Facebook has released a collection of it’s Deep-Learning tools. Deep-learning is a technique that helps computers to learn how to recognize speech and voice.
Facebook’s idea behind releasing all the algorithms and tools is that it will save a lot of time for the researchers and students dedicated towards Artificial Intelligence. The tools will help the researchers in perfecting their technology much faster and make it better.
A lot of algorithms about AI are already out there, but coding them into programs is not as easy as it may sound. Making working codes using the AI algorithms is a sophisticated and tideous job.
Facebook artificial intelligence researcher and software engineer Soumith Chintala
Someone has to go and implement the algorithm in a program, and that’s not trivial in general. You have to have a lot of skill to implement it efficiently.
According to Chintala, Facebook’s new Open Source project will help startups and researchers who do not have a lot of time and resources and hence sometimes end up proving algorithms which already exist. It will give them room to handle new projects. “Even though we don’t collaborate day-to-day with that world, it could provide a general catalyst to the community and that will benefit us indirectly,” he said.
Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Lab released the tools related to the project sub-field “deep learning”. With this, various aspects of our brain and behavior can be learnt and predictions can be made according to things which please us. Google and Facebook and a lot of other sites are already using Deep Learning and it’s obvious that this is going to be a part of a lot of our online services. Facebook already uses it to alter our news feed. It also learns to read the faces in the pictures we upload and hence makes better suggestions.
Facebook research lab has released it’s modules for the open source computing network, Torch. Torch has represented a lot of improvement on the online service of Deep Learning algorithms. It has played a pivotal role in many research and academic labs of big corporations like Google and Twitter.
Facebook’s tools are faster and fierce when questioned in terms of development. Chintala further said
We benchmarked our code, and these are the fastest open source implementations out there. People didn’t explore certain areas because they didn’t think it was possible and now they are.
Deep Learning tools are already in our lives and their development is helpful but it’s slow. Maybe this new turn of events from Facebook nudges other big companies to adopt it too.
