Flashlight is a great project, and we're proud to be part of it. I'm with ArrayFire. If anyone has questions or feedback for ArrayFire, I'm here to be useful however I can!
It is a suboptimal outcome. I'd prefer to have a bot that knows it can get back X% for me over time. Then I can budget for my charity to friends and understand / maximize the results.
And it's a huge time sink to do personal AR, and a tedious ugly task.
We’ve been working on this problem for over a decade and have some support for Rust. Let’s work together if that makes sense to you l! I’m John at ArrayFire.
ArrayFire is a leader of accelerated technical computing. We maintain the ArrayFire open source library as well as deliver services to clients around the world in the areas of deep learning, computer vision, and accelerated computing.
We started as a Georgia Tech company and are now located in the startup hub next to the Atlanta Tech Village.
Great thoughts and interesting to see your thought process along the way. For quite some time, we have made ArrayFire free for a single GPU usage, dipping a toe in building a user base. We have already started monetizing that free user base over the last several years and we are good at that already. So from a business perspective, we have no margins that are really at risk. We only have more money to make from this move!
I bet the market conditions that led to this are broader than just GPU computing. I think it would more generally apply to any middleware business. But it is certainly more palatable for people in scientific computing and HPC to use something free and later pay for support and services and addons. Once people start really relying on the free thing, that reliance can be monetized. In this sense, it is more "scalable" to have an open source product which is readily adoptable by early users than to attempt to sell a product to buyers that have not yet started to rely upon it and have a good distance to go before reliance sets in. This is not SaaS and never will be, haha.
Hello everyone! I am a co-founder of ArrayFire. Since this is a startup-oriented board, I thought readers of this thread might be interested in how we arrived at this decision to open source from a business perspective, http://notonlyluck.com/2014/07/31/the-decision-to-open-sourc...
One great way to start is to use OpenCL libraries. We work on clMath (https://github.com/clMathLibraries) and ArrayFire (http://arrayfire.com) which are both easy to pick up. Once you get comfortable with libraries, you can start trying to write your own kernels, and you'll know which things you'll need to write that aren't already in a freely available library. Good luck!
We agree. Language bloat is a cacophonous. That's why we don't call ArrayFire a language. It's just a library with compatibility for existing languages, e.g. C, C++, Fortran.