Vertex AI on Google Cloud is an MLOps solution, used to build, deploy, and scale machine learning (ML) models with fully managed ML tools for any use case.
$0
Starting at
TensorFlow
Score 8.1 out of 10
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TensorFlow is an open-source machine learning software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. It was originally developed by Google.
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Pricing
Vertex AI
TensorFlow
Editions & Modules
Imagen model for image generation
$0.0001
Starting at
Text, chat, and code generation
$0.0001
per 1,000 characters
Text data upload, training, deployment, prediction
$0.05
per hour
Video data training and prediction
$0.462
per node hour
Image data training, deployment, and prediction
$1.375
per node hour
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Vertex AI
TensorFlow
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
Pricing is based on the Vertex AI tools and services, storage, compute, and Google Cloud resources used.
Since we have used this platforms in multiple scenarios we can confidently say that where this excels is when you want to combine free form Q&A bots with structured responses. Gemini shines through and stands tall with it's natural language model and accurate reading of knowledge base to provide the best answers to whatever prompt you can throw at it.
Whenever the problem has the demand for a neural networks based solution, Tensorflow (TF) is a great fit.
The tf.dataset API makes it really simple to create complex data pipelines in a few lines of code.
tf.estimators API abstracts all the complex computation graph creation logic making it very simple to get started.
Eager execution makes it simple to develop a TF graph as debugging the code would be like any other imperative Python program.
TF abstracts all the complexities of scaling it to multiple machines. It has various code and data distribution algorithms ready to use.
Projects like TensorBoard make monitoring the training process really easy. It also gives the ability to view embeddings without any extra code. Their What-If is extremely useful for poking and understanding a black box model. It also has tools to visualize data to quickly check for anomalies.
TF Autograph aims to covert any normal Python code into a distributed program which is quite handy to scale an existing code base.
Vertex AI comes with support for LOTs of LLMs out of the box
MLOps tools are available that help to standardize operational aspects
Document AI is an out of the box feature that works just perfectly for our use cases of automating lots to tedious data extraction tasks from images as well as papers
Data pipeline implementation is quite good, loading large amounts of data and pre-process it in an efficient way is no more issue for us
It supports all major DL algorithms and network layouts such as ConvNets, RNN, LSTMs, Word2Vec, and even the latest transformer architecture
The abstraction for the device is perfectly done and its support seamlessly for multiple GPU and even TPU will bring a lot of performance gain for enterprise scoped solution while still keep the flexibility
The TensorBoard is amazing. I haven't seen a similar thing in other frameworks on the market. It allows us to quickly understand and debug the model with the info visualization which makes understanding much better
A very supportive community, which is the key for sharing the ideas and find the quick and best solutions
It would be much better if they could provide good documentation and easy ways to understand concepts.
It is difficult to understand the concept behind for example, Tensor Graph, which takes a lot of time.
As you have to write everything, it is time consuming to write the implementation of whole neural network. It would be better if they can provide some wrapper library to make things easier.
Google is always top notch with their security and user interface performance. We use Google's entire suite in our business anyways, so using Vertex became second nature very quickly. I will say, though, that Google does need to come down on the price somewhat with their token allocation. Also, their UI is very robust, so it does require some time for training to really master it.
Community support for TensorFlow is great. There's a huge community that truly loves the platform and there are many examples of development in TensorFlow. Often, when a new good technique is published, there will be a TensorFlow implementation not long after. This makes it quick to ally the latest techniques from academia straight to production-grade systems. Tooling around TensorFlow is also good. TensorBoard has been such a useful tool, I can't imagine how hard it would be to debug a deep neural network gone wrong without TensorBoard.
Out the gate, Vertex just seemed to be more accurate on command with our prompts. We spent less time versus other platforms getting exactly what we wanted. Google's UI is way more robust, too, with how you can configure the exact settings you want when doing image generation. The other platforms do a decent job, but we've gravitated more towards using Vertex now.
Can't seem to choose any deep learning platform in the above, so I'll list it here: 1. Apache MXNet: this has been used for one of our main algorithms for search as an end-to-end pipeline. We chose this because of the Scala bindings, which makes it easier to integrate with out JVM backend. MXNet seems comparable to TensorFlow, although community support is not as good as TensorFlow, and there are issues with memory leaks that are being worked on. TensorFlow in general is easier to use, but MXNet isn't too far behind. 2. Keras: still a favorite. Often I use this when paired with TensorFlow. TensorFlow 2.0 will make it even easier. 3. PyTorch: only used it a little, so it's hard to provide a good opinion. 4. DL4J: used it initially in an early days project because it has good JVM support. Harder to used not because of poor API design, but because community support is lacking and features don't come out as fast as TensorFlow.
Positive Impact- As I mentioned before its open source. Very easy to learn for average programmer/ developer. We were able to design a POC model for understanding the patient appointment cancellation snd reasons behind it in 3 week time frame.
Negative Impact- If you are using tensor flow for small project it works fine. If you are trying to build a model for face recognition it will be hard to program and train the system. It needs data to be processed before hand cannot learn on the go.
