[HN Gopher] Modelplace: AI Model Marketplace by OpenCV
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       Modelplace: AI Model Marketplace by OpenCV
        
       Author : philnelson
       Score  : 113 points
       Date   : 2021-06-15 12:56 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (modelplace.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (modelplace.ai)
        
       | ipsum2 wrote:
       | I don't think this will be a successful business model. Niche AI
       | models cost a lot of money to gather the right dataset and train,
       | but they would probably only sell to <100 companies/individuals.
       | So pricing a model at $50-100 isn't profitable. If you're selling
       | general CV models, you have to compete with the plethora of open
       | source ones, including ones that Google and Facebook release for
       | free, which are trained on huge datasets and using a lot of
       | compute resources.
        
         | gieoon wrote:
         | I agree, it seems like fine-tuning the massive open source
         | models is better than buying small niche models. Curating the
         | dataset is also a non-trivial amount of work that has to be
         | customised per client. However with further adoption of AI into
         | new markets new clients may emerge.
        
         | meragrin_ wrote:
         | Are they selling models or making introductions? As you say,
         | niche models have small audiences which makes it all the more
         | likely the models will require modifications. Discussing those
         | modifications provides an opening to adjust the pricing.
        
         | pepe-sad wrote:
         | It looks like model-as-a-service. Cool feature, isn't it?
        
       | blululu wrote:
       | Interesting concept. Would be great to have more technical
       | details about how a model performs. Having a sense of the size,
       | accuracy, platforms supported, and other simple benchmarks would
       | be really helpful to evaluate a model before making a purchase.
        
       | Namidairo wrote:
       | Weird, the account registration wouldn't work on my normal IP,
       | claiming 'too many requests'
       | 
       | Worked fine on a VPN however (sorry, I know you probably don't
       | like this).
       | 
       | After the account registration though, I did quite like trying
       | out a couple models out on a couple frames of footage to see if
       | the models would "work".
        
         | philnelson wrote:
         | Thanks for the report- it looks like we had our anti-spam set a
         | little too sensitive. Glad you like the site!
        
       | moritonal wrote:
       | This seems like an attempt to cash in and steal the branding
       | behind the library, OpenCV. (I realise now it's the actual
       | authors of the libary.. I've become too jaded here).
        
         | otoburb wrote:
         | >> _Did you really name your company OpenCV? As in.. Open
         | Computer Vision, which you know is an incredibly well-known
         | brand for a 20-year old library, likely fundamental to most the
         | libraries you 're now trying to commission for in your market?_
         | 
         | This looks deliberate because the Chief Scientist & President,
         | Gary Bradski[1], created the OpenCV library that you refer
         | to.[2]
         | 
         | [1] https://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/3270
         | 
         | [2] https://www.opencv.ai/#About-us
        
           | moritonal wrote:
           | Ah, well, that's fair. Egg on my face.
        
       | mendeza wrote:
       | A lot of these models are open source, I wonder who would this
       | product market towards?
        
         | karxxm wrote:
         | The models have to be trained. Trained towards a given task.
        
           | yeldarb wrote:
           | And then once you have the weights you have to figure out
           | what to do with them. Data science (training a good model)
           | and engineering (deploying it as a service to be consumed by
           | end users) are pretty distinct tasks.
        
             | pepe-sad wrote:
             | Good point.
        
         | numbers_guy wrote:
         | Can I ask where one can download the pretrained weights? Is
         | there some online repository?
        
           | belval wrote:
           | You can look up the torchvision model zoo for pretrained
           | weights of most popular architectures.
           | 
           | Tensorflow as an equivalent tool but I can't remember the
           | name.
        
           | _joel wrote:
           | Some for YOLOv4 https://github.com/AllanYiin/YoloV4
        
       | wolterlw wrote:
       | If this becomes something like huggingface for Computer Vision -
       | awesome. For now, it's a shame model descriptions seem to often
       | be lifted straight from README.
       | 
       | Having a more standardized description, something like model
       | cards [1] (CV example [2]) would be hugely beneficial IMO.
       | 
       | [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.03993.pdf
       | 
       | [2] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f39lSzU5Oq-
       | j_OXgS67KfN5wNso...
        
         | pepe-sad wrote:
         | They looks quite similar. What did you find useful in this card
         | and can't get from a model description?
        
         | joshmarlow wrote:
         | I hadn't heard of model cards before - thanks for the link!
         | 
         | I wonder how feasible it would be to develop some formal
         | ontology to describe the capabilities of models and attach them
         | to model cards.
         | 
         | That could open up some interesting applications:
         | 
         | * automated search for a set of models to accomplish some task
         | 
         | * a human usable search engine for finding specific models
         | 
         | EDIT: to complete a sentence
        
         | philnelson wrote:
         | It's a good suggestion, thanks.
        
       | rexreed wrote:
       | Looks like https://modeldepot.io shut down, which was another
       | model-as-a-service marketplace. You can check out
       | https://paperswithcode.com/
        
       | version_five wrote:
       | I can see value in being able to casually integrate vision models
       | into different applications.
       | 
       | I would urge everyone involved (OpenCV and people using the
       | models) to not use this in any safety related application. The
       | example given on the site is person detection for construction
       | site safety. If you're going to use ML for something like this,
       | hire someone with experience using it for such applications, that
       | can understand the operating condition and failure modes. Your
       | worksite is not safe if you just plugged in an online person
       | detection model to a video feed.
        
         | JSbloater wrote:
         | I can see the lawsuits already
        
       | jcims wrote:
       | Cool idea. I keep looking for a search/filter/facet function to
       | leverage the tagging and classification they've done with the
       | models, but I can't find one.
        
         | philnelson wrote:
         | Thanks! This is definitely a feature we want to add in the
         | future.
        
         | innerlee wrote:
         | We also expored ways of presenting hundreds [1] of AI models in
         | a better way. Recently we updated the model zoo so that it is
         | arranged according to benchmark datasets [2] and papers [3]. Do
         | you think it satisfies the needs?
         | 
         | [1] https://mmpose.readthedocs.io/en/latest/modelzoo.html [2]
         | https://mmpose.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/body(2d,kpt,i...
         | [3]
         | https://mmpose.readthedocs.io/en/latest/papers/algorithms.ht...
        
       | wokwokwok wrote:
       | How do you stop piracy on something like this?
       | 
       | Surely I could take a model, refine it slightly to get distinct
       | weights (ie. not a flat clone) and unload it as my own novel
       | variant?
       | 
       | ...and I mean, is the problem not utterly fundamental?
       | 
       | When is a model "yours" or sell?
       | 
       | When you trained it? When you're not using transfer learning?
       | When you wrote the paper? When you own the training data? When
       | you can recreate it from scratch?
       | 
       | I see this being problematic to look after...
        
         | Moosdijk wrote:
         | Disclaimer: I'm not very familiar with the current state of CV
         | and the way models are trained.
         | 
         | What authors could do is train the model on a dataset, but add
         | a specific image that it flags as a key.
         | 
         | That way, if you keep the image private, you can check if a
         | model is a clone of yours if recognises that specific image.
        
         | belval wrote:
         | The value of these could be in private datasets. Model
         | architectures are not really patentable and ownership of a
         | trained model has always been very muddy water.
         | 
         | That being said, if I am selling a bird classifier chances are
         | that to train it I had to combine multiple datasets and someone
         | can't easily finetune it to get better results.
        
           | aledalgrande wrote:
           | The marketplace should probably be on datasets.
        
             | Moosdijk wrote:
             | I'd rather buy a model than a dataset that I have to spend
             | money to train a model with.
        
               | aledalgrande wrote:
               | You are limited in expanding your dataset and making your
               | model better, if you only have the model. And I would
               | rather see how clean/balanced the dataset my model was
               | built from was.
        
           | wokwokwok wrote:
           | They dont need to fine tune it for _better_ results, they
           | only need to fine tune it to give _different_ results and
           | sell it for $5 less than you are.
        
             | belval wrote:
             | I misunderstood your point.
             | 
             | The "attack" that you are describing could probably be
             | mitigated by doing activation analysis. Given random
             | initialization even with fine-tuning the activation
             | distribution will be similar. Same method should be used to
             | weed out people just repackaging the ImageNet pretrained
             | model from torchvision.
             | 
             | That being said you can still distill a network into
             | another with a teacher-student approach and that would be
             | undetectable.
        
             | pepe-sad wrote:
             | I believe it has a kind of pre-moderation.
        
         | bonoboTP wrote:
         | Right, you could steal the model by querying lots of images and
         | using teacher-student model distillation.
        
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       (page generated 2021-06-15 23:01 UTC)