MILA and the future of Theano

[jxramos]

I find myself very impressed with the humility of the group taking a bow at the right time.

This is the crux of the matter it would seem: "Even with the increasing support of external contributions from industry and academia, maintaining an older code base and keeping up with competitors has come in the way of innovation."

Very mature move Theano team, you all did a great job and raised the bar at your peak with the solid innovations that became standard as you identified. Best wishes.

[pesenti]

Reminds me of Chrome. Lots of competing alternatives. Google comes late yet still manage to take over the market organically very quickly by producing a superior and more robust alternative.

[clickok]

It's something of a pattern for Google. Existing products (say, Theano and Torch) were revolutionary, but had a number of pain points that were difficult to remove[0]. TensorFlow is essentially Theano without those problems, and with the guarantee of continued relevance thanks to Google's backing[1]. And of course, they reap the benefits of making it "open-source" while keeping a closed version for private use, similar to Chrome and Google Ultron.

However, I still feel kinda nostalgic for those warm summer days, writing my first autoencoder in Theano and using it to make blurry versions of photos.

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0. Theano had some truly gnarly exception tracebacks, which made it difficult to identify if you'd made a truly incompatible model or if one of the layers/operations just needed a datatype specified.

1. I wish more companies did something like this. It's not necessarily innovation, so much as having a corps of people experienced with some wondrous but unwieldy technology and then giving those people the opportunity to reimplement it "right". Maybe there are many companies that attempt it, but instead produce a clone with problems of its own? Or maybe you need someone like Jeff Dean supervising the project to make sure everything comes together?

[alexasmyths]

" by producing a superior and more robust alternative."

In a commodity market - those with brand and distribution will win.

Chrome isn't really that much better than others. It may be in some areas, not in others.

But when the 'company that owns the web' is promoting it, they can get any number of downloads they chose to as long as the product is competitive.

And distribution is one thing, brands have incredible power - even with 'we HN readers' who should kind of know better.

[aljones]

Chrome's growth was bootstrapped with very pushy ads on the highest traffic website on the internet, that typically doesn't allow ads. They also paid to bundle it with unrelated installers.

[yongjik]

Anybody else has the feeling that PyTorch is to TensorFlow what Chrome was to other browsers? I started PyTorch about a month ago and was impressed how effortless everything was compared to TF.

[nextos]

I guess this is quite natural. Once some key ideas have been laid out, it's easy for a big corp like Google (whose expertise is on software engineering & algorithms for data processing) to chip in and produce something better.

Research organizations like the University of Montreal cannot compete with that.

[m3kw9]

Try chrome on a Mac, it constantly revs up the CPU and eats way more memory than safari

[ssivark]

I think that the goals of MILA/Theano might be somewhat different from that of Mozilla/Firefox.

Mozilla aims to continuously steer the direction in which the web develops. As far as a software layer developed by an academic research group, I'm sure they will be extremely happy that they could set the agenda with early software, and now get to pass the baton to an industrially supported codebase so that they can focus on the next generation of innovative ideas.

While the dominating market share of Chrome over Firefox could be considered a battle loss for Mozilla, the maturation of Tensorflow (and other frameworks which leverage GPUs and provide a higher level interface for ML algorithms) may be considered a big win for MILA.

[r3bl]

How does a ML Python library that's shutting down remind you of Chrome?

[alkoumpa]

organically? Please, Google promoted Chrome through ads for months! -- disclaimer, I love Chrome!

[makmanalp]

Hah, that sounded almost like "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" :-)

[jsweojtj]

I'm curious what will happen with PyMC... incorporate another library? Is there an easily swappable library that does what Theano does?

[make3]

Tensorflow does everything Theano does, but with the backing of the big G. That's basically why Theano is being sunsetted.

[sammorrowdrums]

Keras is pretty cool and can already use Theano and Tensorflow as a backend.

[nohat]

I'm actually nostalgic despite not using Theano for all that long. Theano really was groundbreaking and excellent, though, like many, I've moved on. Thanks to the developers!

[jostmey]

EDIT:

Theano inspired TensorFlow, Pytorch, ect ect. That there are so many imitators is a complement to Theano.

[jszymborski]

Can't say I'm not sad to hear this... I've always much preferred the Theano API. IMHO, the way you have to explicitly build the graph in Tensorflow is cumbersome, compared to how it automagically happens behind the scenes in Theano. The code to simply multiply a couple of matrices, for example, reads much nicer in th than tf.

Annyywhoo, better brush up on TensorFlow I guess.

[JustFinishedBSG]

You should give PyTorch a try

[stuaxo]

First time I've looked up what it is, looks like it's quite useful - I'd imagine the community will keep patching it.

[lotusbar]

RIP

[azinman2]

I originally misread this as Theranos and thought well duh, but oddly enough Theranos seems to have outlived Theano!

[jwilk]

Please use the original title ("MILA and the future of Theano").

[jonstokes]

Yes, this. The seemingly increasing HN practice of rewriting submission titles and headlines strikes me as the ultimate in IT support nerd "just move"-ism.