Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has open sourced its deep-learning software, Deep Scalable Sparse Tensor Network Engine. The software is now available on Github where the tech giant hopes developers and researchers will expand its functionalities.
Leveraging Developers and Researchers Ideas
Renowned for product recommendations, Amazon expects developers to improve it given that it only works well when subjected to small amounts of data. The e-commerce giant also remains confident of developers putting it to good use in fueling innovation in other areas.
“We hope that researchers around the world can collaborate to improve it. But more importantly, we hope that it spurs innovation in many more areas,” Amazon in a statement.
Unlike other tech giants, Amazon is not fond of opening up its software to outside developers. The company says it decided to open source Deep Scalable Sparse Tensor Network Engine because it has more to offer than other products in the market.
One of the distinct features of the deep learning software is that it can solve recommendation problems and perform natural language understanding twice as fast as other tools. Amazon claims that DSSTNE is 2.1 times faster at tackling problems than Google’s Tensor flow. The tool can achieve such speeds because of multi-GPU capabilities.
Growing Deep Learning Investments
Amazon is not the only company betting big on artificial intelligence seen as the next big thing on the internet. Google and Facebook have already open sourced their systems.
Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has been the most active on this front with its AI system TensorFlow having already had successes in indexing photos and improving the quality of translations. Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) for its part is trying to use its deep learning system to understand people’s news feeds on its flagship app.
By open sourcing Deep Scalable, Sparse Tensor Network Engine, Amazon hopes to help grow machine learning beyond speech recognition and language. Open sourcing Deep Scalable Sparse Tensor Network Engine comes months after Amazon invested in a nonprofit AI research project dubbed OpenAI.
