Nervana open-sources its deep-learning software, says it outperforms Facebook, Nvidia tools

Nervana Systems, one of a handful startups focusing on a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning, today is announcing that it has released its Neon deep learning software under an Apache open-source license, allowing anyone to try it out for free. The startup is pointing to benchmarks a Facebook researcher recently conducted suggesting that the Nervana software outperforms other publicly available deep learning tools, including Nvidia's cuDNN and Facebook's own Torch7 libraries. "We really want to get the tools out there to make it easy for people to apply deep learning to the problem," Naveen Rao, chief executive and a cofounder of Nervana, told VentureBeat in an interview. "Keeping a closed environment makes it kind of hard for people to try things out and have an idea even for what people can do. If they want the fastest, they'll come to us." The technology ought to catch the attention of companies that have been working with deep learning systems, including Google and Microsoft.