Microsoft has recently announced that it is democratizing its Cognitive Toolkit, which was originally a research tool kit but has been used to develop a wide range of consumer products. In simple terms, everybody now has access to the toolkit.
Formerly known as CNTK, the toolkit was originally designed to aid Microsoft researchers in speeding up their research effectively. However, it soon evolved into something which led to the development of various products which include Cortana and Skype Translator.
Microsoft has made it available in GitHub which allows developers to use it using Python or C++. The new version has not only led to the development of many things but most especially to the development of reinforcement learning, a type of learning which utilizes artificial intelligence.
One of the advantages of the toolkit, according to its creators, is its capability to work across multiple servers allowing it to detect suboptimal performance and accuracy as they start to work on bigger datasets. Moreover, it does not negate smaller datasets but treats it similarly like the greater ones. What's good about it is that you can work on it using a single laptop or a series of large computers.
Microsoft developers created the toolkit with the idea in mind that a lot of developers don't want to write a lot of code; thus, they developed a custom system that makes it easy for developers to configure their own system without having to use a lot of code. However, as the toolkit gained more popularity, a lot of developers also want to integrate their own coding with the deep learning capabilities of the toolkit. Moreover, researchers also expressed their desire to reinforce learning research where people learn how to do the right thing through a series of trial and error. This kind of research, according to experts, is what real artificial intelligence is all about.
