Friday, July 14, 2017

‘Not Hotdog’ Brings App from HBO’s Silicon Valley to Life

On this week’s episode of the AI Podcast, developer Tim Anglade shares his experience developing “Not Hotdog,” an app that spawned as a joke on HBO’s Silicon Valley TV show, but is now available on iOS and Android stores. Anglade, who also works as a consultant for the series, used NVIDIA GPUs, TensorFlow, and Keras to train the app


Users can now determine if any food or object they photograph is or isn’t a hot dog. “It’s a defining problem of our time,” quipped Anglade. In the show, “Not Hotdog” was developed when character Jian-Yang tries to create a food recognition AI app, only to have it backfire when it can only identify hot dogs. To develop the app, Anglade relied on existing research and libraries covering image recognition.