I want to build, train and deploy a ML learning model in production.

I do know how to program.

I still want this tool. Badly. So badly. Just because I can program doesn't mean I want to use programming to solve every problem. I want simple tools that do the complex things for me for the 90% of cases where they are good enough.

Let me spend my time on the 10% of problems that simple tools can't solve!

This is the general response from programmers toward tools that automate programming. It's also generally FUD about being replaced by said tools.

I don't think ML is a regular form of programming.

That's because it's not programming. ML describes a strategy using machines to derive information from data. You use programming languages to tell machines how to execute on that strategy.

Data science is probably a better description.

ML is simply a conversion of data to weights.

Having the old Azure ML Studio before, yes, it is the worst of both worlds. This new refresh will be no better.

Excel has proven there's a market for tricking people into designing complex technical systems without realizing that they are programming a computer.

'tricking'. Such typical tech guy condescension. Excel provides a ramp all the way from "put numbers in boxes" through complicated multidimensional calculations to... well game development if you're crazy enough. It's a good tool for the tasks it was designed for, and it can be used by people of all skill levels.

Heh. Didn't mean to condescend. I do think many powerful Excel users don't think they are programming, so I stand by my statement.

There was a post yesterday about how it is desirable for Fortran to be preserved as opposed to porting Fortran code to C++, because scientists want to focus on expressing the science and math, not on the low level details of passing arrays around and performing safe array access (which Fortran compilers are more strict about and will emit errors for).

I haven't used this tool, but it seems reasonable that the people who it might be useful for (regardless if Microsoft PR recognizes this or not) are for scientists who have an idea for an algorithm, but don't want to spend too much time thinking about how to write and deploy python/C++ code to their clusters.

Sure, it may not seem like that much effort to many programmers, but as the Fortran discussion stressed, just because you can code and think logically, doesn't mean you're a programmer.

People possessing Domain and Subject knowledge are usually not coders so it makes perfect sense to give a tool that eases the transition into use of this tech. Make the tools accessible enough so that it caters to 80% of use cases and you have already won the battle.

Funny enough, when I saw a demo for this, it was by a programmer, and that was one of his main task at his job. I had the same impression, but he actually made a quite sound argument for it. He wasn't a machine learning expert (yet) and it allowed him and his team to quickly construct models and see what the best fit was. He was quite efficient at using it, and showed us how to build and run models in under an hour. There was no code they had to maintain which was ultimately a lot less work for them.

By "there was no code to maintain" they meant that the process was not automated, so they had to do everything manually each time?

I think a lot of biologists (such as myself) would find drag and drop ML very useful.

I’m not interested in deploying a service or anything, but it would be a great way to take a first pass at analyzing some of the huge and pretty complex datasets that we generate, like metagenomic DNA sequences of microbiotas that are paired with health related information that could also be fed into the model.

Even just narrowing down a list of potential targets would be pretty darn useful.

In the analytics departments of enterprise sized companies and organisations sits a lot of mathematicians, economics and statisticians. These are the people who are going to use ML to change the world, because business intelligence, prediction and analytics live in these departments.

Not a lot of these people can program.

I know a lot of programmers who want to work with ML, but in my experience, very few programmers are good enough at math or statistics to do so, and even fewer have the business skills to actually translate their results to management in non-tech based organisations.

I’m sure a lot of programmers will make excellent data-scientists, but I’m not entirely convinced why I would bring ML to my programmers rather than my people who have degrees in applied statistics and organisations.

I work in the public sector. One of the reasons ML hasn’t found it’s golden case yet, is largely because no one have figured out how to use ML in a way that is better than the decades worth of data-related work we have already done, and part of the reason behind this, is that companies who sell ML are programmers. They know how to use ML to identify, but none of them, not even IBM seem to know how to use ML for something they can actually get us to buy. And lord knows both sides of the tables have tried, I mean, even our political leadership has heard of the ML hype, and want us to use it. So I’m rather hopeful these tools for non-programmers will bring ML into the hands of people who will know what to use it for.

Years ago, someone said something about what we were building that I've never forgotten:

"Anyone smart enough to use this isn't dumb enough to need it."

Those were the words that come to my mind everytime I see stuff like this. Clickers want solutions, not complicated toolkits in a GUI.

I think there's value in these services for marketers, or target-ers. I see a lot of potential clients that know only excel /basic SQL and have a large list of customers/orders, or voters & donors. If they could upload and get back a scored list of top targets or leads that would add value. They just need to upload that list back to FB or wherever.

I don't see what the market would be for implementing this into production, like you say to make live in production needs to know how to code. Perhaps though I could see Segment offer a similar tool which I guess would be 'in production' without code.

I think that’s true regarding where value will be produced, but Microsoft can sell way more subscriptions if it’s point and click and presumably wrong. I will say though that they recently added suggested chart types in excel and they don’t seem half bad.