Introducing Athena: The Next Character in The AI Revolution
By Mazin Gilbert
Meet Athena. While you may already know Athena as the famous Greek Goddess of Wisdom and War, we’d like to introduce you to our Athena – the first public code release of the Acumos AI Project.
There are clearly a few differences between the two Athenas. For starters, Athena the goddess originated from one creator, Zeus. Ours was created by developers from multiple companies in the open source community.
The goddess is a figure of Greek mythology, who lives in epic poems accompanied by heroes and villains. Conversely, our Athena is tangible, accessible and serves students, scientists and developers solving real-world problems.
You can also draw parallels between the two. The goddess was a patron of the arts and crafts and embodied wisdom and rational thought. We hope the first release of Acumos will inspire the same ideals of creativity and curiosity in aspiring developers everywhere.
What our Athena means for the future
AT&T is a founding member of the Acumos AI Project, which is freely available for download as a project under the Linux Foundation. We co-developed the project with Tech Mahindra with the goal of lowering the barrier to entry and making artificial intelligence (AI) available to everyone. Yes, everyone.
Since its official release into open source earlier this year, we’ve been impressed and energized by its progress. Acumos led to the Linux Foundation creating a deep learning umbrella, which now includes 15 members and counting. There are already nearly 1,000 registered Acumos users, and we’re confident the first release will encourage more to join.
Athena makes it easier for you to deploy and share AI models through a more personalized experience. New features include:
- a design studio that provides the ability to compose a variety of models into one machine learning (ML) application;
- an advanced user portal with the ability to share models privately or publicly;
- the ability to deploy models to private or public cloud and Kubernetes environments;
- and the ability to share models privately or publicly through an AI marketplace.
Inclusive innovation
These are just a few of the highlights, and we invite you to get to know Athena on your own. The features of this release were designed with the user in mind. And, there’s no definition of just “who” the user is. It could be a data scientist, a college student or a curious mind looking to expand their horizons. Remember, available to everyone?
AT&T remains committed to sharing our AI insights for the sake of moving the industry forward. Recently, we hosted a free event for the community to come together for open discussions about the future of AI – Acumos AI Day. We learned quite a bit at the event – and the most exciting part is that this is just the beginning of our epic journey with Acumos. Join us as we continue down this path of inclusive innovation.
