HINGHAM, MASS. September 24, 2024
Mozilla has selected the Elixir Nx project from among nearly 200 applications to be one of 14 projects in its inaugural Builders Accelerator. The accelerator supports designing, testing, and building of projects that expand the open-source AI ecosystem. Mozilla’s inaugural accelerator theme was Local AI, highlighting projects designed to run AI models and applications without the need for cloud-based servers.
Nx takes a novel approach to on-device and local AI solutions. Building on Elixir’s fault tolerance and scalability, it aims to create a distributed machine-learning framework that outperforms currently available solutions. The project will produce enhancements to the Elixir Nx library ecosystem to expand its capabilities and performance.
Benefits of Nx:
- Enhanced Privacy: By processing data locally, Nx ensures sensitive information remains secure and under user control.
- Performance Boost: Running AI models on local devices significantly reduces latency, enabling real-time decision-making.
- Scalable Infrastructure: Nx scales across a variety of devices—from servers and GPUs to edge devices—maximizing hardware efficiency.
- Open-Source Collaboration: Nx is part of the open-source community, inviting global collaboration and continuous innovation.
Nx leverages the power of open-source technologies to allow users to run AI models directly on their own hardware, eliminating the need for external cloud services. This way users maintain full control over their data and how it’s stored, processed, and shared. By minimizing the amount of data sent over the internet, local data processing significantly reduces the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access.
Not only does that approach enhance data privacy, but it also addresses latency issues, enabling real-time data processing for faster decision-making. The local process approach also expands the use cases for AI solutions in areas with limited internet connectivity or financial resources.
As an open-source project, Nx makes machine learning accessible to a wider audience. Nx is built on open-source technologies, ensuring that advanced AI and machine learning tools are available to everyone.
“By developing and leveraging open-source technologies, we make these tools available to a broader audience, allowing individuals and organizations to use and contribute to advanced AI solutions without incurring high costs. The open-source nature of our project encourages global collaboration, fostering continuous improvement and customization of the technology,” said Paulo Valente, DockYard senior software engineer and Nx team member.
About DockYard:
At DockYard, we help our partners build digital products that delight their users and scale seamlessly. Over the last decade, major companies—including Netflix and Apple—and industry disruptors alike have trusted DockYard to overcome complex product challenges. We believe that digital products can be made in an ethical and resilient way. And we incorporate that belief through our range of consulting services, from product strategy, design, and user experience (UX) to full-stack engineering and QA.
About Nx:
Nx Launched in October 2020, Nx is a library for numerical computation and machine learning in Elixir. Built to enable efficient manipulation of multi-dimensional arrays (tensors), Nx allows developers to create high-performance machine learning models, including neural networks via the Axon library. It leverages XLA for accelerated computation on both CPUs and GPUs, making Elixir a viable alternative to Python for data science and machine learning tasks.
