congerous
Joined 9 years ago
Joined 9 years ago
I didn't compare Tensorflow to Android services. I said that Tensorflow would serve as the basis of a service bundle, much like Android did. Let's come back in a couple years and I'll tell you I told you so.
Eager is actually not as innocent as "open-source projects borrowing the best parts from each other", as some commenters here suggest.
Google is attempting to dominate the machine-learning API and the Python ecosystem for scientific computing.
The company that controls the API influences which apps are built on it and how. Think about how Google bundled Android services on top of Android, and how that posed an existential threat to other companies. That's what's coming for TensorFlow. Many developers are too naive to realize it, or too short-sighted to care.
* We knew about Tencent's AI Lab (Saying you need your own capabilities is another way of saying: We have NIH and we will waste 3 years building our own framework from the bottom up).
* We knew about China's AI plan, which was announced in July. That was huge news at the time.
* We knew about Baidu, but Baidu is actually slipping. They lost Andrew Ng and Adam Coates, and frankly they have executed poorly on social media and cloud computing compared to Tencent and Ali. It looks like they'll lose their lead in AI.
And the article actually contradicts its own sub-headline: "The West shouldn’t fear China’s artificial-intelligence revolution. It should copy it." The West is leading in AI research, and China is copying the West. So what does it mean that the West should copy China? China is playing catch up in AI just like it has been playing catch up in GDP growth. Catching up always moves faster than blazing a trail. The West is blazing a trail now. They don't have much to learn from players trying to catch up.
That's impossible to measure, but the arguments you have employed regarding personnel changes do not demonstrate your point.
Maybe, be people in this thread treat Tensorflow's creation as an act of simple altruism.
> And if "anywhere" includes the users' hardware, it's wrong: tensorflow runs flawlessly on any Linux/NVIDIA hardware. Maybe it works better with GCE than AWS, but that would once again fall into that "rather unsurprising" category of factoids.
Sorry, Tensorflow is slow on GPUs compared to other frameworks. This is not just an early blip, its a consistent pattern that has been repeatedly demonstrated. Why is Tensorflow slow on commodity hardware? Why isn't Google with it's infinite resources making Tensorflow run as fast as other frameworks on GPUs? Because it needs to demonstrate an advantage on the Google Cloud with TPUs.
On that cloud, it surrounds Tensorflow with other functionality that makes it easy to build AI, which aren't part of the Tensorflow project. Tensorflow is hard and inefficient to serve for inference, for example.
Machine learning is Google cloud's only hope to salvage Diane Greene's efforts and extend their dominance to a new sector. They're running a distant fourth.
> actually doesn't sound that scary.
It sounds scary to a lot of companies that don't want to be controlled or destroyed by Google. But by all means, lend them a hand, geek soldier.