machine learning tools became too monopolistic, it would be like "trying to use one programming language to code all applications." Xu doesn't believe that any one company will dominate this area. "Different tools have different strengths," he said. "The deep learning ecosystem will end up having different tools optimized for different uses. Just like no programming language truly dominates software development."
It's at least an interesting idea that AI might end up mimicking animal minds, with specialist centres dealing with specific aspects of cognition. Wonder what that would translate into for machine AI?
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
I work in a research lab, and as far as we're concerned, game is basically over, and TensorFlow has won. Some computer vision researchers are still using Torch, but even they are considering moving to TF because it's faster, and Lua is, how can I say this diplomatically, not a good choice for many reasons.
Andrew Ng now works at Baidu. Any chance that Ng has something to do with this?
After all, he is responsible for a lot of people understanding Machine Learning at Stanford, Coursera, and Google.
He seems to be passionate about spreading knowledge of Machine Learning.
Thirty five years ago, before printer drivers allowed software to work with many devices, we had the same interface problems as AI has today. If AI drivers became ubiquitous then every user's interface would be unique. There are several million prototypes of AI solvers out there, as sophisticated users, most of whom would like what Baidu are offering, if only the driver issue was solved between the deep learning supplier community and the user. This *userware* has grown into lopsided interfaces that only unique users know or care about. Nonetheless, all AI interface dreams should be accommodated by any AI Driver Standards Committee.
I nominate the open source AI primitive, called Ingrid, to have its prototyping language modify and make use Baidu's deep learning toolbox. Do I hear any seconders?
Where's the link to the source? I want to actually see it.
We can't trust it USA #1
Baidu should apply that "deep learning" to it's dumbass search spider that keeps looking for files deleted more than seven years ago.
Look, dumbass, 404 means it's NOT FUCKING THERE.
As usual