
Ask HN: Machine Learning Training as a Service? - fyquah95
Does such a service exist? I am thinking along the lines of:<p>- write a model like you normally would (in tensorflow, for eg) with some loose predefined format (eg: model must be returned by model.py#model and must be an instance of something)
- git push
- trains the model on a cloud service for a small fee
- Provides useful graphs on training epoch &#x2F; loss &#x2F; error &#x2F; accuracy
- (Optional) Host machine learning APIs<p>I used Microsoft Azure at some point, but found it quite complex to setup and works well only for well-known models only. I.e: If i want to build a custom neural net, things gets messy and confusing.<p>It&#x27;d be useful to have such a service (or something that achieves a similar purpose). I have only a laptop that I carry around all the time, so it&#x27;d be infeasible for me to train a model on it.<p>EDIT: Update title
======
brudgers
To me, this seems like more of consultancy type business than a SaaS. The
reason being the logistics of moving meaningful data sets to the location of
the compute are much more difficult than moving compute to the location of the
data as data set size becomes more interesting.

The other thing is that the competition for ML SaaS is Google and Microsoft
and maybe Amazon. They're able to apply ML to the logistics of ML SaaS and are
competing on pricing in a commodity model. That's probably not an ideal market
for a small company to pursue.

Good luck.

------
gonber
I once setup a genetic algorithm running in Heroku. See
[https://minme.herokuapp.com/](https://minme.herokuapp.com/). It is quite
simple to build if you use Flask for the API and Python for the machine
learning in the backend.

So, to answer your question, such a service could be built on top of Heroku.
I'm just not sure if Heroku can provide the performance you're looking for.

~~~
fyquah95
I rephrased the question to make my intend clearer. I was referring to some
sort of service like heroku, but Optimization as a Service sounds like the
thing i am looking for.

