[Update – You can now download the app for your iPhone!]

I am totally convinced that deep learning approaches to hard AI are going to change our world, especially when they’re running on cheap networked devices scattered everywhere. I’m a believer because I’ve seen how good the results can be on image recognition, but I understand why so many experienced engineers are skeptical. It sounds too good to be true, and we’ve all been let down by AI promises in the past.

That’s why I’ve decided to release DeepBeliefSDK, an iOS version of the deep learning approach that has taken the computer vision world by storm. In technical terms it’s a framework that implements the full Krizhevsky stack of 60 million neural network connections, with a customizable top layer inspired by the Decaf approach. It does all this in under 300ms on an iPhone 5S, and in less than 20MB of memory. Here’s a video of me of me using the sample app to detect our cat!

This means you can now easily build cutting edge object recognition into your iOS apps. Even the training on custom objects can be done on the phone. Download and build the sample code and judge the effectiveness for yourself. Then all you need to do is teach it the things you care about, link against the framework, and you’ve given your app the ability to see!