IBM: We're the Red Hat of Deep Learning

IBM today took the wraps off a new release of PowerAI, the prepackaged bundle of deep learning frameworks that debuted last fall. With the addition of Google's TensorFlow framework, the company says its AI business model is starting to resemble the Linux distributor Red Hat. "In a sense, PowerAI makes IBM the Red Hat of deep learning," Sumit Gupta, the vice president of IBM's High Performance Computing & Data Analytics business, told Datanami. In the same way, instead of going to TensorFlow or Caffe or other websites [for deep learning frameworks], they want an enterprise-level distribution." The first release of PowerAI included "optimized" versions of Caffe-bvlc, Caffe-ibm, Caffe-nv, DIGITS, Torch, and Theano. With this release, the software includes TensorFlow 0.12, as well as Chainer, a deep learning framework that's very popular in Japan. Gupta says PowerAI--which is free and distributed as a binary for Ubuntu Linux (sorry, Red Hat)--is resonating with IBM clients, particularly those who have bought the "Minsky" Power8 servers to run deep learning and machine learning workloads on. "Enterprise customers prefer not to go to an open source website and download software and build it.