Facebook releases design for souped-up artificial intelligence server, 'Big Sur'

Facebook is releasing the hardware design for a server it uses to train artificial intelligence software, allowing other companies exploring AI to build similar systems. Code-named Big Sur, Facebook uses the server to run its machine learning programs, a type of AI software that "learns" and gets better at tasks over time. It's contributing Big Sur to the Open Compute Project, which it set up to let companies share designs for new hardware. One common use for machine learning is image recognition, where a software program studies a photo or video to identify the objects in the frame. But it's being applied to all kinds of large data sets, to spot things like email spam and credit card fraud.