Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by reubenmorais 2658 days ago
The "Making it Work, On-device" paragraph makes it seem like TensorFlow Lite will easily get your model running fast on-device, but in reality RNNs aren't currently supported by the TFLite Converter and the TFLiteLSTMCell example is super slow for training, so this is actually based on proprietary code not available to mere mortals using open source TensorFlow. If you were to actually try reproducing this work, you'd have to use several workarounds, dig deep into the TensorFlow source code, and possibly still end up with a suboptimal TFLite model.

Don't get me wrong, in terms of deployability and flexibility for production usage, TensorFlow/TFLite is really good, specially compared to other frameworks, but Google tends to oversell the abilities of open-source TensorFlow significantly in their marketing material, and you only find out when you go and try doing it yourself.
2 comments
lawrenceyan 2658 days ago
For industry/real world work, TensorFlow is best in class. It is far superior to any other existing framework. I agree that there are always areas for improvement, but the way you worded your comment makes it almost sound like TF is pretty subpar compared to other offerings.

The reality is more, TensorFlow is really the only option you have if you don’t want to build everything from scratch again. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, well at least it’s because TensorFlow is actually a good product and not because Google is preventing others from building their own / pushing others down.

link
ru999gol 2658 days ago
what are you even talking about, tf is a mess. pytorch, mxnet, caffee2, etc. are all superior fameworks
link
lawrenceyan 2644 days ago
For research and/or hobbyist machine learning I agree. For real world production use cases, you use TensorFlow.
link
perone 2658 days ago
That is an important point, Google is the master of releasing things in half, this was a common practice in Tensorflow since the initial release, they basically removed a lot of things to release it and it became a Frankenstein base of code. Bazel is another example, inside Google it works amazingly, but the open source project is a pain in the ass.
link