Meet ‘Brain.js’: GPU Accelerated Neural Networks in JavaScript for Browsers and Node.js

Neural networks will now be available for your browser too. Check out this JavaScript library called ‘Brain.js‘ that lets you deploy a neural network in the browser or on node.js. It uses the GPU of the computer or pure javascript if the GPU is not available to do the calculations. Brain.js has a key benefit: it builds a neural network on the most popular web language, which also creates a neural network with surprisingly little code.

While the creator of brain.js (Robert Plummer) claims that it can have unlimited applications, There were suggestions to include using the Neural network to predict the weather or the stock market or using it to manage seeds in a farming community. Another note is that Brain.js only operates on supervised data, and the function for unsupervised data is not available now. According to TheNewStack’s article, Robert also commented that javascript is about as powerful as Python or R in terms of its computational power because they use GPU through GLSL, a subset of C++. Due to this, they work very similarly to Python or R.

Brain.js was created in 2016 as an extension of a library known as Brain that was created in 2014 by Heather Brian, who had to abandon the project due to the effort and complexity it took to maintain it. Where Robert took on the project because he felt like he had never seen neural nets developed so simply and understandably and also states that there is no reason for javascript not to be performative when compared to other languages. Since its original version, a lot has changed in the realm of Brain.js, such as adding GPU to help in number crunching calculation types. Robert, just like heather, has been suffering from the lack of support and spends what little time he has aside from the day job fixing bugs. He is currently working on reinforcement neural nets that aim to improve automatically by learning over time.

Tool: https://brain.js.org/

Github link: https://github.com/BrainJS/brain.js#brainjs

Reference: https://thenewstack.io/brain-js-brings-deep-learning-to-the-browser-and-node-js/