Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (2.0) is now open to everyone

Microsoft announced that it is open-sourcing the Cognitive Toolkit, previously known as CNTK. The free and open source tools for deep learning and artificial intelligence applications are hence available for everyone.

The company is launching the first beta of the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (2.0), which gives an improved performance, especially when working on big datasets that can be deployed across multiple machines.

On its website, Microsoft says, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit will empower the developers to “harness the intelligence within massive datasets through deep learning by providing uncompromised scaling, speed and accuracy with commercial-grade quality and compatibility with the programming languages and algorithms you already use. “

Xuedong Huang, Microsoft’s Chief Speech Scientist told TechCrunch, “We prioritized internal efficiency — and internally we’ve been using C++ all the time. We open-sourced the internal tool and shared that with the public.”

The open release also allows developers to bring their own Python or C++ code to the toolkit along with several published articles to help researchers train their own artificial intelligence.

The toolkit available on the Github open source repository also provides 'Reinforcement learning', which can be used to speed up advances in areas such as speech and image recognition, and search relevance, using general-purpose processors and Nvidia graphics chips.

AI developers can also take advantage of cloud-based Azure N-Series virtual machines that provide systems with up to 24 Intel Xeon E5-2960 version 3 processors, and four Nvidia Tesla graphics units on two physical cards, along with 224 gigabytes of memory and 1.44 terabytes of solid state storage.