Companies are vying for dominance in the AI software space. This is not a sprint but a marathon. One needs to do research before making a selection of AI software.

1. 11/12/2017 The First Great Artificial Intelligence Software War
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Desmond Yuen
Follow me to get news on Intel, HPC, Supercomputing, Arti cial Intelligence, Deep Learning,
Technology and society. desmondyuen.org; @desmondyuen1
Oct 15 · 6 min read
The First Great Arti cial Intelligence
Software War
There is a war raging in the world of AI software and the competition
for dominance is heating up. The rst casualty of the AI software war is
Theano. The Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms (MILA) has
announced that they will stop the development of their Python library
Theano following the release of version 1.0 of the software. Here is the
link to the announcement.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/theano-
users/7Poq8BZutbY
Below is an excerpt from the message posted by Yoshua Bengio on the
Theano users group forum explaining why and citing competition as a
reason.
WordPress.com
Why MILA stop development of Theano

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So who are their competitors? Industry heavy weights such as Google,
Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Google puts TensorFlow on Github
back in Nov 2015. Microsoft released its software in Jan 2016 and
Amazon added its MXNet software to GitHub in May 2016. To ensure
AI software runs best on their cloud service, cloud service providers
have built custom hardware for their AI software—both Microsoft and
Amazon are using FPGA solutions and Google designed their own
TensorFlow Processor (TPU).
To get an idea of the magnitude of the shift, just look at the star stats on
GitHub.The GitHub star is a simple way for GitHub users to bookmark
repositories that interest them. If we look at Tenso ow and Theano,
Tensor ow has more than ten times as many stars than Theano.
Frameworks developed by academia just don’t have the same level of
resource or manpower to grow its developer base or even sustain it to
stay competitive.

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“The enemy of my enemy is my friend”
If we look at the GitHub star stats below, TensorFlow is way ahead of
the other frameworks. This is exactly why Microsoft is joining forces
with Amazon and Facebook in the AI software war. On Thursday,
Amazon and Microsoft red their rst salvo. Together, they launched a
new deep learning software called Gluon to makes it easier for
developers to build arti cial-intelligence and machine-learning
systems. This is a direct challenge to Google’s dominance in the AI
Cloud.
Earlier in the week, AMD, ARM, Huawei, IBM,Intel and Qualcomm
announced their support for the Open Neural Network Exchange
(ONNX) founded by Microsoft in conjunction with Facebook.
GitHub Stars for TensorFlow
GitHub Stars for Theano
Github Stars Comparison

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While TensorFlow has the lead, this is not going to be a one horse race.
If history is any guide, look at what happened with the Internet
Browsers war.
. . .
Internet Browsers War
The First Browser War was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer against
Netscape’s Navigator during the late 1990s. Explorer’s dominance
continued into the early 2000s. Browser wars continued with the
decline of Internet Explorer’s market share since 2003 and the
increasing popularity of browsers including Mozilla Firefox, Google
Chrome, Safari, and Opera.
. . .
Competition outside the US
For now, the US has clearly dominated the AI software space. However,
many countries like China are realizing how arti cial intelligence is
important to their economic future. They are investing heavily in AI
development too. On July 20, China’s State Council issued the “Next

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Generation Arti cial Intelligence Development Plan”, which outlines
how China will lead the world in AI. Not to be outdone by its neighbor,
Japan’s government announced in late August that it is planning to
invest billions of yen to fund next-generation semiconductors and other
technologies critical to AI development.
If we look at the supercomputing market, China now claims the number
one and number two systems. The same thing can happen with AI.
With the heavy investment by the Chinese government, Chinese
companies will be vying for dominance in AI software. For example,
PaddlePaddle, the deep learning software from Baidu. It is not as well
known as other frameworks such as CNTK, MXNet and TensorFlow but
its popularity is rising especially in the chinese market.
How to navigate through it
With so many AI software out there, how would one picks the right AI
software? There are no hard and fast rules. Every framework is
di erent and many of them o er similar features. Look at what you
need versus follow the crowd. The most important feature to look at is
probably what interface it’ll support. The most common interfaces
today are probably Python and C++. Here is a comparison of some of
the features supported by the di erent AI software.
Comparison of features supported by di erent AI Software

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The other factor to consider is what type of data you are using. For
example, if you or your company have already made a big investment in
Big Data, you might want to consider using BigDL. This is a distributed
deep learning library for Apache Spark, and is designed to scale very
well. With the help of BigDL, you can run your deep learning
applications directly on Spark or Hadoop clusters, by writing them as
Spark programs. It has a rich deep learning support, and uses Intel’s
Math Kernel Library (MKL) to ensure high performance. Using BigDL,
you can also load your pre-trained Torch or Ca e models into Spark. If
you want to add deep learning functionalities to a massive set of data
stored on your cluster, this is a very good library to use.
The world of AI software will continue to evolve. Competition is a good
thing as it’ll deliver better and easier to use AI software for developers
and users. Always remember one thing, do your research before you
make a selection.
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