AI startup Petuum aims to industrialize machine learning ZDNet

The past thirty years of machine learning breakthroughs are intimately entwined with a big idea in computing: parallel distributed processing, where a parts of a program run simultaneously on multiple processors to speed computation. Eric Xing, a Carnegie Mellon professor of machine learning, three years ago founded Petuum, based in Pittsburg, which has received $108 million in funding from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, along with Advantech Capital, Chinese computing giant Tencent, Northern Light Venture Capital, and Oriza Ventures. The company plans to ship the first version of its AI platform software next summer, an offering Xing hopes will "industrialize" machine learning, thereby making it more reliable and more broadly available. Petuum founder and CEO Eric Xing came up with the idea for the AI software while on sabbatical from Carnegie Mellon at Facebook in 2010. Much of the challenge of AI is a systems engineering challenge, and at the heart of that is a problem of parallelizing the running of algorithms across all kinds of configurations of machines.