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>And all of them will soon be backed using Tensorflow Swift Lol at this. It's ~5 years before S4TF has feature parity with TF let alone pytorch. I watch their
by throwlaplace 7y ago
>And all of them will soon be backed using Tensorflow Swift
Lol at this. It's ~5 years before S4TF has feature parity with TF let alone pytorch. I watch their design meetings almost every Friday (they're public) and not only is the core autodiff runtime nowhere near 1.0 (just a couple of weeks ago they were talking about replacing their bespoke system with XLA) there's almost no differentiable function type library (nn.functional). Not to mention ecosystem (there are probably, at most, 20 people, including the S4TF team, consistently using S4TF). This is not to say that they're not doing great work but that's it's far off.
Edit: I forgot to also say they're going through the Swift evolution process (since they're building the autodiff into the Swift compiler) and it's completely unknown whether it'll be accepted. I have no idea what will happen to the project if it doesn't but if they end up having to maintain their own Swift runtime then S4TF is dead in the water because no one will be comfortable deploying two runtimes and even then no one will trust Google to maintain.
- justicezyx 7y agoHow can I audit the Friday design meeting?
- asparagui 7y agohttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fm56p5rV1t2Euh6WLtBFKGqI43ozC3EIjReyLk-LCLU/edit#heading=h.s0dsh2pzge57 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fm56p5rV1t2Euh6WLtBFKGqI...
- asparagui 7y agoAs one of those 20 people, I feel like I'm in good company! Five years is pessimistic. The core library is still in a state of flux, but the team is getting the fundamentals hammered out. Once the foundation is in place, adding higher level apis should be relatively straightforward. Re: XLA/MLIR, s4tf is actively trying to coordinate with other groups within google. Whatever short term losses there are in time/energy will be paid off down the road when the project can piggyback off other people's progress. Finally, while the swift evolution process isn't going as quickly as would be desired, the changes needed to merge the tensorflow branch have been identified and are being worked on. It's just a matter of time till the two projects are in sync.
- sandGorgon 7y agoThank you for your work. Although I still wish you guys had done Kotlin instead of Swift. I haven't seen people love a language without evangelism like Kotlin. And you already had the world's biggest ecosystem (because of Android). And Kotlin native is pretty good. i daresay you would have had better control of the compiler there.