Star Wars Episode VII is out this week. Here at Mycroft we were intrigued by the possibility of integrating Mycroft’s natural language processing with BB-8’s unique mobility. The result? A Mycroft BB-8 hybrid concept drawing. Looks pretty good to us!
The open source artificial intelligence community got a bit bigger this week with the launch of OpenAI. The AI community was also excited to see Facebook’s announcement that they are releasing their artificial intelligence hardware under an open source license.
OpenAI shows that there is strong interest in the AI space and signals that there will be a plethora of tools available for AI development under open licenses. OpenAI is focused on deep learning research which will benefit companies like Mycroft who use these tools to produce useful software.
Facebook’s announcement is even more interesting. The hardware Facebook plans to release to Open Compute makes deep learning more accessible to companies like Mycroft. Their 3U server contains 24,576 computing cores and 96GB of RAM. This type of processing power, which was once only available in research labs, will accelerate Mycroft’s progress toward a useful, open AI.
Ben Smith joined the Mycroft team of advisors this week. Ben is a Principal of social and new media agency Social:IRL. He is a serial entrepreneur, having founded several businesses over the past 20 years and is very active in the regional startup community. We are very pleased to have him on board.
Mycroft runs on multiple platforms.
In keeping with our vision of Mycroft as a software platform we revised the front page of our website. It now shows Mycroft running on a System76 Linux laptop, iMac, Windows Surface Tablet and Android phone.
Updated Rear Panel on Mycroft
Derick Schweppe, the industrial designer behind Mycroft’s unique appearance has an updated device backplate to share. The backplate includes the 40 pin IO header, RCA outputs, 12V barrel connector, 4 USB ports and the Ethernet port.
Finally, we have a new feature video this week. This week’s feature video focuses on Mycroft’s ability to play media.
Remember the last day to preorder Mycroft is December 31st, so hurry up and order now!
CTO of the Mycroft project. A long time open source software developer Ryan has contributed to the Solus Project, GtK, DuckDuckGo and many others. He is a former systems administrator for the Northeast Kansas Library System. Ryan has extensive experience with datacenter management including the construction and maintenance of high availability virtualization systems.