In that case then what is the added value compared to Mahout, the Hadoop-based ML framework? I'm always extremely skeptical of such initiatives, because ML is

In that case then what is the added value compared to Mahout, the Hadoop-based ML framework? I'm always extremely skeptical of such initiatives, because ML is not a magical black box where you put your data in one end and you get results on the other end. Automating the trivial parts of ML, ie. providing an API to a ML library, is a week-end project, but that in itself is useless. If you don't automate the hard parts of ML, such as feature engineering, then you're not providing any value at all.