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Is Microsoft Mainstreaming Machine Learning? (networkworld.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the calling-all-Python-developers dept.

Tuesday Microsoft updated their open source Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK), adding support for both C++ and Python. "This announcement is more than a point release..." argues Network World. "It's the recognition of AI and machine learning as the next big platform after mobile." This announcement represents a shift in Microsoft's customer focus from research to implementation... The toolkit is a supervised machine learning system in the same category of other open-source projects such as Tensorflow, Caffe and Torch. Microsoft is one of the leading investors in and contributors to the open machine learning software and research community. A glance at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference reveals that there are just four major technology companies committed to moving the field of neural networks forward: Microsoft, Google, Facebook and IBM.
A Microsoft engineer described CNTK as "democratizing AI," according to Microsoft's announcement, which also notes that their toolkit "has been optimized to best take advantage of the NVIDIA hardware and Azure networking capabilities that are part of the Azure offering."

2 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. No. by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 5, Informative

    TensorFlow is what everyone is using because it works well and it has a nice license to go with it. Besides, willingly becoming reliant on anything Microsoft makes is a devil's bargain.

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    1. Re:No. by somenickname · · Score: 4, Informative

      TensorFlow is what everyone is using because it works well and it has a nice license to go with it. Besides, willingly becoming reliant on anything Microsoft makes is a devil's bargain.

      Logged in to write exactly this. I've worked on a number of projects in the past that could have been simplified by TensorFlow. I have an equal level of disdain for Microsoft and Google but, TensorFlow is pretty darn cool. And the licensing alone makes it better than anything that Microsoft would be willing to release. So, no, Microsoft isn't mainstreaming machine learning. These days, I don't think Microsoft is mainstreaming anything except surveillance and shitty user interfaces.