IBM Tool Seeks to Bridge AI Skills Gap

Deep-Learning-as-a-Service, unveiled at IBM's annual IT industry conference in Las Vegas, seeks to lower barriers to deploying AI and deep-learning tools, a complex and painstakingly repetitive process that requires large amounts of computing power, the company said. The new service allows companies to upload data in Watson Studio, IBM's cloud-native platform for data scientists, developers and business analysts. There, they can create deep-learning algorithms for datasets – known in AI parlance as a "neural network" – using a drag-and-drop interface to select, configure, design and code the network. IBM also has automated the repetitive process of fine-tuning deep-learning algorithms, with successive training runs started, monitored and stopped automatically. For many firms, the complexity of creating smart algorithms from scratch has kept them from leveraging AI to parse massive stores of data for business value, the company said.