Smart Software: Just Keep Adding Layers between the Data and the Coder

September 6, 2018

What could be easier? Clicking or coding.

Give up. Clicking wins.

A purist might suggest that training smart software requires an individual with math and data analysis skills. A modern hippy dippy approach is to suggest that pointing and clicking is the way of the future.

Amazon is embracing that approach and other firms are too.

I read “Baidu Launches EZDL, an AI Model Training Platform That Requires No Coding Experience.” Even in China where technical talent is slightly more abundant than in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, is on the bandwagon.

I learned:

Baidu this week launched an online tool in beta — EZDL — that makes it easy for virtually anyone to build, design, and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) models without writing a single line of code.

Why slog through courses? Point and click. The future.

There’s not much detail in the write up, but I get the general idea of what’s up from this passage from the write up:

To train a model, EZDL requires 20-100 images, or more than 50 audio files, assigned to each label, and training takes between 15 minutes and an hour. (Baidu claims that more than two-thirds of models get accuracy scores higher than 90 percent.) Generated algorithms can be deployed in the cloud and accessed via an API, or downloaded in the form of a software development kit that supports iOS, Android, and other operating systems.

Oh, oh. The “API” buzzword is in the paragraph, so life is not completely code free.

Baidu, like Amazon, has a bit of the competitive spirit. The write up explains:

Baidu’s made its AI ambitions clear in the two years since it launched Baidu Brain, its eponymous platform for enterprise AI. The company says more than 600,000 developers are currently using Brain 3.0 — the newest version, released in July 2018 — for 110 AI services across 20 industries.

What could go wrong? Nothing, I assume. Absolutely nothing.

Stephen E Arnold, September 6, 2018

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, algorithms, Business strategy, News

Comments

One Response to “Smart Software: Just Keep Adding Layers between the Data and the Coder”

great face place on October 12th, 2018 4:40 pm

Thanks for the information!

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.