As companies plow more and more investment into AI research, China has finally woken up to the realisation of open source and how it can shape the development of a field that’s becoming increasingly attractive. Over the last few years, open-source has become the foundation of innovation — and the major contributions come from tech giants like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Uber and Amazon among others. In November 2015, Google made an unparalleled move by open-sourcing its software library — which now rivals Torch, Caffe and Theano.
These are the open-source lessons that big Chinese companies seem to be learning fast. Traditionally, Chinese firms have trailed behind their US counterparts when it comes to the contributions from the US and Europe, but that’s changing now. Over a period of time, Chinese tech companies are trying to grow their influence in the open-source world by building a robust ecosystem. Not only that, they have learnt that open-sourcing tech can help attract great ML talent and increasingly it is also making good business sense. At a time when the AI tool stack is evolving, enterprises are rushing to grab a pie and provide a unified software and hardware technology stack. Internet and cloud Chinese tech giants have woken up to the promise of open source and AI-related datasets and models can serve the bigger business goals of the companies.
Baidu: In 2016, Baidu took the lead and marked an important chapter in its history by open-sourcing its deep learning tool PaddlePaddle which was used in-house to develop products and technologies for search ranking, large-scale image classification, optical character recognition, machine translation and advertising. Just like other popular frameworks in the market – Keras, TensorFlow, PyTorch,Baiduclaims thatPaddlePaddleis easier to use than rival programs. PaddlePaddle provides a toolkit for deep learning, with which he hopes to win the developer market. Positioned as a new generation of Deep Learning frameworks, PaddlePaddle is based on “deep learning programming language” and also provides a visualization tool called VisualDL. In addition to this, the PaddlePaddle is positioned to be more friendly for large-scale calculations.
