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/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @05:18AM
Oh yeah...right. The Russians have always tried to claim they invented something. Seems we have found the Russian bot.