Why in the last few years, Deep learning is picking up and it is becoming so much popular? In this article, we are going to discuss a few reasons why it is taking off.
1. Growth in the volume of data
If you look at any business nowadays, they have some kind of ID adoption, they will be using some software to manage their business, they will also be having a mobile app.
This wasn’t the case a few years back. And because of that, the business transaction data, the volume of that data is increasing.
Also, in social media, so many people are posting their content that photos, likes, dislikes, and so on. And because of the growth in social media data, it has become possible to do many interesting things such as Twitter sentiment analysis.
So Deep learning works better if the volume of data is higher. That’s the general principle behind neural networks that you need to have a huge volume of data. And since the volume of data has gone up in terms of business and personal data, it makes sense to deep do Deep learning now.
2. Advancement in Hardware
Back in 2003, my laptop had only 500 megabytes Ram 500 or even less than that, and it used to take hours to run my Deep learning job.
Nowadays, the same job I can run on my computer within seconds. So computer hardware has advanced so much. Also, we have come up with specialized hardware such as GPU and TPU.
When you talk about GPUs, of course, the name that comes to your mind is Nvidia I used to work for Nvidia and I’ve seen the evolution of GPUs.
GPUs are awesome when you want to run a computation in parallel. And Deep learning is perfect for that. So you can run your Deep learning job on Nvidia GPUs also TPU is a tensor flow processing unit.
It is something that Google has started building recently. And they are also you can learn a Deep learning job. So eat so much easier.
So computer hardware advancements are making it possible for normal people like you and me, where we can earn our jobs, either local and computer or in the cloud.
3. Python and open source ecosystem
Python is a very, very easy programming language to learn. Even a student who is in fifth grade can learn Python.
So nowadays, what’s happening is many methods to mathematicians or people from a statistics background, if they don’t know to program, they can learn Python in few days, and they can write Deep learning programs.
Python is so easy that is making it possible that any person can come in, he can he or she can learn programming in few days and can start doing Deep learning if you have a math and statistics background.
4. Deep learning frameworks
The other thing is the Deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow, PyTorch is by Facebook, TensorFlow is by Google.
So these frameworks are something that you can install on your computer for free. And then you can start writing programs, which make use of neural networks.
5. Cloud And AI Boom
The other reason that Deep learning is advancing is because of the cloud. Nowadays, if you don’t have GPU or TPU, you can rent a server on the cloud and you can run a Deep learning job on the cloud.
So you don’t need to invest in hardware, right because if you buy less GPU TPU or heavy computer, you might have to spend a lot of money.
But nowadays, if you want to play with it, just rent a computer on the cloud, and you can run it there.
So the entry barrier overall is becoming less than less both in terms of cost, as well as in terms of learning and nowadays we are living in an AI boom, where every company every business wants to do artificial intelligence.
Google announced that they are going from mobile-first to AI-first approach and every big company is now following in their footsteps.
If you’re not in machine learning or AI, you are kind of running behind so that’s what the Majority of the business executives, they want to invest money into artificial intelligence and machine learning, and that further accelerates the growth of Deep learning.
So these are some of the reasons why Deep learning is taking off.
