Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Baidu Open-Sources Its Deep Learning Tools (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the freely-available dept.

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."

2 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. Andrew Ng by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Meh by ImdatS · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm not sure about that.

    I just briefly glanced at PaddlePaddle and its "QuickStart" is actually a "start" instead of TensorFlow's highly complex unusable documentation.

    PaddlePaddle seems to be directed towards the user instead of the scientific community. I know, TensorFlow has some examples for beginners (MNIST sample) but in order to get something out of TensorFlow I need weeks of reading, trying to understand how it works under the hood and try something out - and in most cases it was just really frustrating.

    Admittedly, I'm not an expert and I'm not in academia - but I want to use it in real-world applications and TensorFlow (without SyntaxNet/Parsey MacParseface) is just ... technology preview ... that I can experiment with but cannot actually use as an outsider for anything practical.

    I'm doing language analysis and working on a product for a customer to reduce the burden of some of his call center agents by applying machine learning to respond to customer's requests automatically.

    The only practical solution so far was using spaCy - TensorFlow was just a mess, including SyntaxNet.

    I'll try out PaddlePaddle, especially because their initial "Quick Start" is actually about a real-world problem.

    There is absolutely nothing about real-world problems such as "Chat" or "FAQ-type bots" using TensorFlow - what I could find so far was only mostly academic mumbo-jumbo.

    Sorry to say that - but most of Google's documentations about their technologies just suck ..