Amazon open-sources Neo-AI, a framework for optimizing AI models

At last year's re:Invent 2018 conference in Las Vegas, Amazon took the wraps off SageMaker Neo, a feature that enabled developers to train machine learning models and deploy them virtually anywhere their hearts desired, either in the cloud or on-premises. It worked as advertised, but the benefits were necessarily limited to AWS customers -- Neo was strictly a closed-source, proprietary affair. Amazon yesterday announced that it's publishing Neo's underlying code under the Apache Software License as Neo-AI and making it freely available in a repository on GitHub. This step, it says, will help usher in "new and independent innovations" on a "wide variety" of hardware platforms, from third-party processor vendors and device manufacturers to deep learning practitioners. "Ordinarily, optimizing a machine learning model for multiple hardware platforms is difficult, because developers need to tune models manually for each platform's hardware and software configuration," Sukwon Kim, senior product manager for AWS Deep Learning, and Vin Sharma, engineering leader, wrote in a blog post.