Microsoft has released its Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) through GitHub on an open source licence, with the stated aim of speeding up artificial intelligence research.

Although Redmond had hosted the CNTK on its own CodePlex site in April of last year, it was held there under an academic licence, freezing out amateur machine shepherds.

It is now available on GitHub so that "the community will take advantage of CNTK to share ideas more quickly through the exchange of open source working code".