

Baidu claims deep learning breakthrough with Deep Speech - sherjilozair
https://gigaom.com/2014/12/18/baidu-claims-deep-learning-breakthrough-with-deep-speech/

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methodOverdrive
I read the paper - it's interesting and definitely improves on prior efforts.
But I wouldn't call it a "breakthrough" \- a few percent better accuracy on
some datasets (with no real discussion of other measures of performance), and
the algorithm they use is dead simple: a recurrent neural network with
rectified linear units (as opposed to Long Short Term Memory). It sounds to me
like the major improvements they made were to use a ton of data, and a ton of
processing power - the interesting part of the paper is largely about data
partitioning to take advantage of multiple GPUs, not about a novel learning
algorithm or network architecture.

Not to discredit work by what I'm sure is a very effective machine learning
research team - this paper is probably important, but as an incremental
improvement on prior algorithms that takes advantage of modern hardware, not a
dramatically new approach.

I guess the "breakthrough" is showing that pure deep learning (without fancy
acoustic models, etc) can perform well - which is pretty cool.

