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MILA and the future of Theano

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Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#21

Post by ssivark »

pesenti wrote: post #2

Reminds me of Chrome. Lots of competing alternatives. Google comes late yet still manage to take over the market organically very quickly by producing a superior and more robust alternative.

I think that the goals of MILA/Theano might be somewhat different from that of Mozilla/Firefox.

Mozilla aims to continuously steer the direction in which the web develops. As far as a software layer developed by an academic research group, I'm sure they will be extremely happy that they could set the agenda with early software, and now get to pass the baton to an industrially supported codebase so that they can focus on the next generation of innovative ideas.

While the dominating market share of Chrome over Firefox could be considered a battle loss for Mozilla, the maturation of Tensorflow (and other frameworks which leverage GPUs and provide a higher level interface for ML algorithms) may be considered a big win for MILA.

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#22

Post by clickok »

pesenti wrote: post #2

Reminds me of Chrome. Lots of competing alternatives. Google comes late yet still manage to take over the market organically very quickly by producing a superior and more robust alternative.

It's something of a pattern for Google. Existing products (say, Theano and Torch) were revolutionary, but had a number of pain points that were difficult to remove[0]. TensorFlow is essentially Theano without those problems, and with the guarantee of continued relevance thanks to Google's backing[1]. And of course, they reap the benefits of making it "open-source" while keeping a closed version for private use, similar to Chrome and Google Ultron.

However, I still feel kinda nostalgic for those warm summer days, writing my first autoencoder in Theano and using it to make blurry versions of photos.

-----

0. Theano had some truly gnarly exception tracebacks, which made it difficult to identify if you'd made a truly incompatible model or if one of the layers/operations just needed a datatype specified.

1. I wish more companies did something like this. It's not necessarily innovation, so much as having a corps of people experienced with some wondrous but unwieldy technology and then giving those people the opportunity to reimplement it "right". Maybe there are many companies that attempt it, but instead produce a clone with problems of its own? Or maybe you need someone like Jeff Dean supervising the project to make sure everything comes together?

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#23

Post by standapartfrom »

lucio wrote: post #17
aljones wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome's growth was bootstrapped with very pushy ads on the highest traffic website on the internet, that typically doesn't allow ads. They also paid to bundle it with unrelated installers.

Chrome also was faster and simpler than the alternatives. That was relevant too . If it was only about Google weight, G+ would be a success.

It really wasn't relevant. Browsers are fungible. Social networks are not. Comparing Chrome with Google+ is missing the point.

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#24

Post by kozikow »

dasternberg wrote: post #16
sammorrowdrums wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keras is pretty cool and can already use Theano and Tensorflow as a backend.

Not sure how this comment relates to PyMC3 though - PyMC3 is for Bayesian statistical modeling with MCMC. It uses Theano as a backend. Keras is a specifically for neural networks.

Who needs anything else except deep learning? \s

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#25

Post by ethbro »

lucio wrote: post #17
aljones wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome's growth was bootstrapped with very pushy ads on the highest traffic website on the internet, that typically doesn't allow ads. They also paid to bundle it with unrelated installers.

Chrome also was faster and simpler than the alternatives. That was relevant too . If it was only about Google weight, G+ would be a success.

I'll be curious if WebAssembly affords them an opportunity to leverage {large number of engineers} or instead enables new browser entrants via evening the legacy "How good is your js engine?" playing field.

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#27

Post by zeroxfe »

alexasmyths wrote: post #13
pesenti wrote: post #2

Reminds me of Chrome. Lots of competing alternatives. Google comes late yet still manage to take over the market organically very quickly by producing a superior and more robust alternative.

" by producing a superior and more robust alternative." In a commodity market - those with brand and distribution will win. Chrome isn't really that much better than others. It may be in some areas, not in others. But when the 'company that owns the web' is promoting it, they can get any number of downloads they chose to as long as the product is competitive. And distribution is one thing, brands have incredible powe…

> Chrome isn't really that much better than others.

The point is that it was much better than the others when it came out. It spurred the competition into actually competing. (If you remember, IE had >80% of the market at the time, and was horrendous.)

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#29

Post by mintplant »

jonstokes wrote: post #26
jwilk wrote: post #15

Please use the original title ("MILA and the future of Theano").

Yes, this. The seemingly increasing HN practice of rewriting submission titles and headlines strikes me as the ultimate in IT support nerd "just move"-ism.

I disagree, the original title is too vague. Perhaps "MILA to stop working on Theano".

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#30

Post by zeroxfe »

aljones wrote: post #12
pesenti wrote: post #2

Reminds me of Chrome. Lots of competing alternatives. Google comes late yet still manage to take over the market organically very quickly by producing a superior and more robust alternative.

Chrome's growth was bootstrapped with very pushy ads on the highest traffic website on the internet, that typically doesn't allow ads. They also paid to bundle it with unrelated installers.

> Chrome's growth was bootstrapped with very pushy ads on the highest traffic website on the internet, that typically doesn't allow ads.

It was (is) also a fantastic browser.

> They also paid to bundle it with unrelated installers.

So did other browsers.

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