Amazon Deep Learning AMIs vs. Kortical

Amazon AMIs has been very useful for the quick setup and implementation of deep learning for data analysis which is something I have used the service for in my own research. We commonly use the service to enable students to run intensive deep learning algorithms for their assessments. This service works well in this scenario as it allows students to quickly set up a suitable environment and get started with little hassle. If you are looking to run simple, surface level deep learning algorithms (kind of contradictory statement I know) then AMI is more complicated than most will need. When it comes to teaching the basics of Machine Learning, this kind of system is unnecessary and there are other alternatives which can be used. That being said this service is a must if you are looking to run complex deep learning via the cloud.

Incentivized

Kortical is really widely applicable to many use cases, although it doesn't handle images or video it is great to help you build really great ML models without needing to plan ahead what you are going to try, you let the platform build you the best model. It is suited to beginner and more advanced data scientists as you can edit the code to narrow the search space which makes model creation more you build it without AutoML. Hosting the model behind an API that is ready to go is great as it saves so much time vs doing that dev work from scratch

• Setting up environment
• Support for different types of machines
• Perfect for Machine Learning / Deep Learning use cases
• Nvidia / Cuda / Conda support easily

Incentivized

• The NLP models results were much better than the ones that we did outside of the platform.
• It is really easy and quick to build a good model with a lot of the manual boring tasks all done automatically like one hot encoding, etc.
• Kortical shows the features and their importance for any model type as part of the platform which is great for understanding the models.

• Some aspects of the User Interface are quite confusing and activating packages can be a bit convoluted
• It can be a bit confusing to switch between frameworks for novice users

Incentivized

• It would be ideal to have Jupyter built into the platform, they say it is coming.
• Also while it is easy to use, at the start it would have been helpful to have more help guides.

Their support is great as we use Slack and we have our own channel and they always respond really quickly. Data Science support is available to help unblock you as well as dev support as we're setting up the data feeds. It would be great if there were more FAQ or self-help guides in the platform but the personal touch is also really appreciated and probably gets us there quicker anyway.

Both of these services provide similar functionality and from my experience both are top class services which cover most of your needs. I think ultimately it comes down to what you need each service for. For example Amazon DL AMIs allows for clustering by default meaning I am able to run several clustering algorithms without a problem whereas IBM Watson Studio doesn't provide this functionality. They both provide a wide range of default packages such as Amazon providing caffe-2 and IBM providing sci-kitlearn. My main point is that both are very good services which have very similar functionality, you just need to think about the costs, suitability of features and integration with other services you are using.

Incentivized

• Saves a lot of Infra Costs
• Saves a lot of time in handling environment issues
• Easy to start a new instance

Incentivized

• ROI is great as what we would spend on compute we get the AutoML for essentially the same price so it is cost neutral as Kortical comes with compute built-in.
• The results mean that we can automate so much more than our previous model so that is key to the positive ROI.
• The platform auto trains new models and lets us know when there is a better model so it has saved a lot of time so we can focus on new business problems to solve with ML.