Deep learning has largely taken over the research and applications of artificial intelligence, with some truly impressive results. The challenge that it presents is that for reasonable speed and performance it requires specialized hardware, generally in the form of a dedicated GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). This raises the cost of the infrastructure, adds deployment complexity, and drastically increases the energy requirements for training and serving of models. To address these challenges Nir Shavit combined his experiences in multi-core computing and brain science to co-found Neural Magic where he is leading the efforts to build a set of tools that prune dense neural networks to allow them to execute on commodity CPU hardware. In this episode he explains how sparsification of deep learning models works, the potential that it unlocks for making machine learning and specialized AI more accessible, and how you can start using it today.

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA