Bits & bytes
In run-up to re:Invent, Google cuts GPU prices.
- Google Cloud announced lower GPU pricing for NVIDIA Tesla and K80 GPUs. Price reductions are as high as 36% in some cases.
Cray jumps on deep learning bandwagon.
- Supercomputer maker Cray announced a host of new deep learning initiatives including Accel AI, a suite of offerings for deep learning training and inference ranging from starter systems to a production-level cluster supercomputer, the Accel AI Lab, an innovation center providing educational content and classes, and new software support for TensorFlow.
China challenges Nvidia’s hold on AI chips.
- China’s Ministry of Science announced (anew) its intention to fund research to develop chips for accelerating AI workloads. Meanwhile, across the Yellow Sea, Samsung announced the formation of a new AI research center.
No grad students? Consider Mechanical Turker Descent.
- A new paper by Facebook AI Research proposes a general framework and algorithm for interactively and collaboratively training ML models. The system presents humans (e.g. Mechanical Turkers) with a game which has them compete against each other to come up with useful training examples for an ML agent. At the end of each round each player’s agent is evaluated on all the other player’s data sets, and the player whose agent fares best wins the round.
Deal desk
AISense raises $10M Series A to power ambient voice intelligence (transcription on steroids).
- This is the third startup I’ve heard about in a month going after some variation of this idea. Nvidia-backed Chinese autonomous truck co
TuSimple raises $55M Series C. Finance analytics startup Xenodata raises $2.2M from Japan megabanks.
- The company uses NLP to extract financial data from reports.
