IBM: Wait Is Over for Deep Learning Light Reading

Deep learning is one of the most exciting elements of artificial intelligence, but it's also one of the slowest moving. IBM Fellow Hillery Hunter calls deep learning, which enables computers to extract meaning from images and sounds with no human intervention, a "rarified thing, off in an ivory tower," but a recent breakthrough by the company promises to make it more accessible -- and a lot faster too. Last week IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) announced that its software was able to take the speed of training deep neural networks down from weeks to hours, or hours to minutes depending on the use case, while also improving the accuracy. It accomplished this by increasing the scalability of its training applications across 256 Nvidia Corp. (Nasdaq: NVDA) GPUs in 64 IBM Power systems. IBM was looking specifically at image recognition and was able to train its model in 50 minutes.