A platform for developing generative AI solutions and custom copilots. Azure AI Studio includes catalog of models from OpenAI, Hugging Face, and Meta, that can be applied over in-house data. It is intended for professional software developers—including cloud architects and technical decision-makers—who want to create generative AI applications and custom copilot experiences.
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TensorFlow
Score 7.7 out of 10
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TensorFlow is an open-source machine learning software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. It was originally developed by Google.
I am deploying a lot of pipelines and making a lot of variants of these pipeline segments, like different types of vector search techniques. The simple way to mix and fix these segments to run the whole pipelines in notebooks options are big overhead killer. The playground which provides a test sandbox helps a lot to evaluate LMs if they are the best fit for our use-case even before deploying and startup with the costing angle.
TensorFlow is great for most deep learning purposes. This is especially true in two domains: 1. Computer vision: image classification, object detection and image generation via generative adversarial networks 2. Natural language processing: text classification and generation. The good community support often means that a lot of off-the-shelf models can be used to prove a concept or test an idea quickly. That, and Google's promotion of Colab means that ideas can be shared quite freely. Training, visualizing and debugging models is very easy in TensorFlow, compared to other platforms (especially the good old Caffe days). In terms of productionizing, it's a bit of a mixed bag. In our case, most of our feature building is performed via Apache Spark. This means having to convert Parquet (columnar optimized) files to a TensorFlow friendly format i.e., protobufs. The lack of good JVM bindings mean that our projects end up being a mix of Python and Scala. This makes it hard to reuse some of the tooling and support we wrote in Scala. This is where MXNet shines better (though its Scala API could do with more work).
Wide Catalog of Models is a beautiful feature for all who want to evaluate a lot of models before proceeding with any client use case for the best performance.
Playground for testing and evaluating visual comparisons on so many metrics like latency, cost, and output time.
Integration with other Cloud services, this makes the full complete solutioning and vision complete, from storage to compute.
Model Catalog can have a feature to show basic compute and the cost of running the model on that compute. With latency metrics, I generally need to do a lot of research before losing some dollars on deployment on hit and trials.
Documentation generator for pipelines deployed in notebooks, generally developers use notebooks for experimentation, where logging them can be a big overhead.
Theano is perhaps a bit faster and eats up less memory than TensorFlow on a given GPU, perhaps due to element-wise ops. Tensorflow wins for multi-GPU and “compilation” time.
Microsoft Foundry includes the existing AI Services. It's quite literally Cognitive Services under the hood, so in that sense, if you're building a new "AI app" today where you would have deployed an AI Services Account, you can deploy Microsoft Foundry instead. The side benefit of that is that Foundry also includes model deployments, and more than just the OpenAI models. So, it removes the need for deploying a separate Azure OpenAI Service in some circumstances. Then finally it has agent capabilities too. So, if you're developing and deploying agents as part of your solution (which usually interface with a model) then you can do that from there as well. Effectively it's meant to be a one-stop-shop for all things AI, just like Fabric is for data.
Community support for TensorFlow is great. There's a huge community that truly loves the platform and there are many examples of development in TensorFlow. Often, when a new good technique is published, there will be a TensorFlow implementation not long after. This makes it quick to ally the latest techniques from academia straight to production-grade systems. Tooling around TensorFlow is also good. TensorBoard has been such a useful tool, I can't imagine how hard it would be to debug a deep neural network gone wrong without TensorBoard.
Azure AI Studio were the pioneers of DevOPs, so MLOPs feels quite a bit better on this platform than Google. Azure brought OpenAI into the system which made the Organization to shift from any other platform to Azure AI Studio.
Keras is built on top of TensorFlow, but it is much simpler to use and more Python style friendly, so if you don't want to focus on too many details or control and not focus on some advanced features, Keras is one of the best options, but as far as if you want to dig into more, for sure TensorFlow is the right choice
Onboarding a team member for the codebase is slightly slower, almost 20% slower. As codebase sharing is like a git pull from repos, whereas here we need to provide all the access.
I have experienced scaling up speed almost 50% faster as per compared with on-prem solutions. ML models are faster deployed in terms of on-prem deployments.
10 times better Azure AI Studio for cost visibility over any other solution.
