My soothsayer friend BG told me last year that “deep learning is the next big thing”. I didn’t know what that meant. A few days ago, I attended the AIFrontiers conference in Santa Clara, California. Now I have a glimpse of what he meant :-)

In this context, by “intelligence”, I interpret it as “smart”. Yes, we have smart phones, smart TVs, and smart speakers. But imagine way more smarter software and devices… like self-driving cars!

Note that artificial Intelligence is about understanding intelligence. Machine Learning is a “brute force” data-driven approach to simulating intelligence., they are related but not the same thing. There are many areas that will lead to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which means “a software that can do any task”, as opposed to Machine Learning which creates software that can do specific tasks. This conference was about Machine Learning, and specifically Deep Learning.

To summarize the scope of the areas, Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Deep Learning.

The mantra at this conference was that we will move from a software stack to an intelligence stack to solve future engineering challenges.

This was best explained by the legendary Jeff Dean in his keynote speech, talking about how many products at Google use deep learning:

Machine learning is one technique to achieve intelligence.

What is machine learning? My understanding is: it is about making computer programs whose behavior is learned from data instead of solely based on lines of code written by humans. Think spam filters – whenever we click on “Spam” or “Not Spam” buttons, the spam filtering system learns from this and the behavior changes over time to reflect that, without somebody explicitly writing code for every single email. On top of this idea, design the system to learn by itself, and it can learn and improve orders of magnitude faster.

What makes Machine Learning special? Because the system is now learning behaviors that is more accurate for the task and can handle more situations than the algorithms we humans could have imagined! Think converting sentences from one human language to another, self-driving cars, etc. Think of all the situations that such systems need to handle. We could have not written code to handle every situation.

Why now? Because machine learning requires:

What is deep learning? It is a machine learning technique that is based on “layers of neurons”, i.e. think of millions of neurons in your human brain that work together to understand, perceive, store knowledge… deep learning tries to simulate your brain. At least, that’s the way I understood it.

Jeff Dean talked about their first internal machine learning system, the problems they faced, and what they ideally wanted:

What do you want in a Machine Learning System?

And eventually they designed TensorFlow to achieve those desirable features.

He went on to mention the algorithms they use for different products, which I found interesting, not because I understood what they meant, but because they are pointers in case you want to learn more. After all, the whole point of attending conferences and meetups is to know what is happening out there.

Some of these models can be found at https://github.com/tensorflow/models.

Jeff Dean also mentioned the kind of impact they have had on products, esp. converting April Fool’s Day jokes into reality:

Jeff Dean expects more reuse of machine learning-developed models across different tasks, described as zero-shot learning:

And more compute-based model generation:

Jeff Dean also gave a glimpse of what kind of queries they hope to achieve in the future:

There was a lot of info throughout the day, so I’ll only post what I found were interesting topics / slides in the discussions:

Baidu also played videos of their self-driving cars in China, so this is not just a USA-only phenomenon. China, indeed, may have an edge in AI.

This is a reason why I feel C++, the beast, is making a comeback – because performance and efficient hardware usage is important again, because we now have to run a lot of processing on the Internet of Things, especially self-driving cars. And because it’s C++, correctness becomes a new risk. This might give a clue as to why Tesla Motors attracted Chris Lattner, the creator of the LLVM compiler, speculation is that Tesla Motors wants to build an integrated autopilot system from chip to compiler.

With Google creating custom chips called Tensor Processing Units (“TPU”) for machine learning model generation in the cloud to NVidia making chips for self-driving cars to Intel releasing it’s Go platform containing 5G modems and chips for self-driving cars, efficient and performant chips for machine learning has become important. This explains why NVidia’s shares have gone up 225% in 2016.

The car is one node of the Internet of Things. It will connect and interact with the cloud.

This is very familiar to me because that is what we do at Automatic.

Microsoft:

Baidu:

Amazon Alexa:

See Wikipedia entry on Long short-term memory.

He talked about how deep learning has dramatically changed the field of NLP. Focused on “end-to-end” deep learning methods.

An example of using computer vision is from Jeff Dean’s keynote speech – https://www.google.com/get/sunroof – enter your address, it will tell you how much roof area you have and how much money you can save by switching to solar energy!

OpenCV is a popular open source computer vision library:

Google:

Vion Vision was the most interesting. They are deploying machine learning models to devices like cameras. They demonstrated their bus-counting cameras that helps bus operators to get real-time traffic so that they can deploy more buses in high-traffic routes, etc. They even had a demo of public-area cameras that auto-detect a crowd beating up a person and sending an alert to the local police station.

This was an amazing session where creators or prominent members of each Deep Learning Framework came up and talked about their thoughts on the framework status and future.

Amazon mxnet:

PyTorch by Soumith Chintala:

It was an excellent conference, with well-chosen topics and the best speakers imaginable – the platform creators themselves. People who were expecting deep-dives or technical details were disappointed, but it was a great “state of the industry” conference for people like me who know nothing about the topic.

Thank you to the conference organizers, the Silicon Valley AI and Big Data Association and all the sponsors.

Geoffrey Moore (author of “Crossing The Chasm”) says: