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Are deep learning and other frameworks really that much more subject to vendor lock in than frameworks in other areas of tech? People make it seem like whichev

Are deep learning and other frameworks really that much more subject to vendor lock in than frameworks in other areas of tech? People make it seem like whichever framework wins now will own AI for the future, but transfer that logic to web development and you would expect perl and php to still be on top of the world instead of whatever the js framework of the day is. GPU acceleration seems to be a pretty big barrier to entry for upstarts. But I think that has more to do with the crappy state of tooling than intrinsic difficulty of GPGPU. Cuda showed that GPGPU could be much easier and I think there is still plenty of room for improvement. Compare the difficulty of setting up Apache a decade ago vs Nodejs today for how much simpler servers have become. Anyway Tensorflow is really hyped right now, but there is no way to know if that will last.

seangrogg 10y ago
In all fairness, PHP still does dominate the field - it routinely picks up new web developers, is the backing language of some of the largest well-known, simple, and open source CMS (WordPress, Magento), and inertia alone places it at ~80% of websites. Is it new/shiny? Nah. But while other languages/frameworks may get the lion's share of attention for reasons that circulate performance, concurrency, and/or scale and large companies do adopt them from time to time... PHP enjoys ridiculous levels of usage. And this is from someone that dislikes and never uses PHP.
cs702 10y ago
Whoa, I did not write (or even intend to mean) that TensorFlow "will own AI for the future," whatever that means. No one is saying that!!! I claim only that TensorFlow has won the "framework for numerical computation using software-specified data-flow graphs" space, at the expense of many other competing frameworks (Caffe, Theano, Torch, CNTK, etc.). In other words, if you want to build a large-scale machine/deep learning model (e.g., with tens or hundreds of millions of parameters) and you need to train this model with, say, tens of billions of samples in a cluster of multi-GPU machines (or TPUs), TensorFlow has become the go-to software infrastructure for doing that.

seangrogg 10y ago

In all fairness, PHP still does dominate the field - it routinely picks up new web developers, is the backing language of some of the largest well-known, simple, and open source CMS (WordPress, Magento), and inertia alone places it at ~80% of websites. Is it new/shiny? Nah. But while other languages/frameworks may get the lion's share of attention for reasons that circulate performance, concurrency, and/or scale and large companies do adopt them from time to time... PHP enjoys ridiculous levels of usage. And this is from someone that dislikes and never uses PHP.

cs702 10y ago

Whoa, I did not write (or even intend to mean) that TensorFlow "will own AI for the future," whatever that means. No one is saying that!!! I claim only that TensorFlow has won the "framework for numerical computation using software-specified data-flow graphs" space, at the expense of many other competing frameworks (Caffe, Theano, Torch, CNTK, etc.). In other words, if you want to build a large-scale machine/deep learning model (e.g., with tens or hundreds of millions of parameters) and you need to train this model with, say, tens of billions of samples in a cluster of multi-GPU machines (or TPUs), TensorFlow has become the go-to software infrastructure for doing that.