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Jeff Dean explains TensorFlow [video]

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Re: Jeff Dean explains TensorFlow [video]

#21

Post by eva1984 »

adrianbg wrote: post #19
argonaut wrote: post #5

Just wanted to repost this from the other thread on TensorFlow, since I joined the party a bit late: I think some of the raving that's going on is unwarranted. This is a very nice , very well put together library with a great landing page. It might eventually displace Torch and Theano as the standard toolkits for deep learning. It looks like it might offer performance / portability improvements. But it does not do an…

Well, it looks way more scalable than Theano or Torch while being as easy to use as Theano. I'd say that's pretty exciting considering the number of groups working on way lower-level scalable neural nets. This is "not a game-changer" in the same way map-reduce isn't a game-changer wrt for loops. Also check out TensorBoard, their visualization tool (animation halfway down the page): http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/…

Only the single machine version is open sourced.

Re: Jeff Dean explains TensorFlow [video]

#22

Post by argonaut »

mailshanx wrote: post #18
argonaut wrote: post #5

Just wanted to repost this from the other thread on TensorFlow, since I joined the party a bit late: I think some of the raving that's going on is unwarranted. This is a very nice , very well put together library with a great landing page. It might eventually displace Torch and Theano as the standard toolkits for deep learning. It looks like it might offer performance / portability improvements. But it does not do an…

I think the fundamental differentiator might be how "production ready" TensorFlow is - the promise of simply declaring an ML pipeline and have that run in very heterogeneous compute environments from mobile phones to GPU blades to plain-old clusters, if fulfilled, can indeed be a huge game changer. The promise is that you literally do not have to write any new code when you are done with a research project / a series…

That's not really a fundamental differentiator. Torch/Theano are definitely production ready. I think the portability is definitely an advantage, though.

Re: Jeff Dean explains TensorFlow [video]

#23

Post by shostack »

chm wrote: post #12
shostack wrote: post #8

Is there anything an "early" programmer like myself can do to play around with this stuff without a background in the related math? I'm dying for this stuff to be dumbed down enough where Joe WebUser can feed in arbitrary data in a csv or point an app at a data source and get some sort of meaningful results. It truly seems like an area where once the barrier to entry is greatly reduced, the creativity of laymen will…

I'm dying for this stuff to be dumbed down enough[...] It kind of already is. Have you read the docs/examples? I don't think your mentality is fruitful. Having argued with people who shared your point of view, it seems there will always be something too difficult that prevents them from being good at X. There's no substitute for sweat. Have fun with the code they gave you and see where you end up!

I think we have different definitions of what "dumbed down" means.

I never said I could/would never put in the work to learn it. I'm saying that the place it is in right now is still too advanced for someone with my background to pick up and play around with without sitting down to seriously study the underlying concepts that are objectively fairly dense subject matter that can require advanced math and CS backgrounds.

To be clear, I'm not advocating that everything should be dumbed down for the sake of it. My point was largely that when the barrier to creation gets low enough, more creative types that don't have the heavy technical backgrounds can pick it up and create things that more technical users may never have imagined.

Not everything is best served as remaining elusively complex for the layman.

Also, for the record, I will probably read up on some of this stuff because I find it interesting and enjoy learning. I just wish it was a step more accessible than it is today, even with this development.

Re: Jeff Dean explains TensorFlow [video]

#24

Post by shostack »

codyguy wrote: post #10
shostack wrote: post #8

Is there anything an "early" programmer like myself can do to play around with this stuff without a background in the related math? I'm dying for this stuff to be dumbed down enough where Joe WebUser can feed in arbitrary data in a csv or point an app at a data source and get some sort of meaningful results. It truly seems like an area where once the barrier to entry is greatly reduced, the creativity of laymen will…

Hi shostack, You can try out ThatNeedle API. http://www.thatneedle.com/nlp-api.html . While it is only catering to retail for now. The underlying capability is broader and generic. If you have specific needs, let's get in touch and discuss. You should at least take a look at the gif demo on the site.

That's pretty cool, I'll play around with it. Thanks for sharing!

Re: Jeff Dean explains TensorFlow [video]

#25

Post by oiduts »

This is from ~22nd of October, and he is being asked whether it is an internal thing or going to be released - his answer is that it is internal and there are no plans to release it. Did they change their mind in a couple of days (not likely)? Was he not in the loop (also unlikely)? What else?

Re: Jeff Dean explains TensorFlow [video]

#28

Post by kybernetikos »

lgas wrote: post #14
narrator wrote: post #4

FYI, Jeff Dean is the inventor of most of Google's distributed computing infrastructure including MapReduce. Definitely up there with the likes of John Carmack and Fabrice Bellard as one of the great software engineers of all time.

I'd wager that way more people know who Jeff Dean is than know who Fabrice Bellard is.

Maybe some people do, personally I'm more familiar with the works of Fabrice Bellard, and that's probably fair enough since I expect I have more pieces of software derived from Bellard projects installed on my machine than I do software derived from Jeff Dean projects (not to criticise Jeff Dean, who I'm sure is very inspirational).

Re: Jeff Dean explains TensorFlow [video]

#29

Post by ossreality »

argonaut wrote: post #5

Just wanted to repost this from the other thread on TensorFlow, since I joined the party a bit late: I think some of the raving that's going on is unwarranted. This is a very nice , very well put together library with a great landing page. It might eventually displace Torch and Theano as the standard toolkits for deep learning. It looks like it might offer performance / portability improvements. But it does not do an…

>I think some of the raving that's going on is unwarranted. This is a very nice, very well put together library with a great landing page. It might eventually displace Torch and Theano as the standard toolkits for deep learning. It looks like it might offer performance / portability improvements. But it does not do anything fundamentally different from what has already been done for many years with Theano and Torch (which are standard toolkits for expressing computations, usually for building neural nets) and other libraries.

I don't know the first thing about TensorFlow, Torch or Theano.... but that was an awful, awful way tot convince me not to be excited about TensorFlow. Like, the worst possible way.

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