China's Baidu to open-source its deep learning AI platform

The Chinese Internet giant Baidu Inc. has been makingbig progressinapplying deep learning neural networksto improve image recognition, language translation, search ranking and click prediction in advertising. Now, it's going to give a lot of it away. The company, often called "China's Google," will announce Thursday at the annual Baidu World conference that it's offering the artificial intelligence software that its own engineers have been using for years as open source onGitHub. It's code-namedPaddlePaddle, for PArallel Distributed Deep LEarning. Deep learningis the branch of machine learning that attempts to emulate the way neurons work in the human brain to find patterns in data representing sounds, images, and other data. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM and other companies have also been making big breakthroughs thanks to the ability to pump massive amounts of data into these artificial neural networks.