Yahoo Has AI Advantage Maybe?
March 2, 2016
I read “Don’t Laugh: Yahoo’s Open Source AI Has a Secret Weapon.” Sorry, I did laugh. I find the Yahooligans’ periodic “we’re really good at technology” messages amusing. More interesting is the willingness of with it magazines to cover these breakthroughs.
I learned:
Yahoo published the source code to its CaffeOnSpark AI engine so that anyone from academic researchers to big corporations can use or modify it.
Good. Open source software is useful, very useful.
I noted this passage:
Yahoo, for example, uses it to improve search results on Flickr by determining the contents of different photos. Instead of relying on the descriptions and keywords entered by the people who upload photos to the site, Yahoo teaches its computers to recognize certain characteristics of a photo, such as specific colors or even objects and animals.
Interesting, but other outfits do image recognition reasonably well. Check out Yandex’s image search or look at the wonky similar images feature that makes it oh, so easy for me to lose my train of thought when looking for examples of Palantir’s interface via Google’s image search service.
I learned:
CaffeOnSpark, as the name suggests, combines two existing technologies: the popular deep learning framework Caffe and the up-and-coming data-crunching system Spark that can run on top of the even more popular big data platform Hadoop. What Yahoo did was simply create a way to run Caffee atop Spark clusters. It can be run either on Spark alone or atop Hadoop. Besides making it easy for AI developers to use familiar tools and avoid moving data around… CaffeOnSpark also makes it relatively easy to distribute deep learning processes across multiple servers, something that the open source version of Google’s TensorFlow can’t yet do.
The challenge for Yahoo is to deal with its here and now problems. The outfit is for sale and many of the researchers of yesteryear have ridden off into the sunrise to find companies able to generate revenue from innovations.
When you are for sale, publicity is a definite plus. By the way, companies with technology to distribute deep learning across multiple servers are chugging along and closing some deals based on their know how. When does open source become a source of revenue and when is it a PR play?
Stephen E Arnold, March 2, 2016
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