Startups Democratize Deep Learning So Google and Facebook Don't Own It All

Deep learning is an awesome topic. The problem I find isn't the concept or the maths. It is the enormous amount of damn data janitorial work that I have to process everyday.

Oh data didn't come back in a clean format? 10 hours gone.

All these text need to be tagged? 2 days

What categories do these images fall under? Another 3 days spent tagging

Wanna parallelize your algorithmn? Ok, good luck learning how to deploy to multiple machines on AWS.

I will pay easily for a service that allows me to run my analysis in parallel without any sysadmin knowledge.

I love deep learning and I am sympathetic to the concern that too much of it will end up patented. However, these garbage popsci tech journalist articles need to slow down. I can't imagine anyone who doesn't already love it not starting to hate deep learning after all the garbage articles about it.

"Once you can recognize key objects in images, you can target ads not just on keywords but on objects in an image."

It is sad that so much amazing tech is being used primarily to deliver ads more effectively. Deep learning is not the first, nor will it be the last, technology for which that is the case...but, it doesn't make it any less depressing. I like free markets, but somehow our collective consciousness needs to shift from valuing making money over all other things.

And, it's alarming that many of the most valuable companies primary products are ads. Many companies that make real things (like electric cars and solar panels) are worth vastly less than many of the companies that spit ads about real things at people (like Google and Facebook). Something seems unbalanced about that. It seems so wrong, in fact, that it feels vaguely dangerous, to me, though I can't quite put my finger on why.

Yes, I agree -- seeing our best minds work on our lamest problems is distressing. Though arguably, it's an improvement from the previous condition, in in which our best technology was primarily used to produce weapons of war.

At least some of the products of the social media & web advertising era give people access to information and one another, two fundamental human drives. That's a bit better than "better technology to persuade people to buy stuff."

If it helps, this is primarily what I'm setting out to solve building a sort of cloudera/red hat for deep learning at skymind. An open source google brain for big companies to solve interesting problems is appealing provided the right interface.