Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft • Hacker News Board

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#11

Post by mza » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 2:03 PM UTC

Artemis2 wrote: post #4

Curious to see what HN thinks of this. Are Amazon and Microsoft going against Google and Tensorflow? Will we see Gluon Processing Units on AWS and Azure in the near future?

We love TensorFlow (and have a ton of developers using it on AWS).

Just like databases we’ll support a wide range of engines on AWS; some of our own like Gluon, along side others from the community like PyTorch and TensorFlow. They’re all first class citizens.

We even fund separable (competing!) teams internally to focus on making sure AWS is the best place to run each of these popular engines.

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#12

Post by chatmasta » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 2:06 PM UTC

moduspwnens14 wrote: post #2

A little odd to see AWS and Microsoft partnering together on something like this, but it's good to see regardless.

The most important executives at both companies live and work around Seattle, so maybe that has something to do with it. There are some nice golf courses in Bellevue!

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#13

Post by floopidydoopidy » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 2:07 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #10

Couldn't they have chosen a better name? http://gluonhq.com/

That's unfortunate. Sometimes I wonder if Microsoft does stuff like this on purpose. A simple google search would should who is using what name.

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#14

Post by romanovcode » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 2:12 PM UTC

staticelf wrote: post #3

Can someone please shed light to why so many ML tools and frameworks are being implemented in Python? What makes Python so special for doing ML? Personally, I would love for MS to release or support a .NET based ML toolkit. There is open source stuff like http://accord-framework.net but I would assume that it isn't as big nor complete as a framework being supported by a major corporation.

Same here, kind of defeats the purpose of many libraries in my opinion if all of them are released for Python and look exactly the same. Think: front-end frameworks in javascript.

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#15

Post by indescions_2017 » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 2:22 PM UTC

AWS / MSR response to dynamic graph computation paradigms such as Chainer, Tensorflow Fold. There is certainly a distribution advantage to having this be the default backend engine as so many store their data on S3, Redhsift.

The DyNet paper is still the best source for background on the relative advantages to using "Define-By-Run" networks:

DyNet: The Dynamic Neural Network Toolkit

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.03980v1.pdf

Now I just need to get to where scaling to 1000 GPUs is a problem I actually have ;)

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#16

Post by timdorr » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 2:26 PM UTC

staticelf wrote: post #3

Can someone please shed light to why so many ML tools and frameworks are being implemented in Python? What makes Python so special for doing ML? Personally, I would love for MS to release or support a .NET based ML toolkit. There is open source stuff like http://accord-framework.net but I would assume that it isn't as big nor complete as a framework being supported by a major corporation.

Python has always had a good selection of scientific/mathematical libraries (numpy, scipy).

In addition, notebook apps like Jupyter fit well with the experimental nature of scientific code. I have a colleague who was attempting to do some stuff in Ruby (to fit with our application stack) who would leave IRB sessions open for weeks at a time. He's recently switched to Zepplin for notebook stuff, and it has been a huge productivity boost for him.

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#17

Post by amrrs » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 2:40 PM UTC

moduspwnens14 wrote: post #2

A little odd to see AWS and Microsoft partnering together on something like this, but it's good to see regardless.

Recently MSFT partnered with FB releasing a deep learning framework Open Neural Network Exchange, and now Microsoft with AWS. Seems Microsoft has learnt that Google is far ahead in this game (just like they lost Internet game to Google) so let's make something happen that Google might not become another unbeatable winner in AI.

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#18

Post by pm90 » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 2:44 PM UTC

staticelf wrote: post #3

Can someone please shed light to why so many ML tools and frameworks are being implemented in Python? What makes Python so special for doing ML? Personally, I would love for MS to release or support a .NET based ML toolkit. There is open source stuff like http://accord-framework.net but I would assume that it isn't as big nor complete as a framework being supported by a major corporation.

Mostly because Python is a great "glue" language. It isn't performant enough to implement the actual low-level computation, but is better at running other applications, getting data from them, feeding them into other applications (a.k.a pipelines).

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#19

Post by zitterbewegung » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 2:52 PM UTC

staticelf wrote: post #3

Can someone please shed light to why so many ML tools and frameworks are being implemented in Python? What makes Python so special for doing ML? Personally, I would love for MS to release or support a .NET based ML toolkit. There is open source stuff like http://accord-framework.net but I would assume that it isn't as big nor complete as a framework being supported by a major corporation.

Python had a scientific community long before even this whole new fad of Data Science. Also, financial institutions helped make software such as Pandas. The last thing is that that the syntax of the language is really friendly and easy to use with batteries included. Others have mentioned its a great glue language since it was originally designed as a systems programming language and a bunch of *nix distributions use it for that purpose.

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#20

Post by origami777 » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 2:56 PM UTC

nozzlegear wrote: post #6

moduspwnens14 wrote: post #2

A little odd to see AWS and Microsoft partnering together on something like this, but it's good to see regardless.

There seems to be a little bit of partnership between Amazon and Microsoft. For example, they recently announced that users will soon be able to use Alexa from Cortana, and Cortana from Alexa. I'm curious to see if this trend continues.

AWS is probably the biggest windows customer by now. Probably a lot of ideas passed between the two.