Vertex AI vs. TensorFlow

We needed to build some ML models and Vertex AI is one such place where all the functionalities are consolidated for model deployment, tweaking and monitoring. And although it is costly, it is compatible with google cloud services and is scalable which makes it the perfect tool for us.

Incentivized

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).

Incentivized

• Vertex AI comes with support for LOTs of LLMs out of the box
• MLOps tools are available that help to standardize operational aspects
• Document AI is an out of the box feature that works just perfectly for our use cases of automating lots to tedious data extraction tasks from images as well as papers

Incentivized

• A vast library of functions for all kinds of tasks - Text, Images, Tabular, Video etc.
• Amazing community helps developers obtain knowledge faster and get unblocked in this active development space.
• Integration of high-level libraries like Keras and Estimators make it really simple for a beginner to get started with neural network based models.

Incentivized

• Customization of AutoML models - A must needed capability to be able to tweak hyperparameters and also working with different models
• Model Explainability -Providing more comprehensive explanations about how models are utilizing features could be very beneficial
• Model versioning and experiments tracking - Enhancing the versioning capability could be good for end users

Incentivized

• RNNs are still a bit lacking, compared to Theano.
• Cannot handle sequence inputs
• 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.

Support of multiple components and ease of development.

Incentivized

Vertex AI is very user friendly and it is very fast. We can spin up instances pretty quickly and it allows to work with GPU instances without much planning. Pages load up very quickly and tasks are competed pretty much in time frame. It integrates with other systems also very well.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Use of cloud for better execution power is recommended.

Incentivized

Vertex AI is much more accessible to non-developers than IBM's product. Moreover, Vertex AI integrates well with other Google products, enhancing its capabilities. A big plus is its integration with cloud storage, that allows for better management and access of data. In all honesty, it wasn't much of a difficult choice to choose Vertex AI.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• It consolidated all the functionalities in one place for AI and ML development.
• Scalable and compatible with google cloud services.
• Though we can manually allocate resources, it is still very costly.

Incentivized

• Learning is s bit difficult takes lot of time.
• Developing or implementing the whole neural network is time consuming with this, as you have to write everything.
• Once you have learned this, it make your job very easy of getting the good result.

Incentivized