O’Reilly AI Conference News Roundup

Tensorflow support, deep learning, and AI training data were some of the notable announcements made during O’Reilly’s Artificial Intelligence Conference in New York City held June 26-29.

Bonsai Expands TensorFlow Support with Gears

AI platform provider Bonsai announced the release of Gears, a new feature of its Early Access Program. Gears enables data scientists to manage, deploy, and scale machine learning models within the Bonsai Platform, including those built with TensorFlow. The release will “more tightly connect its AI platform to business needs,” stated RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady.

Baidu Research Announces Latest Deep Learning Benchmark Tool

Badiu Research announced the next generation of its open source deep learning benchmark DeepBench. Following feedback from the AI industry and academia, the company included the measurement of deep learning inference and training across different hardware platforms.

“Measuring inference is critical,” said Dr. Greg Diamos, Senior Researcher at Baidu Research Silicon Valley AI Lab. “It covers the operations needed to run neural networks on a device, be it in the cloud, on a phone or a wearable. A better understanding of performance of inference means better chips and neural networks in real products.”

In addition to measuring inference performance, DeepBench provides new kernels for training from several different deep learning models. It also sets new minimum precision requirements for training.

Alegion Nets $3.6 Million to Accelerate Artificial Intelligence Initiatives

Human intelligence platform provider Alegion announced it raised $3.6 million in Series A funding to expand its AI intelligence initiatives.

Alegion assists data science teams in accelerating and optimizing AI and machine learning projects by supplying large-scale custom training datasets, human-in-the-loop exception processing and human-scored results validation.

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are already beginning to change the world as we know it,” said Nathaniel Gates, the CEO and co-founder of Alegion. According to IBM, AI spending is expected to surpass $16B annually by 2022. Over half of all development teams are planning to integrate AI services into their apps by 2018.

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