Portable source code
Portable source code or GTFO.
The architect behind some of Google's mammoth machine-learning systems has figured out a way to dramatically reduce the cost of the infrastructure needed for weak artificial intelligence programs, making it easier for cash-strapped companies and institutions to perform research into this crucial area of technology. In a paper …
I built a PaaS that does exactly this (www.ersatz1.com) There have been a lot of advances in neural nets, starting in 2006 (deep learning is now 7 years old!)
But yeah, Google seems to be focused on building bigger and bigger networks, but latest research is actually suggesting that "bigger isn't necessarily better" (see: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3583v4.pdf) Our system takes the approach of training a bunch of smaller networks (although still huge compared to what people were doing just a few years ago) and stringing them together as modules, more like how our brains actually work.
Anyway, don't worry, this stuff is a looooong way from skynet... Expect to see a lot more growth in this industry, google is not the only game in town--although they do have by far the best PR team ;-)
Machine learning is an incredibly powerful tool... Oh, it's quite credible, I assure you.
"Google researcher describes CPU-GPU architecture for large neural nets" would have been an appropriate title for this piece. There's nothing amazing or even particularly innovative here. GPUs are not a panacea (as DeWaal points out above), and bigger neural nets aren't either (as Sullivan points out). And machine learning encompasses far more strategies than just neural nets.