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Gluon – Deep Learning API from AWS and Microsoft
- moduspwnens14 9y agoA little odd to see AWS and Microsoft partnering together on something like this, but it's good to see regardless.
- nozzlegear 9y agoThere seems to be a little bit of partnership between Amazon and Microsoft. For example, they recently announced that users will soon be able to use Alexa from Cortana, and Cortana from Alexa. I'm curious to see if this trend continues.
- origami777 9y agoAWS is probably the biggest windows customer by now. Probably a lot of ideas passed between the two.
- chatmasta 9y agoThe 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!
- intern4tional 9y agoThis 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.
- jeffbarr 9y agoAs far as I know, none of my colleagues can golf. But I hear that we do have some nice courses.
- bbgm 9y agoThat did make me chuckle.
- amrrs 9y agoRecently MSFT partnered with FB releasing a deep learning framework Open Neural Network Exchange, and now Microsoft with AWS. Seems Microsoft has learnt that Google is far ahead in this game (just like they lost Internet game to Google) so let's make something happen that Google might not become another unbeatable winner in AI.
- forgotAgain 9y agoPartnerships between tech companies is not that unusual. Now if it happens to amount to anything significant that would be odd.
- staticelf 9y agoCan 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 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.
- aswanson 9y agoMomentum, community uptake. Python with numpy, matplotlib had the framework in place as a free alternative to the exhorbitantly priced Matlab. Community ran with it.
- romanovcode 9y agoSame here, kind of defeats the purpose of many libraries in my opinion if all of them are released for Python and look exactly the same. Think: front-end frameworks in javascript.
- timdorr 9y agoPython has always had a good selection of scientific/mathematical libraries (numpy, scipy). In addition, notebook apps like Jupyter fit well with the experimental nature of scientific code. I have a colleague who was attempting to do some stuff in Ruby (to fit with our application stack) who would leave IRB sessions open for weeks at a time. He's recently switched to Zepplin for notebook stuff, and it has been a huge productivity boost for him.
- pm90 9y agoMostly 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).
- staticelf 9y agoSure 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.
- Artemis2 9y agoCurious to see what HN thinks of this. Are Amazon and Microsoft going against Google and Tensorflow? Will we see Gluon Processing Units on AWS and Azure in the near future?
- gfredtech 9y agoTensorflow was the default Keras backend on AWS, but it got replaced by MxNet
- krallistic 9y agoNote that they used a pretty old+forked version of keras for the mxnet backend
- eanzenberg 9y agoSorry that's super confusing, since currently Tensorflow is 1 of 2 possible backends to Keras. Is this the same Keras?
- genericpseudo 9y agoOne of four (MXNet and CNTK alongside TF and Theano), and the Amazon deep learning API forked Keras to default to MXNet support before it was really ready - which irked the Keras authors quite a bit.
- mza 9y agoWe love TensorFlow (and have a ton of developers using it on AWS). Just like databases we’ll support a wide range of engines on AWS; some of our own like Gluon, along side others from the community like PyTorch and TensorFlow. They’re all first class citizens. We even fund separable (competing!) teams internally to focus on making sure AWS is the best place to run each of these popular engines.
- wonder_bread 9y agoIs this as much of a collusion attempt against TensorFlow as it seems? Or has this been a long time coming?
- logicchains 9y ago>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.
- wonder_bread 9y agoDo 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
- ninju 9y agoI guess the collusion comes from the cooperation of Amazon and Microsoft on this effort
- pjmlp 9y agoCouldn't they have chosen a better name? http://gluonhq.com/ http://gluonhq.com/
- floopidydoopidy 9y agoThat's unfortunate. Sometimes I wonder if Microsoft does stuff like this on purpose. A simple google search would should who is using what name.
- xelxebar 9y agoNot to mention that "gluon" is the name of a particle (strong force carrier). There seems to be a trend recently to ride science hype by choosing a sciency-sounding name. :/
- indescions_2017 9y agoAWS / MSR response to dynamic graph computation paradigms such as Chainer, Tensorflow Fold. There is certainly a distribution advantage to having this be the default backend engine as so many store their data on S3, Redhsift. The DyNet paper is still the best source for background on the relative advantages to using "Define-By-Run" networks: DyNet: The Dynamic Neural Network Toolkit https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.03980v1.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.03980v1.pdf Now I just need to get to where scaling to 1000 GPUs is a problem I actually have ;)
- c0brac0bra 9y agoPage is 404ing now?
- dstaheli 9y agoIt's here too: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/
- stablemap 9y agoIt was marked as a dupe, but someone posted this earlier and I like that it shows a little code: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/ai/introducing-gluon-an-easy-to-use-programming-interface-for-flexible-deep-learning/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/ai/introducing-gluon-an-easy-to...
- mhh__ 9y agoI can't help but feel that "Gluon" is only going to conflict with Gluons (The Bosonic particle)
- mikebenfield 9y agoThere's also the Gluon language [1] and, as someone below mentioned, this [2] enterprise mobile thing. [1]: https://github.com/gluon-lang/gluon https://github.com/gluon-lang/gluon [2]: http://gluonhq.com/ http://gluonhq.com/
- Analog24 9y agoIn the same way Caffe conflicts with your local coffee shop. This is far from the first naming conflict of the internet age.
- eanzenberg 9y agoThis is interesting, but because of the growth of the number of ML frameworks and languages, when new ones pop up it would be great for them to release methods to transfer existing models to their language. I would love some extra compatibility with AWS for deploying deep learning models in prod but since I already have existing models running in production, it's a hard sale for me to re-train and re-implement from scratch existing work.
- Narew 9y agoRecently there is more and more initiative to have standard format in deeplearning environnement. dlpack for tensor format (https://github.com/dmlc/dlpack https://github.com/dmlc/dlpack) onnx for saved NN (https://github.com/onnx/onnx https://github.com/onnx/onnx) and tvm for execution (http://tvmlang.org/2017/10/06/nnvm-compiler-announcement.html http://tvmlang.org/2017/10/06/nnvm-compiler-announcement.htm...)
- 0xbear 9y agoThe goal is to erode TF user base. Too little, too late: PyTorch is already very effectively eroding the TF user base.
- binarymax 9y agoI feel like DL/ML frameworks are getting about as frequent as the JavaScript framework craze of the past decade. I started out on Torch and recently I've been using Keras, and this looks quite similar to the latter. Hard to see why one would switch to this if they are already comfortable in another.
- vonnik 9y agoGluon is an attempt by Microsoft and Amazon to regain some influence in AI tools. Keras looked like it was going to become the standard high-level API, but now Theano is dead, and CNTK and MxNet are controlled by Google's rivals, and they're ganging up against Google's tools. Francois Chollet is committed to keeping Keras neutral, but he's still a Google engineer, and that probably makes Microsoft and Amazon nervous. This is the equivalent of Microsoft creating C# in response to Java. The company that controls the API, has enormous influence on the ecosystem built atop the API, just like Google has had with Android, or MSFT with Windows. MSFT and AMZN are carving out their own user base, or trying to, at the price of fragmenting the Python community.
- Narew 9y agoUnlike Keras and Tensorflow, Gluon is Define-by-run Deeplearning framework like Pytorch, Chainer. Network definition/debugging/flexibility are really better with dynamic network (define-by-run). That's why Facebook seem to use Pytorch for research and caffe2 for deployment. Gluon/Mxnet can do both define-by-run with Gluon API and "standard" define-and-run with it's Module API.
- agibsonccc 9y agoI think you're both right here. Competition will force the other to innovate. I don't think end users lose by there being multiple interfaces even if fragmentation is ultimately what happens here. Standard formats and interop will help fix that.
- deanCommie 9y agoI think you had a justifiable devil's advocate until your claim about "Fragmenting" What exactly is so bad about competition?
- blueyes 9y agoWhat is so bad about standardization?
- machineman44 9y agoWhy AWS and Microsoft? Why not Amazon and Microsoft?