How a Japanese cucumber farmer is using deep learning and TensorFlow
While it's a cool concept and agriculture is ripe for technology disruption, the enterprise software product marketer in me finds it to be a calculated marketing stunt, if not an disingenuous one.<p>TensorFlow is, in no way shape or form, ready to be used by anyone but very technical people with a solid knowledge of both software engineering and machine learning. In fact, it's probably unfair to single out TensorFlow because every deep learning toolkit I have seen is still in the same "extremely early adopter" phase. Yet, this article makes it seem like a line of business user (farmer) with some background in technology (former embedded systems engineer) can use deep learning to transform his/her business -when, in reality, much expert help is needed to make it work. In other words, it would have been a lot more plausible/genuine if the article read like:<p>1. A progressive farmer got in touch with Google.<p>2. Google dispatched their solutions architect to work with them.<p>3. Hey, a cool, early prototype is working!<p>I am not trying to be a hater. Deep learning has huge potential, and Google, among others, is doing a lot to make it accessible. That said, this type of over-promising ahead of market reality is what gives cutting edge technology a bad name.