
MILA and the future of Theano - shagunsodhani
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/theano-users/7Poq8BZutbY
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jxramos
I find myself very impressed with the humility of the group taking a bow at
the right time.

This is the crux of the matter it would seem: "Even with the increasing
support of external contributions from industry and academia, maintaining an
older code base and keeping up with competitors has come in the way of
innovation."

Very mature move Theano team, you all did a great job and raised the bar at
your peak with the solid innovations that became standard as you identified.
Best wishes.

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pesenti
Reminds me of Chrome. Lots of competing alternatives. Google comes late yet
still manage to take over the market organically very quickly by producing a
superior and more robust alternative.

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alexasmyths
" by producing a superior and more robust alternative."

In a commodity market - those with brand and distribution will win.

Chrome isn't really that much better than others. It may be in some areas, not
in others.

But when the 'company that owns the web' is promoting it, they can get any
number of downloads they chose to as long as the product is competitive.

And distribution is one thing, brands have incredible power - even with 'we HN
readers' who should kind of know better.

~~~
zeroxfe
> Chrome isn't really that much better than others.

The point is that it was much better than the others when it came out. It
spurred the competition into actually competing. (If you remember, IE had >80%
of the market at the time, and was horrendous.)

~~~
dnautics
I don't know why this is being downvoted. I moved to chrome because ff
performance was abysmal (and moved back when Chrome's v8 jit kept taking 100%
cpu and locking my Linux laptop)

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jsweojtj
I'm curious what will happen with PyMC... incorporate another library? Is
there an easily swappable library that does what Theano does?

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make3
Tensorflow does everything Theano does, but with the backing of the big G.
That's basically why Theano is being sunsetted.

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diab0lic
As I understand it Tensorflow does not handle a large number of variables very
well[0], which is the killer feature of NUTS in pymc3. This makes it a bit of
a non-starter for pymc3.

[0] [https://github.com/pymc-devs/pymc3/issues/1650](https://github.com/pymc-
devs/pymc3/issues/1650)

~~~
shoyer
That comment states that TensorFlow does not handle a large number of
_operations_ well, not a large number of variables. There's a large difference
between those statements :). But yes, the general point is correct, especially
for models that do not use many matrix multiplications.

~~~
diab0lic
Oops! Right you are. I just recalled that there was some issue with a large
number of <insert important item for MCMC here>. I should have reread the
threat before linking it.

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nohat
I'm actually nostalgic despite not using Theano for all that long. Theano
really was groundbreaking and excellent, though, like many, I've moved on.
Thanks to the developers!

~~~
jostmey
EDIT:

Theano inspired TensorFlow, Pytorch, ect ect. That there are so many imitators
is a complement to Theano.

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jszymborski
Can't say I'm not sad to hear this... I've always much preferred the Theano
API. IMHO, the way you have to explicitly build the graph in Tensorflow is
cumbersome, compared to how it automagically happens behind the scenes in
Theano. The code to simply multiply a couple of matrices, for example, reads
much nicer in th than tf.

Annyywhoo, better brush up on TensorFlow I guess.

~~~
JustFinishedBSG
You should give PyTorch a try

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stuaxo
First time I've looked up what it is, looks like it's quite useful - I'd
imagine the community will keep patching it.

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lotusbar
RIP

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azinman2
I originally misread this as Theranos and thought well duh, but oddly enough
Theranos seems to have outlived Theano!

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jwilk
Please use the original title ("MILA and the future of Theano").

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jonstokes
Yes, this. The seemingly increasing HN practice of rewriting submission titles
and headlines strikes me as the ultimate in IT support nerd "just move"-ism.

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mintplant
I disagree, the original title is too vague. Perhaps "MILA to stop working on
Theano".

~~~
jonstokes
The original title is less precise, but it's not even remotely inaccurate or
even "vague" by any reasonable definition of the term.

If you want to know about the future of Theano, that tells you about it.

If a title is misleading clickbait, then sure, fix it. But if you're making
subjective judgment calls about whether you think the level of imprecision is
appropriate or not, and so on, that's way over the line.

Again, the original title is 100% appropriate for the post, because it
describes exactly what the post lays out. It may not be as precise as you
personally want it, but this is how the author chose to package it and that
should be respected.

