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DailyDirt: Open Source Artificial Intelligence Is Smart

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The importance of machine learning is becoming clearer as vast amounts of valuable data accumulates and human minds are looking ill-equipped to try to parse all of it. Sure, humans seem to be better at deciphering our own handwriting and voices, but artificial intelligence (AI) might be a tad better at predicting long-term weather patterns or imminent economic instabilities. We’ve already seen AI that can beat the best of us at Jeopardy! and chess. Here are just a few open source projects that could help achieve the next milestones of AI and machine learning.

• Facebook is going to open source its hardware designs for ‘Big Sur’ — its artificial intelligence computer with 8 GPUs. This open source design will, not surprisingly, fit in Facebook’s Open Compute standard data centers, and if anyone wants to build it themselves, they can also run open source AI software, Torch, on it. [url]
• Google released its open source artificial intelligence code, TensorFlow, and outsiders are using it to do some cool stuff already. But the cool stuff isn’t really the point. Google is nudging developers to use its AI code so that Google can find talented programmers. Machine learning or deep learning skills are going to have an impact on a wide range of industries soon, as automated pattern recognition finds its way into fashion and finance and almost anything that we puny bags of mostly water humans value. Remember to ‘do no evil’, please. [url]
• There are a few more open source AI projects to keep an eye on: DARPA’s DeepDive, Apache UIMA, OpenCog and OAQA (Open Advancement of Question Answering Systems). IBM’s Watson is partially built upon a couple of these projects, and there will likely be more proprietary AI systems based off of open source code. Maybe someday we’ll know when an open source Skynet becomes sentient because it’ll change its licensing terms. [url]
• The OpenAI project is another open artificial intelligence group, promising to share its findings with the public as a non-profit organization. Its funding comes from Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Jessica Livingston and Amazon Web Services — and with Musk involved, we’ll hopefully avoid creating an evil Skynet from becoming a reality. [url]

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Filed Under: ai, artificial intelligence, big sur hardware, darpa, deep learning, deepdive, elon musk, machine learning, oaqa, open compute, open source, openai, opencog, tensorflow, uima, watson
Companies: amazon, facebook, google, ibm, microsoft