by Angela Guess
Jeremy Hsu recently wrote in Spectrum IEEE, “Deep learning is Silicon Valley’s latest and greatest attempt at training artificial intelligence to understand the world by sifting through huge amounts of data. A startup called Nervana Systems aims to make AI based on deep learning neural networks even more widely available by turning it into a cloud service for any industry that has Big Data problems to solve. ‘Our goal is to really be the world’s platform on which you do artificial intelligence,’ says Naveen Rao, cofounder and CEO of Nervana.”
Hsu goes on, “Nervana has a different philosophy than many other deep learning startups who are ‘trying to compete head to head with the Googles of the world,’ Rao says. He thinks it will be tough for even the scrappiest startups to compete directly with Google’s huge data science team at tackling the toughest computational problems. Instead, Nervana wants to develop and sell deep-learning AI as a service for the many companies that have more mundane Big Data problems but lack the data scientists and deep learning tools to handle them. ‘From the start, we’ve been focused on making deep learning fast, easy to use and scaling,’ Rao says.”
He continues, “On 29 February, Nervana officially debuted its Nervana Cloud service. Nervana Cloud is a hosted hardware and software platform that allows any organization to develop its own deep learning solutions tailored to the specific problems of its industry, be it healthcare, agriculture, finance, energy, or something else. The cloud service also promises much speedier solutions than competing AI cloud platforms—up to 10 times faster.”
photo credit: Nervana