What are your opinions on machine learning platforms like AWS SageMaker and Azure Machine Learning?
Machine learning for all developers with edX and Amazon SageMaker | Amazon Web Services
I kind of don't like the way a lot of the material around SageMaker is marketed. I really think it's misleading, although maybe not intentionally so.
Most of the material talks about something to effect of "machine learning for developers." I disagree with that statement. Yes, SageMaker allows for easier creation, training, and deployment of machine learning models. However, it conveys none of the subject matter expertise around machine learning. When I see this, I just get worried about the proliferation of bad models with fundamental problems like data leakage. After all, you pick up the tensorflow API and that's all there is to this ML stuff, right?!
The better way to market this product in terms of where it fits in the industry is that Amazon provides the data platform so that your data scientists don't also have to be engineers (DevOps or ML). That fits a much better market need. However, that's also a smaller potential market, so I can understand why they're riding the hype train of software engineers wanting to dabble with ML.
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Any machine learning novices use SageMaker to do something useful?
It's mostly for research still, in my eyes. If you want to play, first find a public dataset, or maybe some large amount of data you already have; this will be your training data. Then choose a column from your data that you would like to predict the value of in relation to the other columns in each row. You have just come up with an idea for your own ML model that you could build with TensorFlow in Sagemaker.
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