leptonai VS server

Hello Hacker News! We're Yangqing, Xiang and JJ from lepton.ai. We are building a platform to run any AI models as easy as writing local code, and to get your favorite models in minutes. It's like container for AI, but without the hassle of actually building a docker image.

We built and contributed to some of the world's most popular AI software - PyTorch 1.0, ONNX, Caffe, etcd, Kubernetes, etc. We also managed hundreds of thousands of computers in our previous jobs. And we found that the AI software stack is usually unnecessarily complex - and we want to change that.

Imagine if you are a developer who sees a good model on github, or HuggingFace. To make it a production ready service, the current solution usually requires you to build a docker image. But think about it - I have a few python code and a few python dependencies. That sounds like a huge overhead, right?

lepton.ai is really a pythonic way to free you from such difficulties. You write a simple python scaffold around your PyTorch / TensorFlow code, and lepton launches it as a full-fledged service callable via python, javascript, or any language that understands OpenAPI. We use containers under the hood, but you don't need to worry about all the infrastructure nuts and bolts.

We have made the python library open-source at https://github.com/leptonai/leptonai/. With it, launching a common HuggingFace model is as simple as a one liner. For example, if you have a GPU, Stable Diffusion XL is as simple as:

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I am wondering what is the best / most cost-efficient way to serve llama V2. - llama.cpp (is it production ready or just for playing around?) ? - Triton inference server ? - HF text generation inference ?

For inference of CNNs, memory should really not be an issue. If it is a software engineering problem, not a hardware issue. FP16 or Int8 for weights is fine and weight size won’t increase due to the high resolution. And during inference memory used for hidden layer tensors can be reused as soon as the last consumer layer has been processed. You likely using something that is designed for training for inference and that blows up the memory requirement, or if you are using TensorRT or something like that, you need to be careful to avoid that every tasks loads their own copy of the library code into the GPU. Maybe look at https://github.com/triton-inference-server/server

I am looking for something like [Triton Inference Server](https://github.com/triton-inference-server/server) or [TFX Serving](https://www.tensorflow.org/tfx/guide/serving), but in Rust. I came across [Orkon](https://github.com/vertexclique/orkhon) which seems to be dormant and a bunch of examples off of the [Awesome-Rust-MachineLearning](https://github.com/vaaaaanquish/Awesome-Rust-MachineLearning)

You've already mentioned Seldon Core which is well worth looking at but if you're just after the raw multi-model serving aspect rather than a fully-fledged deployment framework you should maybe take a look at the individual inference servers: Triton Inference Server and MLServer both support multi-model serving for a wide variety of frameworks (and custom python models). MLServer might be a better option as it has an MLFlow runtime but only you will be able to decide that. There also might be other inference servers that do MMS that I'm not aware of.

[1] https://docs.nvidia.com/launchpad/ai/chatbot/latest/chatbot-triton-overview.html[2] https://github.com/triton-inference-server/server[3] https://neptune.ai/blog/deploying-ml-models-on-gpu-with-kyle-morris[4] https://thechief.io/c/editorial/comparison-cloud-gpu-providers/[5] https://geekflare.com/best-cloud-gpu-platforms/

"TensorFlow has the better deployment infrastructure"

Tensorflow Serving is nice in that it's so tightly integrated with Tensorflow. As usual that goes both ways. It's so tightly coupled to Tensorflow if the mlops side of the solution is using Tensorflow Serving you're going to get "trapped" in the Tensorflow ecosystem (essentially).

For pytorch models (and just about anything else) I've been really enjoying Nvidia Triton Server[0]. Of course it further entrenches Nvidia and CUDA in the space (although you can execute models CPU only) but for a deployment today and the foreseeable future you're almost certainly going to be using a CUDA stack anyway.

Triton Server is very impressive and I'm always surprised to see how relatively niche it is.

[0] - https://github.com/triton-inference-server/server