txtai VS Tribuo

I tend to agree with this sentiment. Many junior devs and/or those in college want to contribute. Then they feel entitled to merge a PR that they worked hard on often without guidance. I'm all for working with people but projects have standards and not all ideas make sense. In many cases, especially with commercial open source, the project is the base of a companies identity. So it's not just for drive-by ideas to pad a resume or finish a school project.

For those who do want to do this, I'd recommend writing an issue and/or reaching out to the developers to engage in a dialogue. This takes work but it will increase the likelihood of a PR being merged.

Disclaimer: I'm the primary developer of txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai), an open-source vector database + RAG framework

txtai is an all-in-one embeddings database for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows.

Bootstrapping only works if you have the runway to do it and you don't feel the need to grow fast.

With NeuML (https://neuml.com), I've went the bootstrapping route. I've been able to build a fairly successful open source project (txtai 6K stars https://github.com/neuml/txtai) and a revenue positive company. It's a "live within your means" strategy.

VC funding can have a snowball effect where you need more and more. Then you're in the loop of needing funding rounds to survive. The hope is someday you're acquired or start turning a profit.

I would say both have their pros and cons. Not all ideas have the luxury of time.

I agree that in many cases people are puffing their feathers to try to be something they're not (at least not yet). Some believe in the fake it until you make it mentality.

With NeuML (https://neuml.com), the website is a simple HTML page. On social media, I'm honest about what NeuML is, that I'm in my 40s with a family and not striving to be the next Steve Jobs. I've been able to build a fairly successful open source project (txtai 6K stars https://github.com/neuml/txtai) and a revenue positive company. For me, authenticity and being genuine is most important. I would say that being genuine has been way more of an asset than liability.

I'll add txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai) to the list.

There is still plenty of room for innovation in this space. Just need to focus on the right projects that are innovating and not the ones (re)working on problems solved in 2020/2021.

txtai is an all-in-one embeddings database for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows.

Nice project! I've long used Tika for document parsing given it's maturity and wide number of formats supported. The XHTML output helps with chunking documents for RAG.

Here's a couple examples:

- https://neuml.hashnode.dev/build-rag-pipelines-with-txtai

- https://neuml.hashnode.dev/extract-text-from-documents

Disclaimer: I'm the primary author of txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai).

If you're interested in graphs + RAG and want an alternate approach, txtai has a semantic graph component.

https://neuml.hashnode.dev/introducing-the-semantic-graph

https://github.com/neuml/txtai

Disclaimer: I'm the primary author of txtai

It seems to have been picked up by Eclipse and there is also Oracle Labs' Tribuo and Deep Java Library. All seem active, but I don't know much about any of them. I agree it's probably best to follow the community and use a more popular tool like PyTorch.

We built model & data provenance into our open source ML library, though it's admittedly not the W3C PROV standard. There were a few gaps in it until we built an automated reproducibility system on top of it, but now it's pretty solid for all the algorithms we implement. Unfortunately some of the things we wrap (notably TensorFlow) aren't reproducible enough due to some unfixed bugs. There's an overview of the provenance system in this reprise of the JavaOne talk I gave here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXOMjq2OS_c. The library is on GitHub - https://github.com/oracle/tribuo.

Although it may be a bit more work, you can do both machine learning and AI in Java. If you are doing deep learning, you can use DeepJavaLibrary (I do work on this one at Amazon). If you are looking for other ML algorithms, I have seen Smile, Tribuo, or some around Spark.

We've been developing Tribuo on Github for two years now, MS are very actively developing ONNX Runtime (and the Java layer is fairly thin and wrapped over the same C API they use for node.js and C#), and things like XGBoost and LibSVM have been around for many years and the Java bits are developed in tree with the rest of the code so updated along with it. Amazon have a team of people working on DJL, though you'd have to ask them what their plans are.

FWIW, Oracle actually did release a Java ML library - https://github.com/oracle/tribuo.

Tribuo (tribuo.org, github.com/oracle/tribuo). ONNX export support is there for 2 models at the moment in main, there's a PR for factorization machines which supports ONNX export, and we plan to add another couple of models and maybe ensembles before the upcoming release. Plus I need to write a tutorial on how it all works, but you can check the tests in the meantime.

You can do ML & data science in Java (full disclosure: I help run TensorFlow-Java, I maintain ONNX Runtime's Java interface, and I'm the lead developer on Oracle Labs' Java ML library Tribuo, so I'm pretty biased). It tends not to be as favoured in research, though I've published academic ML papers which used Java implementations. People do deploy ML models quite a bit in Java in industry.

It might be worth having a look at the ONNX Runtime Java API in addition to TF-Java, it'll let you deploy the rest of the HuggingFace pytorch models that don't have TF equivalents. I built the Java API a few years ago, and it's now a supported part of the ONNX Runtime project. We use it in Tribuo to provide one of our text feature embedding classes (BERTFeatureExtractor).

The IJava notebook kernel works pretty well for data science on top of Java. We use it in Tribuo to write all our tutorials, and if you've got the jar file in the right folder everything is runnable. For example, this is our intro classification tutorial - https://github.com/oracle/tribuo/blob/main/tutorials/irises-tribuo-v4.ipynb.