Gluon Helping Developers Adopt Machine Learning

Heath Jordan
by Heath Jordan 12 Oct, 2017
Microsoft and Amazon Web Services announced their collaboration on Gluon, a new open-source programming library for machine learning.

For some time the industry has demanded a more open AI ecosystem, illustrated well by the broad support of this week's ONNX format announcement. Is there enough demand from the development community and enough value for tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon to support it long term?

Let's take a closer look at what we're dealing with here.

Gluon is a deep learning library, or interface, for building neural networks. It can be used with either Apache MXNet or Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, and will reportedly be supported in all Azure services, tools and infrastructure. The library/interface features symbolic and imperative programming, hybridization, the ability to define complex models, support for sparse data and scheduling.  

The Gluon interface, according to Microsoft, is available now on GitHub for use with MXNet and is actively working for support of an upcoming release of Cognitive Toolkit.