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The point is that as awesome as this repo is it doesn't do much to ween the "ML folks" off of Python since it doesn't provide the flexibility and GPU support th
by jebarker 3y ago
The point is that as awesome as this repo is it doesn't do much to ween the "ML folks" off of Python since it doesn't provide the flexibility and GPU support that people designing and training DL systems rely on.
- waynecochran 3y agoI’m just encouraged when I see ML libraries not using Python w its environment kludges. Just a step in the right direction.
- jebarker 3y agoI don't disagree that Python environments are a mess. I'm actually a developer on quite a prominent large scale neural network training library and a DL researcher that uses said library. With my developer hat on I like to have minimal dependencies and keep Python scripting as decoupled as possible from the CUDA C++ implementation. With my researcher hat on I don't want to be slowed down by C++ development every time I want to change my model or training pipeline. At least for me, C++ development is slower and more error prone than modifying Python. Obviously doing any heavy lifting in Python is a bad idea. But as a scripting language I think it's good, especially if you keep the environment simple. I don't think the answer for DL training is to dump Python entirely and start over in pure C/C++/Rust/Julia/whatever. Learning C/C++ is too big of an ask for everyone working on the model design and training side and it would slow down progress significantly - most of that work is actually data munging and targeted model tweaks. But I do think there's still a lot that can be done to decouple Python from the underlying engine and yield networks where inference can be run in a minimal dependency environment. There's lots of great people working on all these things.