The artificial intelligence that powers Facebook’s online services is now open source. The social media company announced Friday that it is releasing its “deep learning” modules to Torch, an open source development environment for machine learning that is widely used by academic researchers and companies like Google, NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, among others.

“Today, we’re open sourcing optimized deep-learning modules for Torch,” said Facebook researcher Soumith Chintala in a blog post. “These modules are significantly faster than the default ones in Torch and have accelerated our research projects by allowing us to train larger neural nets in less time.”

“Deep learning” is a trendy buzzwords these days, but it basically refers to teaching computers how to recognize objects and speech. Deep learning uses simulated networks of brain cells to process data. Facebook has invested heavily in it over the past couple years, especially with the “DeepFace” project, which uses deep learning in facial recognition software to reduce error rates by more than 25 percent, approaching human level accuracy.

Google Plus also employs deep learning to allow users to find images in their photo galleries. And in a key step towards the driverless cars of the future, NVIDIA is experimenting with deep learning to enable car cameras to classify objects on the road, TechCrunch reports.

Facebook hopes that by opening up its deep learning algorithms, it can save other researchers quite a bit of time in building their own AI services. Resource-stretched labs and startups often spend huge amounts of time implementing existing algorithms instead of doing new research, Wired reports.  Facebook wants to change that.

“Even though we don’t collaborate day-to-day with that world, it could provide a general catalyst to the community and that will benefit us indirectly,” Chintala told Wired.