Amazon Deep Learning AMIs vs. Pytorch

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

They have created Pytorch Lightening on top of Pytorch to make the life of Data Scientists easy so that they can use complex models they need with just a few lines of code, so it's becoming popular. As compared to TensorFlow(Keras), where we can create custom neural networks by just adding layers, it's slightly complicated in Pytorch.

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

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• flexibility
• Clean code, close to the algorithm.
• Fast
• Handles GPUs, multiple GPUs on a single machine, CPUs, and Mac.
• Versatile, can work efficiently on text/audio/image/tabular datasets.

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• 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

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• Since pythonic if developing an app with pytorch as backend the response can be substantially slow and support is less compares to Tensorflow

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The big advantage of PyTorch is how close it is to the algorithm. Oftentimes, it is easier to read Pytorch code than a given paper directly. I particularly like the object-oriented approach in model definition; it makes things very clean and easy to teach to software engineers.

Incentivized

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

Pytorch is very, very simple compared to TensorFlow. Simple to install, less dependency issues, and very small learning curve. TensorFlow is very much optimised for robust deployment but very complicated to train simple models and play around with the loss functions. It needs a lot of juggling around with the documentation. The research community also prefers PyTorch, so it becomes easy to find solutions to most of the problems. Keras is very simple and good for learning ML / DL. But when going deep into research or building some product that requires a lot of tweaks and experimentation, Keras is not suitable for that. May be good for proving some hypotheses but not good for rigorous experimentation with complex models.

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

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• The ability to make models as never before
• Being able to control the bias of models was not done before the arrival of Pytorch in our company

Incentivized