Microsoft is reportedly turning the tools that its researchers use into open source to accelerate the advancement of artificial intelligence with a wider group of developers.
The company shows that it finally caught the point, following a tactic that Google also uses. Open Sourcing is urged to accelerate the development of the CNTK tool, a deep learning toolkit developed by Microsoft researchers.
Xuedong Huang, the company's chief scientist, said he and his team want to make faster improvements to how well computers can understand speech and perceive the images they see.
So they assigned a problem group to a group of volunteers to solve it on their own. The effort paid off.
In internal tests, as reported by Xuedong Huang, CNTK proved to be far more effective than the four other popular computing tools that developers used to create deep learning models that are capable of recognizing speech and image.
"The CNTK toolbox is just outrageously more efficient than anything we've ever seen," Xuedong said.
So they decided to make the tools they use, available through open source licenses to all interested researchers and developers.
https://github.com/Microsοft/CNTK
