Problems Facing MLOps

General

  • Coding is not the whole story
  • It’s easier for great engineers to pick up ML knowledge, but it’s a lot harder for ML experts to become great engineers.
  • Use “off the shelf models”
  • Companies focus on improving data, but not model
  • Model sizes are hard
  • Dataset/model versioning is hard
  • Experiment Tracking
    • Hyperparameter tuning is important and it’s not surprising to find several that focus on it,
    • none seems to catch on because the bottleneck for hyperparameter tuning is not the setup, but the computing power needed to run it.
  • Data monitoring
    • Distribution shift
  • Labelling
    • How often do we need to re-label
  • CI/CD
    • Testing
    • Re-train model
  • Deployment
    • How often to package and deploy
    • One reason for the lack of serving solutions is the lack of communication between researchers and production engineers.
    • Small companies, whose employees can see the entire stack, are constrained by their immediate product needs
  • Model Compression
    • Compress ML Models
  • Optimizing Inference
  • Edge devices
  • Privacy
    • GDPR
  • OSS vs Open Core
    • Since OSS has become a standard, it’s challenging for startups to figure out a business model that works.
    • Any tooling company started has to compete with existing open-source tools.