Birds Aren’t Real. And Neither Is MLOps Posted on : Mar 31 - 2022

Are birds real? A group of 20-somethings tried to convince us they weren’t in the past few years, to varying degrees of success. And now a University of Washington professor wants us to believe that MLOps isn’t real, either. What is the world coming to?

“MLOps is NOT real,” Luis Ceze, a professor in the UW computer science and engineering department, declared in a statement. Ceze is also the CEO and co-founder of OctoML, the Seattle, Washington company that is commercializing Apache TVM, the open source tool for automating the deployment of machine learning models to a variety of platforms, including those running atop GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs, and other types of processors.

As one of the creators of Apache TVM, Ceze is imminently familiar with what the world means by “MLOps,” which most of us believe refers to the tools and techniques that data scientists, software engineers, and other IT professionals use to deploy and maintain machine learning models in production.

So what is the deal? MLOps is clearly a thing. Is Ceze some kind of conspiracist or something?

“I promise you that the Earth is not flat,” Ceze told Datanami, alleviating one of our concerns. “I promise, I’m not trying to be contrary just to get attention.”

After explaining what he meant, it turns out Ceze is not playing an early April Fool’s joke on an unsuspecting tech reporter after all. The professor has given his provocative statement on the existence of MLOps quite a bit of thought. He has his (very real) ducks in a row. View More