New ask Hacker News story: You Can't Have a Free Software AI Stack

You Can't Have a Free Software AI Stack
4 by Vox_Leone | 5 comments on Hacker News.
A creeping crisis in free software? You've probably noticed by now that it's not possible to build a complete AI stack with free software. You can start building your dataset with free tools, in house, but soon you will run into difficulties with dataset annotation and model training. If your work is in CV area (my case) you can choose manual labeling with (merely) Open Source tools, or use a backend to automate the task [Tensorflow, PyTorch, JAX, etc., all proprietary]. Image annotation tools like [often require] working by pulling images from the cloud rather than your workstation. Then you soon find yourself making an account with Microsoft, Google or Amazon. Are you a genius with plenty of time to do everything on your premises? You won't escape Nvidia's [GeForce] or Intel's [Arc] tentacles. Then you go back to Tensorflow/PyTorch/OpenCV/Nvidia/Intel to train and put your model into production… You get the idea. Will there be a place for free software in AI?

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