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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: 1) by unhandyandy on Thursday August 16 2018, @02:59PM (1 child)

    by unhandyandy (4405) on Thursday August 16 2018, @02:59PM (#722216)

    "there must always be the freedom for the individual to allocate his own capital however he sees fit."

    There's a conflation here of two different flavors of capitalism: competitive markets, which are generally good (with some exceptions like health care) and free markets, which are good only to the extent they're competitive. Crony capitalism is the worst of both worlds - socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @07:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @07:00PM (#722427)

    A government is fundamentally anti-capitalism; taking resources at the point of a gun is the antithesis of capitalism—picking winners and losers wither other people's resources is the antithesis of capitalism.

    You call it "Crony Capitalism", but it contradicts the very fundamental requirements of Capitalism. That is why you are so confused. IT IS NOT CAPITALISM. Quit calling it what it isn't.