
Startups Democratize Deep Learning So Google and Facebook Don't Own It All - jonbaer
http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/09/17/ai-for-everyone-startups-aim-to-democratize-deep-learning-so-google-and-facebook-dont-hog-it-all/
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SwellJoe
"Once you can recognize key objects in images, you can target ads not just on
keywords but on objects in an image."

It is sad that so much amazing tech is being used primarily to deliver ads
more effectively. Deep learning is not the first, nor will it be the last,
technology for which that is the case...but, it doesn't make it any less
depressing. I like free markets, but somehow our collective consciousness
needs to shift from valuing making money over all other things.

And, it's alarming that many of the most valuable companies primary products
are ads. Many companies that make real things (like electric cars and solar
panels) are worth vastly less than many of the companies that spit ads about
real things at people (like Google and Facebook). Something seems unbalanced
about that. It seems so wrong, in fact, that it feels vaguely dangerous, to
me, though I can't quite put my finger on why.

~~~
aaronharnly
Yes, I agree -- seeing our best minds work on our lamest problems is
distressing. Though arguably, it's an improvement from the previous condition,
in in which our best technology was primarily used to produce weapons of war.

At least some of the products of the social media & web advertising era give
people access to information and one another, two fundamental human drives.
That's a bit better than "better technology to persuade people to buy stuff."

~~~
unknownian
>seeing our best minds work on our lamest problems is distressing

I've seen this a lot, and it's probably true. But because of cuts to research
and capitalism's "market failure" as Gates calls it, when it comes to
research, does it really matter? The highly motivated and brilliant people
will go off into research anyway.

The fault isn't the people of course, it's the markets.

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viktorppt
Deep learning is an awesome topic. The problem I find isn't the concept or the
maths. It is the enormous amount of damn data janitorial work that I have to
process everyday.

Oh data didn't come back in a clean format? 10 hours gone.

All these text need to be tagged? 2 days

What categories do these images fall under? Another 3 days spent tagging

Wanna parallelize your algorithmn? Ok, good luck learning how to deploy to
multiple machines on AWS.

I will pay easily for a service that allows me to run my analysis in parallel
without any sysadmin knowledge.

~~~
agibsonccc
What would you like to do? I made deeplearning4j for this express purpose?
Don't need hadoop, command line aws (just specify the number of machines),
with a consistent data pipeline interface usable in either single threaded or
distributed mode. Happy to take feature requests and answer questions.

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Teodolfo
I love deep learning and I am sympathetic to the concern that too much of it
will end up patented. However, these garbage popsci tech journalist articles
need to slow down. I can't imagine anyone who doesn't already love it not
starting to hate deep learning after all the garbage articles about it.

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eegilbert
I think we should revisit the meaning of the word "democratic."

~~~
neurotech1
I think its a relevant description. Technology like deep learning shouldn't be
the domain of large companies and graduate researchers.

A friend is working on DeepLearning4J
([http://deeplearning4j.org/](http://deeplearning4j.org/)) which is an open
source distributed deep learning package.

~~~
agibsonccc
Thanks for mentioning me! Admittedly a lot of work to be done. Looking forward
to a stable release here soon that will hopefully allow easier access to
models while not compromising on speed and ease of use. It can be hard problem
to solve and I myself have learned a lot along the way.

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oscargrouch
> AI For Everyone: Startups Democratize Deep Learning So Google And Facebook
> Don't Own It All

> In particular, several companies aim to democratize deep learning by
> offering it as a service or coming up with cheaper hardware to make it more
> accessible to businesses.

Couldnt spot the "democratization" of AI here (unless democracy only to those
that can pay?); also, given the current trends, small interesting startups get
acquired by the big ones early.. and we end in big monopolies again..

The only way to runaway from this cycle is open-source.. otherwise we would
still using windows XP and IE6 by now

Until good open-source initiatives can happen, we will be lock in the hands of
a few forever.. I hope we still have some open-source heroes left out there..

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agibsonccc
I discussed this very concept at[1]. The industry as a whole could really
benefit from representation learning. There's a lot of unstructured media to
analyze. What's missing I think is the proper interface to do so. I think the
tools will emerge in the next few years that will allow us to do this.

[1]: [https://gigaom.com/2014/08/11/gigaom-meetup-talk-learn-
and-h...](https://gigaom.com/2014/08/11/gigaom-meetup-talk-learn-and-hear-
about-the-future-of-ai-and-deep-learning/)

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mikkiq
Everytime I think about deep learning, I am in awe of how important mechanical
turk is.

A "turker" essentially a "probabilistic", "general purpose" classifier.

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seanmcdirmid
Don't forget Microsoft. We are way ahead on using DNNs in speech and training
those with GPUs.

