Chinese giant says it is now leader in computer intelligence race.
B y Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Chinese search giant Baidu says it has invented a powerful supercomputer that gives it the edge in the race for true artificial intelligence.
Minwa, the company’s latest in supercomputer technology, has 72 incomprehensibly powerful processors and 144 graphics processors that enable it to comprehend speech, images, and written language, according to MIT Technology Reveiew.
Baidu released an academic paper claiming that the computer had been used to train machine-learning software that set a new record for recognizing images, beating a previous mark set by Google.
Minwa scanned more than 1 million images and taught itself to sort them into about 1,000 categories — and did so with 95.42% accuracy, the company claims, adding that no other computer has completed the task at that same level. Google’s system scored a 95.2% and Microsoft’s, a 95.06%, Baidu said.
“Our company is now leading the race in computer intelligence,” said Ren Wu, a Baidu scientist working on the project, speaking at the Embedded Vision Summit on Tuesday. Minwa’s computational power would probably put it among the 300 most powerful computers in the world if it weren’t specialized for deep learning, said Wu. “I think this is the fastest supercomputer dedicated to deep learning,” he said. “We have great power in our hands—much greater than our competitors.”
Computing power matters in the world of deep learning, which has produced breakthroughs in speech, image, and face recognition, and improved the image-search and speech-recognition services offered by Google and Baidu, according to the MIT Technology Review.
Wu said that in addition to thinking about how to expand Minwa and use it with video and text, Baidu’s researchers are working on ways to shrink their trained neural networks so they can operate on mobile devices. Baidu has also announced plans to further escalate its deep learning program by building a more powerful computer capable of 7 quadrillion calculations per second within the next 2 years.