Microsoft Releases Its Deep Learning Toolkit On GitHub (microsoft.com) 53
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft is moving its machine learning Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) from its own hosting site, CodePlex, to GitHub. They're also putting it under the MIT open source license. The move marks an effort to make it easier for developers to collaborate on building their own deep learning applications using the CNTK. Under the CodePlex license, access was restricted to academics only, and it was wholly targeted to that audience. Now that it's opening the project to everyone, Microsoft hopes to attract a greater number of developers, and a wider variety as well.
This follows similar releases from Google and Baidu.
Did anyone (Score:1)
Read this as Microsoft releases big learning rootkit?
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One always needs to beware of that, especially from MS. I'd need to check, does the MIT license protect you against patent infringement suits based around the released code? If not, then I'd suspect a trap, even if not a rootkit.
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This is inevitable. Our society needs to figure out how to deal with it, instead of inciting fear that the world is doomed because of it.
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This is inevitable. Our society needs to figure out how to deal with it, instead of inciting fear that the world is doomed because of it.
This is why the universal basic income is inevitable at some point. It either that or massive riots to protest the organised poverty.
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Call me when software can dig ditches and build roads all on it's own.
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Maybe never "all on its own" but with a massively reduced number of people required.
It used to require a lot of people with shovels.
Then it required fewer people with bull dozers.
The big earth movers are already moving to semi-autonomous. Next step is a single 'drone' operator in AC working on the stuff that needs a human to do while a few other dozen in the fleet manage themselves automatically.
http://www.cat.com/en_US/artic... [cat.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Every machine need less people working on it than the number of people needed to perform the task in the first place. That's automation: allowing fewer people to perform the same amount of work, including the guys needed to maintain the machines.
If it were different, there would be no automation going on. But there is, and it's steadily moving massive amounts of people to unemployment.
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Newsflash: there's not enough need of that to occupy that much of the population, and with a missing middle class current capitalism doesn't work anyway.
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Call me when a bot wins a Turing competition without shenanigans.
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You are leaving out the millions that starved to death in the wake of automation. (It didn't happen in one year, but try thousands over a hundred years.) Some times were worse than others, and it occasionally hit a peak. Check out the history of the Enclosure Acts. Or the Luddites. The modern weavers (in US/Europe) do much better than the weavers of that time, but they aren't their descendants. Too many of them died.
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P.S.: The Luddites are also significant to attend to if you want to observe the way history is managed by the wealthy to make them look good...or at least not totally evil. It is rightly said "History is written *for* the winners". And much of how it's managed isn't through acts of war as such, but through economic pillaging. (And if you don't think that's happening wherever you live today, you've got blinders on.)
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Skynet?
More developers? (Score:1, Interesting)
..., Microsoft hopes to attract a greater number of developers, and a wider variety as well.
Good luck. I've worked – professionally, both directly and indirectly – on a couple different open source projects. They all had (and still have) lots of users.
But growing the list of active developers from outside the core cadre of devs? Next to impossible.
If they're open sourcing it to get more active development, I expect they've got a tough row to hoe.
I'm more inclined to think they're just not funding development and this is a desperation move.
Re:More developers? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think they're putting the source code out there so people will improve these libraries. They've got the payroll to hire armies of people to work on this. I suspect Microsoft wants to see greater adoption of this code by seeding an ecosystem of projects that are utilizing it. Kind of like how they've posted Windows 10 iOT for free. Different, though, because it's not open source, but they want people to use it so their platform stays relevant in a quickly evolving technological landscape.
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You know Google did the same thing four months ago, right?
Re: Wow. (Score:1)
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I think you missed the <sarcasm> tag.
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To some extent this relates to the regime change that happened after Ballmer left. Microsoft previously shunned open source and the Linux ecosystem. Now they are much more open to it, and are shifting to Linux for (e.g.) their GPU computing. Apparently they are also rewriting a lot of the CNTK code to work better w
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Did it? While one on the main researchers on NN keeps working on Theano, not to mention everything else that exists, I have my doubts.
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Otherwise Known As (Score:2)
I though their Deep Learning Toolkit was named Windows 10 - wait, who's learning what?
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Not necessarily, for 2 reasons. First, math is math, and most of the building blocks of machine learning are pretty well known. What is valuable is how the building blocks are assembled and set up for a given problem. Second, without large amounts of collected data, even knowing the exact setup of somebody's model isn't particularly valuable. So a company can open source a lot of good general optimizers and other functions without giving away any "secret sauce."
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AI isn't going to be close the Hollywood AI for a long time. Say 20-30 years. It requires too much computer power.
OTOH, there are specializations that can totally upset society that will probably be showing up a lot sooner. People can dis self-driving cars all they want, but they are going to cause social upheaval. Probably as much as did the switch from horses to cars, and over a shorter time-frame. And that's just *one* of the applications on a near future track. And while mobile AI is heavy, interc
Complex (Score:1)