Dan, I’ve implemented RBMs and assorted statistical machine learning algorithms in context with the NetflixPrize. I’ve also recently adapted some of these to work on Nvidia cards via their CUDA platform. Performance improvements have been 20-100x and this is hardware that has only taken a few steps away from pure graphics specialization. Fine-grained parallelization, improved memory bandwidth, less chip logic devoted to branch prediction, user-controlled shared memory, etc. help.
I’m seeing a lot of interesting applications in multimedia processing, many of which have statistical learning elements. One project at Siggraph allowed users to modify a single frame of video and have that modification automatically adapt across the entire video. Magic stuff. If we are heading towards hardware that is closer to what we’d expect as the proper substrate for AI, and we are finding commercial applications that promote this development, then I think we are building towards this fricking hard problem the only way possible: in small steps. It’s not the conjugate gradient, but we’ll get there.
Dan, I’ve implemented RBMs and assorted statistical machine learning algorithms in context with the NetflixPrize. I’ve also recently adapted some of these to work on Nvidia cards via their CUDA platform. Performance improvements have been 20-100x and this is hardware that has only taken a few steps away from pure graphics specialization. Fine-grained parallelization, improved memory bandwidth, less chip logic devoted to branch prediction, user-controlled shared memory, etc. help.
I’m seeing a lot of interesting applications in multimedia processing, many of which have statistical learning elements. One project at Siggraph allowed users to modify a single frame of video and have that modification automatically adapt across the entire video. Magic stuff. If we are heading towards hardware that is closer to what we’d expect as the proper substrate for AI, and we are finding commercial applications that promote this development, then I think we are building towards this fricking hard problem the only way possible: in small steps. It’s not the conjugate gradient, but we’ll get there.