UPDATED 08:15 EDT / APRIL 11 2016

NEWS

What you missed in Big Data: The rise of deep learning

The artificial intelligence craze continues to spread in the enterprise market. Last week saw Nvidia Inc. add its name to the long list of vendors trying to monetize the trend by introducing a new graphical processing unit specifically designed to run deep learning algorithms. The Tesla P100, as the chip is called, is the biggest of its kind by far thanks to a 15-billion transistor count that took the company’s engineers some two years to achieve.

Nvidia says that the GPU also includes faster memory than its previous-generation cards and a new interconnect technology called NVLink designed to increase processing speed even further. Its impressive feature set has already attracted orders from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, IBM Corp. and several other top data center equipment makers that presumably plan on incorporating Tesla P100s into their high-performance computing systems.

Historically used mainly by research institutions to perform scientific simulations, such hardware is starting to find use among a wide range of commercial organizations ranging from banks to web companies like Amazon Inc. that are using artificial intelligence to improve their services. The retail giant’s interest in the technology was revealed to be much broader than previously believed last week after Bloomberg reported it’s quietly acquired Orbeus Inc., a low-key startup that has built a deep learning service for performing automated object recognition.

It’s not known how much Amazon paid for the outfit or what it’s planning to do with its offering, but SiliconANGLE’s Mike Wheatley pointed out there is no shortage of areas where the software can be applied. Jeff Bezos’ firm could incorporate Orbeus’s algorithms into its Flow mobile client to let consumers quickly identify interesting products they encounter in their everyday lives, or use the technology to help the robot transports that roam its warehouses find items more efficiently. The acquisition came against the backdrop of another analytics outfit called SurveyMonkey Inc. announcing some exciting news of its own: The launch of its app monitoring service.

The aptly-named SurveyMonkey Intelligence platform enables mobile developers to track how users interact with their software and measure the amount of time each segment of the install base spends doing so. According to the company, the information from its service can be used to fine-tune monetization efforts based on which demographics are likely to provide the biggest return on investment.

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