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Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

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Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#21
post #18

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).

Sure but if I have invested a lot in MS technologies I am hesitant to learn and implement things in a completely new language if I can find something that is more fitting to the stack I already use.

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#22

Is this as much of a collusion attempt against TensorFlow as it seems? Or has this been a long time coming?

>Is this as much of a collusion attempt against TensorFlow as it seems?

What do you mean by collusion here? Seems more like an attempt at competition than collusion.

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#23

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!

This is not the case. Probably more relevant is that there are dedicated AI / Cloud Computing meetups and groups in the Bellevue and Seattle area that employees of all the companies attend. This means that the people that do this research and build these products frequently chat with each other.

I know my counterparts at AWS as a result and as we are friends, I push for collaboration whenever opportunities arise. At least on the MS side of the house these sorts of outreach and collaborative projects are a ground up push.

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#24

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.

As a long-time Java developer, Python was a beauty. It brings back the joy of programming and makes data manipulation a breeze. C# is better than Java, but it's still not as elegant/simple/clean as Python for data science.

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#25

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.

As a long-time Java developer, Python was a beauty. It brings back the joy of programming and makes data manipulation a breeze. C# is better than Java, but it's still not as elegant/simple/clean as Python for data science.

Python is only fun for tiny projects. Once you reach 120k LOC in a project, refactoring in Python is an insanity even with PyCharm, and debugging becomes impossible, too.

Have you tried Kotlin?

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#26

Is this as much of a collusion attempt against TensorFlow as it seems? Or has this been a long time coming?

>Is this as much of a collusion attempt against TensorFlow as it seems? What do you mean by collusion here? Seems more like an attempt at competition than collusion.

Do you think they would still be doing this if TF hadn't become the near de-facto ML software? Seems like more of a response to its rise than an actual research project

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#27
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long-time Java developer, Python was a beauty. It brings back the joy of programming and makes data manipulation a breeze. C# is better than Java, but it's still not as elegant/simple/clean as Python for data science.

Python is only fun for tiny projects. Once you reach 120k LOC in a project, refactoring in Python is an insanity even with PyCharm, and debugging becomes impossible, too. Have you tried Kotlin?

Can you be specific on what makes this a headache? Your "refactoring" tells me that the code probably wasn't well structured in the first place and if so this would make refactoring difficult for any language, particularly dynamically typed ones.

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#28

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.

According to the nips blog I think, 98% of deep learning papers are published with python source, and 1% R 1% other stuff.

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#29
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long-time Java developer, Python was a beauty. It brings back the joy of programming and makes data manipulation a breeze. C# is better than Java, but it's still not as elegant/simple/clean as Python for data science.

Python is only fun for tiny projects. Once you reach 120k LOC in a project, refactoring in Python is an insanity even with PyCharm, and debugging becomes impossible, too. Have you tried Kotlin?

Once you reach 120k LOC in a machine learning project, you should have split it up into disparate projects (input adapters, interactive applications, transforming results...) many orders of magnitude ago, even in verbose and refactoring-friendly languages like Java.

Re: Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft

#30
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is only fun for tiny projects. Once you reach 120k LOC in a project, refactoring in Python is an insanity even with PyCharm, and debugging becomes impossible, too. Have you tried Kotlin?

Can you be specific on what makes this a headache? Your "refactoring" tells me that the code probably wasn't well structured in the first place and if so this would make refactoring difficult for any language, particularly dynamically typed ones.

> Your "refactoring" tells me that the code probably wasn't well structured in the first place

Well considering this is a realistic scenario for fallible humans, it’s still decent advice to keep your exploratory projects in python small to avoid ridiculous tech debt. It’s not quite as bad as with ruby, but it’s close.

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