With its recent gain in popularity, a lot of things have been called “Artificial Intelligence”. But what is it anyway? According to Wikipedia, it’s “intelligence demonstrated by machines”, but does such a thing exist? At time of writing, they are 4 main types of AI development algorithms. Expert systems defines a category of computer programs that are specifically designed to do a task using prior human knowledge. Software engineers work closely with a domain expert to build the program, that will act in a predicable way, like the domain expert would have done if he or she had the same processing power.

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is used in many Deep Learning models as an algorithm to optimize the parameters (the weights of each layer). Here is how it works:

At each step in the training process, the goal is to update the weights towards the optimal value. For this, SGD uses the equation:

As Deep learning is becoming more and more popular, there is an ongoing debate on whether it’s possible to create Deep Learning applications with a Free Software license. See for example this discussion on the debian-devel mailing list. The argument we often see is that: It’s impossible to study the inner workings of a Deep Learning software (for example, an image classifier or a text generator) or improve it, because one cannot understand how it’s going to make predictions only by looking at the weights of the Deep Learning model Training a Deep Learning model requires a specialized and expensive hardware that runs non-Free software But the first statement misses the point of Deep Learning programs.

This procedure has been tested on Fedora 28, on a HP laptop with this graphical card: NVIDIA Corporation GP107M GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile (rev a1). The commands have to be run as the root user. This tutorial assumes the nvidia driver is already working. Install pip dnf install python3-pip Install Cuda We install cuda 9.0 as it is the latest version supported by tensorflow at the time of writing. wget https://developer.

If we have to choose between a convenient system and a secure one, we often pick the former rather than the latter. The reason is mainly psychological. Several scientific studies have shown that we prefer instant gratification over delayed gratification, because that’s how our brains are wired. We are surrounded by instant gratification, our day-to-day actions like our hobbies, usage of social media, got us hooked on having a quick feedback.

We should not think that programming is complicated. It is often the easiest part of an IT project, because one simply needs to communicate with a computer. The communication between human beings is far more complicated. Computers are the most predictable things in the universe. Humans are unpredictable by nature. They can lie, change mood or theirs opinions multiple times, decline an offer because they had a bad day or due to the weather, or the horoscope, you name it.