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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 15 2018, @05:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the faster-path-to-skynet dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Students from Fast.ai, a small organization that runs free machine-learning courses online, just created an AI algorithm that outperforms code from Google's researchers, according to an important benchmark.

Fast.ai's success is important because it sometimes seems as if only those with huge resources can do advanced AI research.

Fast.ai consists of part-time students keen to try their hand at machine learning—and perhaps transition into a career in data science. It rents access to computers in Amazon's cloud.

But Fast.ai's team built an algorithm that beats Google's code, as measured using a benchmark called DAWNBench, from researchers at Stanford. This benchmark uses a common image classification task to track the speed of a deep-learning algorithm per dollar of compute power.

Google's researchers topped the previous rankings, in a category for training on several machines, using a custom-built collection its own chips designed specifically for machine learning. The Fast.ai team was able to produce something even faster, on roughly equivalent hardware.

"State-of-the-art results are not the exclusive domain of big companies," says Jeremy Howard, one of Fast.ai's founders and a prominent AI entrepreneur. Howard and his cofounder, Rachel Thomas, created Fast.ai to make AI more accessible and less exclusive.

Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611858/small-team-of-ai-coders-beats-googles-code/


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Wednesday August 15 2018, @07:22PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday August 15 2018, @07:22PM (#721893) Homepage

    > The Fast.ai team was able to produce something even faster, on roughly equivalent hardware (custom-built collection [of Google's] own chips designed specifically for machine learning).

    So only as accessible as Google makes its custom built machine learning chips, then.

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