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Microsoft Cognitive Services

projectoxford.ai

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Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#21

Post by themodelplumber »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #20

I have thought about this many times. What kind of startups or companies would actually pay for ML as a service at the initial stages knowing very well that a) you are providing a lot of training data and instead of being paid for the service, you are actually paying for the privilege? b) if your product/service takes off, there is a higher chance you will be competing not against similar startups, but rather a featu…

> In other words, why would anyone invest in ML as a service with so many potential forces acting against your continued success?

a) You see little chance of remaining relevant in your field without biting the bullet & providing training data as part of the package deal

b) You see "product/service takes off" as a far off dream, with many near-term wins that will make the tradeoff worth it for you. For now. And that has to be good enough.

c) You wonder aloud what kind of data that might be, that could be combined into something else, along with your data. Your best strategy people tell you it's not worth getting bothered over, given the nature of your project. Now is the time to take risks.

> In other words, why would anyone invest in ML as a service with so many potential forces acting against your continued success?

Because those "forces" are wayyyy out there compared to the bigger risk, namely "not having any better ideas"

Nobody said MS has to market this to companies that see MS as a potential competitor.

Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#22

Post by jjuu »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #20

I have thought about this many times. What kind of startups or companies would actually pay for ML as a service at the initial stages knowing very well that a) you are providing a lot of training data and instead of being paid for the service, you are actually paying for the privilege? b) if your product/service takes off, there is a higher chance you will be competing not against similar startups, but rather a featu…

Because the standard enterprise IT department is filled with people barely capable of keeping up a website and a database.

Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#24

Post by PJDK »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #20

I have thought about this many times. What kind of startups or companies would actually pay for ML as a service at the initial stages knowing very well that a) you are providing a lot of training data and instead of being paid for the service, you are actually paying for the privilege? b) if your product/service takes off, there is a higher chance you will be competing not against similar startups, but rather a featu…

I think this comes down to making sure your advantage is inhouse but outsource the other stuff.

For the vast amount of companies where ML isn't in any way core, this is great. For example we've got a little internal app that includes a profile picture.

Currently we pre-crop photos before uploading. Obviously not the best solution. Putting together a little javascript thingy to allow the user to crop is somewhere deep in the backlog. Now this exists I'm very tempted to implement a little feature to auto crop around the face on upload. Nothing there to steal, definitely not worth rolling our own ML system to do it but a very nice thing to now be available in our toolkit.

Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#25

Post by weego »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #20

I have thought about this many times. What kind of startups or companies would actually pay for ML as a service at the initial stages knowing very well that a) you are providing a lot of training data and instead of being paid for the service, you are actually paying for the privilege? b) if your product/service takes off, there is a higher chance you will be competing not against similar startups, but rather a featu…

The kind of startup that doesnt want to run out of startup capital getting strung up managing software and infrastructure but would rather get to market and then concern themselves with the trivial concerns you raised.

Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#26

Post by RandomBookmarks »

philip142au wrote: post #23

I would pay money to buy a image to text software (text recognition) if it was as good as Microsoft's and I could run it batch on my images.

Good news: You don't need to pay, because Microsoft OCR is available for free, nicely packaged as "DLL". The caveat: It currently supports only UWP (Universal Windows Platform) apps: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/02/08/optical-ch...

For a quick test, try https://ocr.space - a free ocr api that uses Microsoft OCR on the backend.

Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#27

Post by ewzimm »

alaskamiller wrote: post #3

AI is the new PC market. Integrating various AI components to formulate something an user wants, uses, and values is going to be the foundation of this third tech wave. Cogsci services will also be the biggest drivers behind cloud computing usage and thus one of the biggest drivers of revenue, hence why Microsoft has doubled down on its Azure efforts, why Amazon is working hard to keep its AWS lead, and why other big…

Having effective universal computing and making it usable for people are different enough that there's plenty of room for people specializing in both. Consumer hardware isn't anywhere near finished changing, and I'm sure a lot of the changes on the server level will continue to affect the hardware in people's hands. Intelligence is partially a matter of coordination. It's best to have lots of devices with specialized tasks, so there's room for phones, home servers, data centers, and all the IoT devices. Smart phones were always dumb without a lot of networking. Technology is developed enough that we're seeing the development of ecosystems that are almost as interdependent as natural ecosystems.

Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#29

Post by coldsmoke »

PJDK wrote: post #24
thr0waway1239 wrote: post #20

I have thought about this many times. What kind of startups or companies would actually pay for ML as a service at the initial stages knowing very well that a) you are providing a lot of training data and instead of being paid for the service, you are actually paying for the privilege? b) if your product/service takes off, there is a higher chance you will be competing not against similar startups, but rather a featu…

I think this comes down to making sure your advantage is inhouse but outsource the other stuff. For the vast amount of companies where ML isn't in any way core, this is great. For example we've got a little internal app that includes a profile picture. Currently we pre-crop photos before uploading. Obviously not the best solution. Putting together a little javascript thingy to allow the user to crop is somewhere deep…

You should check out imgix as well. They have a really nice crop feature along with automatic quality adjustment and serving different formats (webp/jpg) where available. https://docs.imgix.com/apis/url/size/crop

Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services

#30

Post by argonaut »

PJDK wrote: post #24
thr0waway1239 wrote: post #20

I have thought about this many times. What kind of startups or companies would actually pay for ML as a service at the initial stages knowing very well that a) you are providing a lot of training data and instead of being paid for the service, you are actually paying for the privilege? b) if your product/service takes off, there is a higher chance you will be competing not against similar startups, but rather a featu…

I think this comes down to making sure your advantage is inhouse but outsource the other stuff. For the vast amount of companies where ML isn't in any way core, this is great. For example we've got a little internal app that includes a profile picture. Currently we pre-crop photos before uploading. Obviously not the best solution. Putting together a little javascript thingy to allow the user to crop is somewhere deep…

Yeah I think this is a good use case. But is that going to be a huge business for Microsoft/Google/Amazon?

There are serious companies (like Netflix) that put their entire infrastructure on cloud platforms. If the concerns the OP raises are valid, no company for whom ML is a big (read: high usage, high paying) feature is going to rely on these cloud services. And startups that do rely on the cloud services for their MVPs are going to move off as quickly as they can. I can't think of any successful cloud platform for which MVPs and small features are the main customer use case. Heroku comes to mind, but even then there are mid-size companies that do rely mostly on Heroku.

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