International Business Machines' (IBM) research laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland has developed a new generic preprocessing building block that could make the speed by which machine learning algorithms can absorb new information faster. Such development is expected to largely benefit the booming AI industry. According to IBM Zurich mathematician Thomas Parnell, they have developed a generic solution to the AI learning process with a 10 times speedup. "To the best of our knowledge, we are first to have generic solution with a 10x speedup. Specifically, for traditional, linear machine learning models -- which are widely used for data sets that are too big for neural networks to train on -- we have implemented the techniques on the best reference schemes and demonstrated a minimum of a 10x speedup."