[hyperopt]

The Cloud Machine Learning service is one that I'm highly anticipating. Setting up arbitrary cloud machines for training models is a mess right now. I think if Google sets it up correctly, it could be a game changer for ML research for the rest of us. Especially if they can undercut AWS's GPU instances on cost per unit of performance through specialized hardware. I don't think the coinciding releases/announcements of TensorFlow, Cloud ML, and now this are an accident. There is something brewing and I think it's going to be big.

[visarga]

I'd love to have a place to experiment cheaply but still not be required to invest 2-3K$ in it.

[hyperopt]

It doesn't just need to be a place to experiment cheaply. Many companies building software around ML techniques still rent time on EC2. Unless you are training models 24/7 and have your machines located in a very cost efficient location in terms of power/cooling, It's probably better for your training to be done in the cloud. It think very few use cases fall into the latter category.