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Dotscience is shutting down

dotscience.com

11–20 of 46 posts

Re: Dotscience is shutting down

#11
post #2

CEO here. Happy to make introductions to the team for anyone who is hiring. We have valuable residual knowledge about building a product in the MLOps platform space and achieving product-market fit, and I hope that this might be helpful to someone else.

Sorry to hear this! Can you share what went wrong ? I’m really interested in the “DevOps for ML” space and I would love to hear what you think was the greatest difficulty or problem with your approach (if you are willing to share that).

Re: Dotscience is shutting down

#12
post #10

It's really revealing that such amazing companies on paper...just don't make money at all and have to resort constantly to outside money to stay alive.

One thing I learned from working with startups in the space (and other B2B verticals): There is little correlation between how nice the site looks and how well the company is doing as a business. In the consumer space: maybe. But not in enterprise software.

Re: Dotscience is shutting down

#13
post #10

It's really revealing that such amazing companies on paper...just don't make money at all and have to resort constantly to outside money to stay alive.

Your comment is worded in a slightly mean way, but I don't disagree. I work on autonomous 3D navigation. Clicking on their "Autonomous Vehicles" solution I see:

- model management solutions

- enormous quantities of data

Well, I have docker containers for my data, and docker containers for the underlying TensorFlow versions, and docker containers for model source code that went into large-scale training. All of that is coordinated using a git repo which has some shell scripts to execute the correct model with matching data on a compatible TF image. So if someone says "I need you to re-run last week's model", I check out the script from that time and run it on an empty server.

I honestly don't get what MLOps is or why I would need it.

Re: Dotscience is shutting down

#15
post #14
post #9

I appreciate how this was handled on the homepage: direct and looking out for your team.

> on the homepage What do you mean by this? I don't see any indication of them shutting down on the homepage, only on the blog.

I got this popup from their homepage:

> Dotscience

> Thanks for checking out dotscience, unfortunately due to the current situation we have had to close our doors and are no longer operating. You may however enjoy checking out the MLOps community to find out more about all the tooling and best practices happening right now in this ever changing landscape.

> Here are some relevant links to the MLOps community: Slack, Youtube, Weekly meetups.

Re: Dotscience is shutting down

#16
post #10

It's really revealing that such amazing companies on paper...just don't make money at all and have to resort constantly to outside money to stay alive.

Your comment is worded in a slightly mean way, but I don't disagree. I work on autonomous 3D navigation. Clicking on their "Autonomous Vehicles" solution I see: - model management solutions - enormous quantities of data Well, I have docker containers for my data, and docker containers for the underlying TensorFlow versions, and docker containers for model source code that went into large-scale training. All of that i…

How many other ML people do you work with? Do they all use the same system? Are you only working with Tensorflow and no other tools?

Generally things like MLOps are targeted at providing systems for people that either don't know how, or don't have the time, to set something up themselves, especially when the data science team is more than just one or two people, and when they're using a range of tools that need to interoperate in various ways.

Something like Kubeflow, for example, does a lot more than what you describe.

Re: Dotscience is shutting down

#17
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on the homepage What do you mean by this? I don't see any indication of them shutting down on the homepage, only on the blog.

I got this popup from their homepage: > Dotscience > Thanks for checking out dotscience, unfortunately due to the current situation we have had to close our doors and are no longer operating. You may however enjoy checking out the MLOps community to find out more about all the tooling and best practices happening right now in this ever changing landscape. > Here are some relevant links to the MLOps community: Slack,…

Huh, that's interesting. I even tried a private browsing window without any form of blocking, but I don't get a popup at all.

Re: Dotscience is shutting down

#18
post #3

Thoughts on how the economic situation will affect machine learning and data science in industry more generally?

Uber gave us a glimpse last week. I think they shut down a lot of the Uber AI projects and probably laid off many of their ML people.

Re: Dotscience is shutting down

#19
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is worded in a slightly mean way, but I don't disagree. I work on autonomous 3D navigation. Clicking on their "Autonomous Vehicles" solution I see: - model management solutions - enormous quantities of data Well, I have docker containers for my data, and docker containers for the underlying TensorFlow versions, and docker containers for model source code that went into large-scale training. All of that i…

How many other ML people do you work with? Do they all use the same system? Are you only working with Tensorflow and no other tools? Generally things like MLOps are targeted at providing systems for people that either don't know how, or don't have the time, to set something up themselves, especially when the data science team is more than just one or two people, and when they're using a range of tools that need to in…

2 others, and yes, everyone has access to the central git repo and to our shared private Docker repository.

And no, we use TensorFlow and Chainer, but both are python frameworks. Plus Numpy, of course.

I like that KubeFlow has an introduction video, but I find it quite odd, too. They talk a lot about how they will make things simpler, but then I learn that I'll need to run Kubernetes on my laptop, my servers, and potentially the cloud.

Plus they use irritating marketing phrases like "you can just focus on your model" or "let KubeFlow handle the abstraction of running on X". Most deep learning models nowadays are memory-limited, so improving the model may well mean optimizing GPU memory usage. And after trying to port a working model from Ubuntu + 1080 TI to Google Cloud + V100 and/or Google Cloud TPU, I distrust anyone who would treat those significant hardware differences as "just an abstraction".

So at the very least, I'll need to enforce consistent GPUs and Operating Systems among all servers, just to make things run OK everywhere.

Re: Dotscience is shutting down

#20
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got this popup from their homepage: > Dotscience > Thanks for checking out dotscience, unfortunately due to the current situation we have had to close our doors and are no longer operating. You may however enjoy checking out the MLOps community to find out more about all the tooling and best practices happening right now in this ever changing landscape. > Here are some relevant links to the MLOps community: Slack,…

Huh, that's interesting. I even tried a private browsing window without any form of blocking, but I don't get a popup at all.

I got the pop-up but only on the first visit to the home page. Subsequent visits or a refresh do not trigger the pop-up. Firefox on Win. Noscript set to temporarily allow all.
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