*I never like these tech-biz arguments that say, "oh it's not a real technology because it doesn't have customers." Nuclear warheads are a real technology. They don't have customers. They exist to remove all customers. The world isn't made of customers.
*With that said, this is an amusing read.
http://www.fast.ai/2017/03/17/not-commoditized-no-phd/
(...)
Why “Machine Learning As A Service” (MLaaS) is such a disappointment in practice
A general purpose machine learning API seems like a great idea, but the technology is simply not there yet. Existing APIs are too overly specified to be widely useful, or attempt to be very general and have unacceptably poor performance. I agree with Bradford Cross, former founder of Flightcaster and Prismatic and partner at Data Collective VC, who recently wrote about the failure of many AI companies to try to build products that customers need and would pay for: “It’s the attitude that those working in and around AI are now responsible for shepherding all human progress just because we’re working on something that matters. This haze of hubris blinds people to the fact that they are stuck in an echo chamber where everyone is talking about the tech trend rather than the customer needs and the economics of the businesses.” (emphasis mine)
Cross continues, “Machine Learning as a Service is an idea we’ve been seeing for nearly 10 years and it’s been failing the whole time. The bottom line on why it doesn’t work: the people that know what they’re doing just use open source, and the people that don’t will not get anything to work, ever, even with APIs. Many very smart friends have fallen into this tarpit. Those who’ve been gobbled up by bigcos as a way to beef up ML teams include Alchemy API by IBM, Saffron by Intel, and Metamind by Salesforce. Nevertheless, the allure of easy money from sticking an ML model up behind an API function doesn’t fail to continue attracting lost souls. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are all trying to sell an MLaaS layer as a component of their cloud strategy. I’ve yet to see startups or big companies use these APIs in the wild, and I see a lot of AI usage in the wild so its doubtful that its due to the small sample size of my observations.”
Is Google Cloud the answer?
Google is very poorly positioned to help democratize the field of deep learning....
