autodistill VS materialize

Roboflow | Open Source Software Engineer, Web Designer / Developer, and more. | Full-time (Remote, SF, NYC) | https://roboflow.com/careers?ref=whoishiring0224

Roboflow is the fastest way to use computer vision in production. We help developers give their software the sense of sight. Our end-to-end platform[1] provides tooling for image collection, annotation, dataset exploration and curation, training, and deployment.

Over 250k engineers (including engineers from 2/3 Fortune 100 companies) build with Roboflow. We now host the largest collection of open source computer vision datasets and pre-trained models[2]. We are pushing forward the CV ecosystem with open source projects like Autodistill[3] and Supervision[4]. And we've built one of the most comprehensive resources for software engineers to learn to use computer vision with our popular blog[5] and YouTube channel[6].

We have several openings available but are primarily looking for strong technical generalists who want to help us democratize computer vision and like to wear many hats and have an outsized impact. Our engineering culture is built on a foundation of autonomy & we don't consider an engineer fully ramped until they can "choose their own loss function". At Roboflow, engineers aren't just responsible for building things but also for helping us figure out what we should build next. We're builders & problem solvers; not just coders. (For this reason we also especially love hiring past and future founders.)

We're currently hiring full-stack engineers for our ML and web platform teams, a web developer to bridge our product and marketing teams, several technical roles on the sales & field engineering teams, and our first applied machine learning researcher to help push forward the state of the art in computer vision.

[1]: https://roboflow.com/?ref=whoishiring0224

[2]: https://roboflow.com/universe?ref=whoishiring0224

[3]: https://github.com/autodistill/autodistill

[4]: https://github.com/roboflow/supervision

[5]: https://blog.roboflow.com/?ref=whoishiring0224

[6]: https://www.youtube.com/@Roboflow

The places in which a vision model is deployed are different than that of a language model.

A vision model may be deployed on cameras without an internet connection, with data retrieved later; a vision model may be used on camera streams in a factory; sports broadcasts on which you need low latency. In many cases, real-time -- or close to real-time -- performance is needed.

Fine-tuned models can deliver the requisite performance for vision tasks with relatively low computational power compared to the LLM equivalent. The weights are small relative to LLM weights.

LLMs are often deployed via API. This is practical for some vision applications (i.e. bulk processing), but for many use cases not being able to run on the edge is a dealbreaker.

Foundation models certainly have a place.

CLIP, for example, works fast, and may be used for a task like classification on videos. Where I see opportunity right now is in using foundation models to train fine-tuned models. The foundation model acts as an automatic labeling tool, then you can use that model to get your dataset. (Disclosure: I co-maintain a Python package that lets you do this, Autodistill -- https://github.com/autodistill/autodistill).

SAM (segmentation), CLIP (embeddings, classification), Grounding DINO (zero-shot object detection) in particular have a myriad of use cases, one of which is automated labeling.

I'm looking forward to seeing foundation models improve for all the opportunities that will bring!

Autodistill

Thanks for the suggestion! Definitely agree, we’ve seen that work extremely well for Supervision[1] and Autodistill, some of our other open source projects.

There’s still a lot of polish like this we need to do; we’ve spent most of our effort cleaning up the code and documentation to prep for open sourcing the repo.

Next step is improving the usability of the pip pathway (that interface was just added; the http server was all we had for internal use). Then we’re going to focus on improving the content and expanding the models it supports.

[1] https://github.com/roboflow/supervision

[2] https://github.com/autodistill/autodistill

Roboflow | Multiple Roles | Full-time (Remote, SF, NYC) | https://roboflow.com/careers?ref=whoishiring0823

Roboflow is the fastest way to use computer vision in production. We help developers give their software the sense of sight. Our end-to-end platform[1] provides tooling for image collection, annotation, dataset exploration and curation, training, and deployment.

Over 250k engineers (including engineers from 2/3 Fortune 100 companies) build with Roboflow. We now host the largest collection of open source computer vision datasets and pre-trained models[2]. We are pushing forward the CV ecosystem with open source projects like Autodistill[3] and Supervision[4]. And we've built one of the most comprehensive resources for software engineers to learn to use computer vision with our popular blog[5] and YouTube channel[6].

We have several openings available, but are primarily looking for strong technical generalists who want to help us democratize computer vision and like to wear many hats and have an outsized impact. Our engineering culture is built on a foundation of autonomy & we don't consider an engineer fully ramped until they can "choose their own loss function". At Roboflow, engineers aren't just responsible for building things but also for helping figure out what we should build next. We're builders & problem solvers; not just coders. (For this reason we also especially love hiring past and future founders.)

We're currently hiring full-stack engineers for our ML and web platform teams, a web developer to bridge our product and marketing teams, several technical roles on the sales & field engineering teams, and our first applied machine learning researcher to help push forward the state of the art in computer vision.

[1]: https://roboflow.com/?ref=whoishiring0823

[2]: https://roboflow.com/universe?ref=whoishiring0823

[3]: https://github.com/autodistill/autodistill

[4]: https://github.com/roboflow/supervision

[5]: https://blog.roboflow.com/?ref=whoishiring0823

[6]: https://www.youtube.com/@Roboflow

> Their SKILL tool involves a set of algorithms that make the process go much faster, they said, because the agents learn at the same time in parallel. Their research showed if 102 agents each learn one task and then share, the amount of time needed is reduced by a factor of 101.5 after accounting for the necessary communications and knowledge consolidation among agents.

This is a really interesting idea. It's like the reverse of knowledge distillation (which I've been thinking about a lot[1]) where you have one giant model that knows a lot about a lot & you use that model to train smaller, faster models that know a lot about a little.

Instead, you if you could train a lot of models that know a lot about a little (which is a lot less computationally intensive because the problem space is so confined) and combine them into a generalized model, that'd be hugely beneficial.

Unfortunately, after a bit of digging into the paper & Github repo[2], this doesn't seem to be what's happening at all.

> The code will learn 102 small and separte heads(either a linear head or a linear head with a task bias) for each tasks respectively in order. This step can be parallized on multiple GPUS with one task per GPU. The heads will be saved in the weight folder. After that, the code will learn a task mapper(Either using GMMC or Mahalanobis) to distinguish image task-wisely. Then, all images will be evaluated in the same time without a task label.

So the knowledge isn't being combined (and the agents aren't learning from each other) into a generalized model. They're just training a bunch of independent models for specific tasks & adding a model-selection step that maps an image to the most relevant "expert". My guess is you could do the same thing using CLIP vectors as the routing method to supervised models trained on specific datasets (we found that datasets largely live in distinct regions of CLIP-space[3]).

[1] https://github.com/autodistill/autodistill

[2] https://github.com/gyhandy/Shared-Knowledge-Lifelong-Learnin...

[3] https://www.rf100.org

[2] https://materialize.com/

To fully leverage the data is the new oil concept, companies require a special database designed to manage vast amounts of data instantly. This need has led to different database forms, including NoSQL databases, vector databases, time-series databases, graph databases, in-memory databases, and in-memory data grids. Recent years have seen the rise of cloud-based streaming databases such as RisingWave, Materialize, DeltaStream, and TimePlus. While they each have distinct commercial and technical approaches, their overarching goal remains consistent: to offer users cloud-based streaming database services.

> Materialize no longer provide the latest code as an open-source software that you can download and try. It turned from a single binary design to cloud-only micro-service

Materialize CTO here. Just wanted to clarify that Materialize has always been source available, not OSS. Since our initial release in 2020, we've been licensed under the Business Source License (BSL), like MariaDB and CockroachDB. Under the BSL, each release does eventually transition to Apache 2.0, four years after its initial release.

Our core codebase is absolutely still publicly available on GitHub [0], and our developer guide for building and running Materialize on your own machine is still public [1].

It is true that we substantially rearchitected Materialize in 2022 to be more "cloud-native". Our new cloud offering offers horizontal scalability and fault tolerance—our two most requested features in the single-binary days. I wouldn't call the new architecture a microservices design though! There are only 2-3 services, each quite substantial, in the new architecture (loosely: a compute service, an orchestration service, and, soon, a load balancing service).

We do push folks to sign up for a free trial of our hosted cloud offering [2] these days, rather than trying to start off by running things locally, as we generally want folks' first impression of Materialize to be of the version that we support for production use cases. A all-in-one single machine Docker image does still exist, if you know where to look, but it's very much use-at-your-own-risk, and we don't recommend using it for anything serious, but it's there to support e.g. academic work that wants to evaluate Materialize's capabilities to incrementally maintain recursive SQL queries.

If folks have questions about Materialize, we've got a lively community Slack [3] where you can connect directly with our product and engineering teams.

[0]: https://github.com/MaterializeInc/materialize/tree/main

Some recent solutions to this problem include Differential Dataflow and Materialize. It would be neat if postgres adopted something similar for live-updating materialized views.

https://github.com/timelydataflow/differential-dataflow

https://materialize.com/

Materialize | Full-Time | NYC Office or Remote | https://materialize.com

Materialize is an Operational Data Warehouse: A cloud data warehouse with streaming internals, built for work that needs action on what’s happening right now. Keep the familiar SQL, keep the proven architecture of cloud warehouses but swap the decades-old batch computation model for an efficient incremental engine to get complex queries that are always up-to-date.

Materialize is the operational data warehouse built from the ground up to meet the needs of modern data products: Fresh, Correct, Scalable — all in a familiar SQL UI.

Senior/Staff Product Manager - https://grnh.se/69754ebf4us

Senior Frontend Engineer - https://grnh.se/7010bdb64us

===

Investors include Redpoint, Lightspeed and Kleiner Perkins.

Materialize | EM (Compute), Senior PM | New York, New York | https://materialize.com/

You shouldn't have to throw away the database to build with fast-changing data. Keep the familiar SQL, keep the proven architecture of cloud warehouses, but swap the decades-old batch computation model for an efficient incremental engine to get complex queries that are always up-to-date.

That is Materialize, the only true SQL streaming database built from the ground up to meet the needs of modern data products: Fresh, Correct, Scalable — all in a familiar SQL UI.

Engineering Manager, Compute - https://grnh.se/4e14099f4us

Senior Product Manager - https://grnh.se/587c36804us

VP of Marketing - https://grnh.se/9caac4b04us

How does it compare to https://materialize.com/ ?