Thursday, November 12, 2015

Why Google Is Willing to Give Away Its Latest Machine-Learning Software

“It’s not a suicidal idea to release this,” said Nello Cristianini, a professor of artificial intelligence at the U.K.’s University of Bristol. “Deep learning is not plug-and-play. It needs a lot of testing, tuning and adapting.”

Deep-learning systems have to be built to perform specific tasks and trained with massive amounts of data, said Dr. Cristianini and others. Several years ago, Google researchers taught a system to recognize cats by loading about 10 million images from its YouTube online-video service into a network of 16,000 computer processors

The systems can have millions of parameters, or “knobs” as Dr. Cristianini calls them, that must be adjusted. Without smart engineers to do this, the deep-learning algorithms Google released are of limited use.

“Tweaking the parameters and having experience from trial and error in the past — that’s something you need expertise on,” said Patrick Ehlen, chief scientist at machine-learning startup Loop AI Labs. “People who come to this for the first time will need to spend a lot of time on this.”

By releasing the software, Google hopes to attract more researchers contributing ideas to improve the software and apply it in new ways.

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