TensorFlow has become the most popular AI programming project on software code sharing service GitHub, leapfrogging well-regarded systems created by universities and corporate rivals, according to data gathered by Bloomberg.
Deep Learning has had a huge impact on computer science, making it possible to explore new frontiers of research and to develop amazingly useful products that millions of people use every day. Our internal deep learning infrastructure DistBelief, developed in 2011, has allowed Googlers to build ever larger neural networks and scale training to thousands of cores in our datacenters. We’ve used it to demonstrate that concepts like “cat” can be learned from unlabeled YouTube images, to improve speech recognition in the Google app by 25%, and to build image search in Google Photos. DistBelief also trained the Inception model that won Imagenet’s Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge in 2014, and drove our experiments in automated image captioning as well as DeepDream.
While DistBelief was very successful, it had some limitations. It was narrowly targeted to neural networks, it was difficult to configure, and it was tightly coupled to Google’s internal infrastructure – making it nearly impossible to share research code externally.
Today we’re proud to announce the open source release of TensorFlow — our second-generation machine learning system, specifically designed to correct these shortcomings. TensorFlow is general, flexible, portable, easy-to-use, and completely open source. We added all this while improving upon DistBelief’s speed, scalability, and production readiness — in fact, on some benchmarks, TensorFlow is twice as fast as DistBelief…
TensorFlow is great for research, but it’s ready for use in real products too. TensorFlow was built from the ground up to be fast, portable, and ready for production service. You can move your idea seamlessly from training on your desktop GPU to running on your mobile phone. And you can get started quickly with powerful machine learning tech by using our state-of-the-art example model architectures. For example, we plan to release our complete, top shelf ImageNet computer vision model on TensorFlow soon.
But the most important thing about TensorFlow is that it’s yours. We’ve open-sourced TensorFlow as a standalone library and associated tools, tutorials, and examples with the Apache 2.0 license so you’re free to use TensorFlow at your institution (no matter where you work).
