This Data Center is Designed for Deep Learning

While we mostly hear about Artificial Intelligence systems like IBM's Watson, which won Jeopardy! Over the last five years or so, Machine Learning, a type of AI, has been a quickly rising tide that's now starting to permeate nearly every corner of technology. From self-driving cars to online advertising, cybersecurity, and video surveillance, companies are training computers to do many of the things human workers have been doing but better, or at least cheaper. Neural networks, computer systems that aim to simulate the way neurons are interconnected in the human brain, are trained to do these tasks the same way babies learn about the world – by observation, repetition, trial, and error, assisted instead of parents by computer scientists – although babies are still much, much better at it. A neural net learns to understand spoken language, for example, by listening to a lot of recorded speech, such as movie dialogue; it learns to identify objects by looking at tons of images.