Where I work, we apply Machine Learning/Deep Learning to various problems in the retail space. Leveraging Elixir and BEAM for ML/DL is something I’m also curious about. I’ve been looking at some of the available Elixir wrappers/libraries, such as Tensorflex.
Although Elixir and BEAM might not be ideal for doing the heavy number-crunching, I imagine that it could be a great technology for building a platform to facilitate for distributed training of neural networks. Some kind of worldwide machine learning orchestration platform/service.
Imagine a peer-to-peer-like platform where people could volunteer idle CPUs and GPUs. Members of the network could then use idle hardware on demand for training their neural nets. One could implement some kind of point-based system for fair time-sharing of hardware resources in the network, etc.
The general idea of distributed computing is nothing new, as it has been applied to many different fields (Folding@Home being an excellent example).
