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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/
(Score: 2, Informative) by anubi on Wednesday August 15 2018, @11:42PM
Case in point... the "Strowger Switch" [wikipedia.org] which was invented by a pissed off undertaker who had to find some way to keep the telephone operator from routing calls to his competitor.
So, he figured out a way to get the telephone operator out of the loop. So there was no longer anyone there to reroute his customers to his competitor.
I am all for the free enterprise and capitalism thing, but it has to run on sane foundations... the foundation of copyright law and patenting has got so far out of whack that its gotten counterproductive to the advancement of society. One cannot milk a past work for nearly so long, just as one can't expect lifetimes of payment for fixing a washing machine or laying some brick. If they want to call it "property", complete with "get off my lawn" kinda stuff, after 10 years or so, start charging property tax at the same rate that everyone else is paying for property tax ( i.e. homeowners ).
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]