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As someone who is stuck with a Windows at work, I love how Google is listening to what developers have to say. TensorFlow has the potential of being the next b
by pippy 10y ago
As someone who is stuck with a Windows at work, I love how Google is listening to what developers have to say.
TensorFlow has the potential of being the next big thing. You'd never see other companies (Microsoft for example) port their crown jewels like halo over to other systems. They begrudgingly port products in which they've lost market share to other rivals, mostly in an effort to appear relevant.
I do think the "Don't be evil" mantra is still alive.
- IshKebab 10y agoYeah I mean it's not like Microsoft has an open source innovative (more so than Tensorflow) deep learning toolkit... https://github.com/microsoft/cntk https://github.com/microsoft/cntk
- amelius 10y agoAnd it also runs on Linux, by the way.
- Eridrus 10y agoWhat is more innovative about CNTK? I mostly use Keras on TF, but am interested in your thoughts.
- IshKebab 10y agoWell apart from the 1-bit multi-GPU SGD (which isn't totally free unfortunately), the main thing is BrainScript (formerly the Network Description Language). This is a DSL that lets you define the neural network as a computational network (which is what it is) but also lets you trivially make it recurrent by using `x = PreviousValue(y)` and `x = FutureValue(y)`. CNTK then works out which subset of the network is recurrent and only unwraps that bit. Other systems like Torch and Tensorflow generally only provide pre-defined recurrent layers, like LSTM and GRU. If you want to make your own you have to deal with a gaping hole in the documentation, and extremely hacky ways of defining recurrence which I honestly never worked out. CNTK makes it trivial.
- sceadu 10y agoI don't think acting out of self-interest (e.g. porting to get more developer interest) implies that the "Don't be evil" mantra is still alive (not sure if this is what you meant in your post, maybe it's just how I read it). Maybe it goes without saying but Google really wants their framework to be THE framework for doing machine learning because it has so many benefits for them. For example, if you have the best ecosystem/framework for doing ML, chances are any newcomers to the field (some of whom will later be experts) will gain familiarity with it, which would make the hiring situation for your ML team much better. Regardless, I'm in the same situation as you w.r.t. Windows at work and have the same reaction (love it and have been waiting for the port).
- cmarschner 10y agoOnly that the port is the result of several months of work in Microsoft which was contributed to TF.
- dekhn 10y agoAre you sure? I think most of the port work was done by a couple of Google developers.