China has just made the battle for artificial intelligence (AI) supremacy a little more intense following the announcement by Megvii Technology that it would make its MegEngine deep learning framework open source.
The move will allow global developers to create AI solutions for industrial and commercial scenarios and to foster an ecosystem around the platform. It puts Megvii in direct competition with the likes of Amazon, Baidu, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
Created in 2014, MegEngine is one of three primary components of the Brain++ architecture that Megvii built from scratch to train computer vision algorithms at scale. The other two proprietary components of Brain++ are MegData data management system and MegCompute computing power dispatching system.
The decision to make MegEngine open source was inspired by the founders’ experience while at Tsinghua University.
“My founders and I studied AI algorithms at Tsinghua in the late 2000s just after international academics achieved a major breakthrough in deep learning and openly shared their ideas. Their work accelerated the fields of computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and audio recognition globally.” said Yin Qi, Co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Megvii.
“In this same brave spirit, we want to open source some of our innovations, creating a dynamic where other engineers improve our tools, while we also have further influence on how the code evolves,” he added.
Entelechy Asia 