Chinese search engine Baidu has released a new open source machine learning framework it calls PaddlePaddle (short for “PArallel Distributed Deep LEarning”). PaddlePaddle exposes functions through Python libraries, which Baidu says makes the framework easy to train.
The company also says that PaddlePaddle allows developers to write less code. “Take machine translation model as an example,” said Wei Xu, Distinguished Scientist at Baidu and leader of PaddlePaddle development. “You only need to write 25 percent of code than what you would on some other popular platforms. PaddlePaddle allows you to apply existing models to new problems without worrying [about] the math equations used to implement the model.”