Plus: Introverts’ must-have Duplex – that restaurant robo-caller – served up to Pixels
Google on Wednesday emitted a TensorFlow preview, finally put its Edge TPU hardware on sale, and rolled out its dreaded robo-caller Duplex – all amid its annual Tensorflow developer conference in Silicon Valley.
Here’s a quick summary of what you should know.
TensorFlow 2.0 teaser: If you’re waiting for TensorFlow 2.0, Google’s popular machine-learning framework used to build neural networks, to land, you’ll have to wait longer. But it’s not all bad news: you can play with an early preview.
Known as TensorFlow 2.0 Alpha, this preview includes a few exercises for beginners and experts to work through to get a feel for the code. One of the top complaints about TensorFlow is that it’s clunky and not easy to grasp compared to other frameworks, such as the Python-based PyTorch.
TensorFlow 2.0 promises to be simpler, making it easier for developers to build, run, and deploy machine-learning models and in fewer lines of code. It’ll do this by integrating Keras, a higher level API library written in Python, more tightly to TensorFlow. Users do not need to download Keras separately, and can switch to the API directly in TensorFlow using a simple command.
You can learn how to install TensorFlow Alpha right here. If you’re a complete newbie, fear not: Google and Udacity also prepared a free online course to get started on TensorFlow.
TensorFlow for mobile phones: TensorFlow Federated is another version of the framework, this time suited for training machine-learning models using data obtained from a large set of devices – such as a big bunch of smartphones running your mobile app.
The name of the game here is decentralized learning. Typically, a neural network is schooled from a single dataset.
