The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has licensed its award-winning artificial intelligence software system, the Multinode Evolutionary Neural Networks for Deep Learning, to General Motors for use in vehicle technology and design.
The AI system, known as MENNDL, uses evolution to design optimal convolutional neural networks – algorithms used by computers to recognize patterns in datasets of text, images or sounds. General Motors will assess MENNDL’s potential to accelerate advanced driver assistance systems technology and design. This is the first commercial license for MENNDL as well as the first AI technology to be commercially licensed from ORNL.
Once trained, neural networks can accomplish specific tasks – for example, recognizing faces in photos – far faster and at much greater scale than humans. However, designing effective neural networks can take even the most expert coders up to a year or more.
The MENNDL AI system can dramatically speed up that process, evaluating thousands of optimized neural networks in a matter of hours, depending on the power of the computer used. It has been designed to run on a variety of different systems, from desktops to supercomputers, equipped with graphics processing units.