This makes me worried for Apple. IBM is not a company that comes to mind when I think of cutting edge cloud services, and Watson in particular has seemed to be a pretty mediocre product with heavy marketing and gimmicks (Jeopardy and H&R Block come to mind).
Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence in their own internal abilities, and that’s not a good look.
> Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence in their own internal abilities, and that’s not a good look.
I think it's a good move. At the very least, they can learn a bit from someone else on how to run a cloud service.
Let me ask you this -- if you didn't already have the Apple hardware that was integrated with iCloud et al, would you pay money to use any of the Apple internet services? Like if they build Windows clients and you had Windows, would you pay to use any of their services?
I can't think of a single Apple service I would pay for if I wasn't on Apple hardware. And even worse, despite the free services from Apple, I will pay to use competitors that offer a worse integration, just to not use the Apple services.
I think you're missing the point of Apple's cloud services.
They exist exactly and only to make the user experience of their devices better. They don't make sense outside the Apple ecosystem, and that's how I imagine it's intended to be.
I have a mac and an iPhone and an iPad and I just want to be able to text my wife on any of them and have it work. That means contacts need to be synced, and there needs to be an answer for how the messages are synced between devices. Same with notes/calendars/etc. iCloud is hiding beneath all of it, and the whole point is that you don't see it, you just see your contacts list works everywhere you look.
I agree completely that Apple’s cloud services aren’t very compelling right now. I’m just worried that they are trying to use IBM’s cloud instead of building out their own capabilities.
If they are going to improve integration with third party services, I would love to have better integration with Google’s services, not IBM’s..
This isn't outsourcing, it is advertising. Apple and IBM have complimentary services that they've just made easier to integrate.
There is a vacuum in the Enterprise from when Blackberry was the go-to device. This smells of an in-road Apple might be taking to make itself the defacto Mobile Device for Enterprise.
IBM benefits from this by being able to market Watson services easier to App makers.
> Has IBM been relevant with anything in the past 10 years regarding technology?
You use things developed by IBM daily without even knowing it. Barcodes, credit cards, RAM, hard drives, modern microprocessors, airline travel, laser eye surgery, and even relational databases are all possible thanks to advances by IBM. Almost all nanotechnology research utilizes scanning tunneling microscopy which was invented IBM.
IBM Research is usually bleeding edge technology. They work on technology decades before it becomes mainstream. Currently they're doing research in things like High temperature superconductivity, Quantum Computing, and Nanotechnology.
IBM also develops solutions for the financial services industry and are working on Blockchain technologies for the banking system. They're doing advanced AI research. They have healthcare and geo-spatial initiatives as well.
It would make sense . They want to grow their services division so why not branch out to ML?
IBM has been struggling retaining people and their cloud efforts have been at best a distant fourth (AWS, AZURE and GCE). I tried using it and it had no advantage . At least Microsoft has a nice windows integration and UX and google has good UX and integration into Google services. AWS is the incumbent and what I personally use since I don’t trust Google and Azure doesn’t appeal to me due to my lack of need of Windows.
>Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence in their own internal abilities, and that’s not a good look.
Apple doesn't outsource their Cloud services to IBM. This story is not about that at all.
(They do use Azure and Google Cloud though, and perhaps Amazon too).
>IBM is not a company that comes to mind when I think of cutting edge cloud services
"Cloud services" is a pretty nebulous term. When it comes to ML cloud services I don't think there are any clear leaders. AWS services don't really compare to this.
Just spent a few minutes playing with the Watson Custom Model for vision flow and let's just say I am totally disappointed is an understatement, few things I noticed:
1. You first need to register an account, and to my surprise there is no command line tool or REST APIs, the entire interface is written in HTML. Hmmm, are they expecting me to specify the network structure by pressing buttons
2. Okay next, after choosing the visual model, it leads you directly to a web page with a bunch of widgets where you can add classes and negatives. To a seasoned ML engineers, this whole interface is useless. The classification has to be done at a full image level, no way to define the layers, the loss function, or any knobs to play around with the network. To an amateur, this is also very confusing. What are they expecting us to drag in to the negatives, if it's a logistic classifier, I could understand but for classifying an image, what exactly do you expect us to put?
3. Btw, to upload images, they expect .zip format, and this is where i stopped. Do they seriously think I will now export this so-called "model" to CoreML and load it to my Xcode?
If they came up with this 5 years ago I might play with it a little longer, but don't the IBM engineers keep up with what's going on at GOOGL, FB or AMZN. I can't possibly imagine anyone using this to develop iPhone apps for the purpose of image recognition, even if it's an offline flow.
Of course you can't imagine anyone using it because (a) you are not the target audience and (b) you are being deliberately contemptuous about the product because it was built by IBM.
If you simply re-read all your own points from an objective standpoint, it should be apparent that this is geared towards individuals who have minimal or no machine learning (much less deep learning) experience; but nevertheless feel they need features like custom image recognition in their application. Rather than spending time and money hiring a 'seasoned ML engineer' such as yourself, they can try this and see if it works well enough for their purposes. Everything from the HTML interface, dearth of model customization, no parameter tuning, etc. points to this use case. Yes, it will be tedious, time consuming, and perhaps a bit unintuitive at first but it will be nowhere near as difficult for them than if they were to build an equivalent data pipeline, neural network, and evaluation setup on specialized hardware using Tensorflow. From that perspective, this could be a great product for application developers.
Finally, there are tons of REST APIs that enumerate all the functionality found here. They are all part of the Watson Cloud catalog. This includes loading data, training, and deploying models. Moreover, is it really necessary to insult IBM engineers by insinuating that they haven't kept up with the broader paradigm shifts in the field? They build what they are told to build by management (just like at the Big 4).
Perhaps I'm not understanding the intent of this collaboration between Apple and IBM but I would like to think that anyone who can write/publish iOS apps should have the aptitude to spend a couple hours understand the basics of deep learning. Would you honestly use an app that was contains an image-classification model that's trained using this flow. Please enlighten me. Or am I the only person who DD'd on their product? Have you tried other web interface versions of online models trainers like SageMaker, Rekognition? Do you work for IBM?
I graduated with honours, did 3D graphics programming in the past, systems programming is one of my favourite areas, worked at few well known names internationally.
Yet I can't get my head around neural networks and related concepts.
Just because it is easy for you, don't assume the same for everyone else.
"no way to define the layers, the loss function, or any knobs to play around with the network". -- This is the point of the service - to enable the (vast group of) users who want to custom-classify images of X/Y/Z without having to understand the difference between momentum and learning rate, or hire people who do. If you do want full control of the model, you should look at Deep Learning as a Service - https://www.ibm.com/cloud/deep-learning
I think there is definitely space for improvement for 2 and 3, but then you would need to collect your own data. Are you a developer? We should talk if you're considering CoreML as we (Polarr) have ready to use, battle tested CoreML models for various computer vision purposes (email in my profile.)
I have used both CoreML and MPSCNN in the past, the pain point is typically how to translate a cloud-based model to run directly on the phone. Caffe2 to CoreML is good so far, but issue is CoreML is a black box and crashes are often not decipherable. I'm looking more in a universal flow that can port models trained in TensorFlow or PyTorch and at the same time some way to debug intermediate results. Or better yet, if there are existing mobile models that can be used is best. Just reached out!
I don't understand why most of the comment here are negative. On the bright side, being able to train a model in any sort of cloud (doesn't matter if it is Azure, Google, AWS, or IBM) and then directly create CoreML models, and iterate from model feedback, is a pretty special and unique position. It's a hybrid edge + cloud approach to running A.I. for end applications, and I do see it to benefit developers who want to roll their own models and create new applications particularly to computer vision, photography, and videos.
I remember as part of that partnership IBM released a version of their MobileFirst tooling that was identical to a previous version except it had Android support removed.
Seeking out possible moves to keep Apple on the leading edge of technology and user experience, a determined Tim Cook arrived at page 103 of his Strategic Decision Making in Information Technology textbook, and came across what some may call ancient wisdom -- such wisdom that seemed peculiarly familiar, as though it was encoded into his subconscious from birth. Left alone in center aligned bold text along the top of the page was scribed "NO ONE GETS FIRED FOR PARTNERING WITH IBM".
Tim, being the savvy executive and decision maker he will always be, concluded that the only logical choice is to make the decision which will virtually nullify his chance of getting fired. "Your legacy shall not go to waste, Steve...", he said under his breath as he picked up the phone.
Probably selective memory on my part but outside of a few research projects I cannot recall the last successful venture to come from IBM since the Space Shuttle onboard computers. (edit) also laptops when they made hardware but they sold off a lot of divisions it seems.
There is no pricing information easily available. Is it free, or are people supposed to invest time into learning, and then find out what it costs to go live?
Yes. I can imagine it because they've already done so repeatedly. The first case I can think of was Apple working with IBM on the Taligent operating system (designed to compete with what became NT and NeXTStep) circa 1988. Then the PowerPC chip at the center of Macs for years was co-developed with Apple, IBM, and Motorola, and in later years IBM supplied the actual chips. Also, the Apple Network Server machines (circa 1996) ran AIX.
Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence in their own internal abilities, and that’s not a good look.