IBM Plays With The AI Giants With New, Scalable And Distributed Deep Learning Software

I've been following IBM's AI efforts with interest for a quite a while now. In my opinion, the company jump-started the current cycle of AI with the introduction of Watson back in the 2000s and has steadily been ramping up its efforts since then. Most recently, I wrote about the launch of PowerAI, IBM's software toolkit solution to use with OpenPOWER systems for enterprises who don't want to develop their AI solutions entirely from scratch but still want to be able to customize to fit their specific deep learning needs. Today, IBM Research announced a new breakthrough that will only serve to further enhance PowerAI and its other AI offerings--a groundbreaking Distributed Deep Learning (DDL) software, which is one of the biggest announcements I've tracked in this space for the past six months. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that deep learning has really taken off in the last several years.