(Photo credit: LIU JIN/AFP/Getty Images) Deep learning is a burgeoning field in artificial intelligence. The algorithms are leading to huge advancements in natural language processing, computer vision and translation. But it's been mostly limited to the few engineers who have mastered its esoteric details. On Thursday, Chinese search giant Baidu said it's open sourcing its internally-developed deep learning software, dubbed "PaddlePaddle." Baidu claims the tools will make it simple for software developers without much experience to take advantage of the advances in deep learning. "It will allow engineers to be able to quickly and easily apply deep learning techniques to their products," said Wei Xu, researcher at Baidu and head of PaddlePaddle development, in an interview. "We want to get more people using artificial intelligence. It's important for our future." Baidu has been developing PaddlePaddle for more than three years and uses it widely in the company's products. For example, the deep learning software is used in its search ranking, targeted advertising, image classification, translation and self-driving cars. Wei argued that what particular makes PaddlePaddle more accessible is that it exposes only high-level functions to developers. So all the difficult math is invisible to developers. Also, Wei said Baidu's software creates less lines of code in the software. Doing machine translation with PaddlePaddle, for instance, requires 75% fewer lines of code compared to other competing deep learning software, Wei claimed. Baidu is entering a crowded field for open source deep learning software. Fellow search giant Google has open sourced its own deep learning software, called TensorFlow. Other open-source frameworks -- such as Caffe, Theano and Torch -- are also pervasive. Wei said that the competition in general is better suited for artificial intelligent researchers and experts in the field, not beginners. "Other deep learning platforms have been a great boon to researchers wanting to invent new deep learning algorithms, but their high degree of flexibility limits their ease of use," said Andrew Ng, the chief scientist at Baidu Research and founder of deep learning research lab Google Brain, in a statement. "In contrast, Paddle focuses on making it easy for enthusiasts and programmers—not just machine learning researchers—to learn and use powerful deep learning tools." Baidu is a dominant tech player in China, but has little reach in the United States. It's uncertain if PaddlePaddle will have much of a chance catching on among US developers against these more established standards, but it's still very early days for deep learning. Developers can now download PaddlePaddle on GitHub.
"Enthusiasts and programmers" are being given the chance to use deep learning tool PaddlePaddle, following the owner of Baidu's decision to open-source the software. Developed early days and used by Baidu for everything from search ranking and image classification to self-driving cars, PaddlePaddle uses 25% fewer lines of code than its rivals, and allows developers to see only its high functions, not the complicated mathematics behind it. Wei Xu, researcher at Baidu and head of PaddlePaddle development, said artificial intelligence was "important for our future."