Post Syndicated from Stephanie Doyle original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ai-101-training-vs-inference/

What do Sherlock Holmes and ChatGPT have in common? Inference, my dear Watson!

“We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of the Cardboard Box

As we all continue to refine our thinking around artificial intelligence (AI), it’s useful to define terminology that describes the various stages of building and using AI algorithms—namely, the AI training stage and the AI inference stage. As we see in the quote above, these are not new concepts: they’re based on ideas and methodologies that have been around since before Sherlock Holmes’ time. 

If you’re using AI, building AI, or just curious about AI, it’s important to understand the difference between these two stages so you understand how data moves through an AI workflow. That’s what I’ll explain today.

The TL:DR

The difference between these two terms can be summed up fairly simply: first you train an AI algorithm, then your algorithm uses that training to make inferences from data. To create a whimsical analogy, when an algorithm is training, you can think of it like Watson—still learning how to observe and draw conclusions through inference. Once it’s trained, it’s an inferring machine, a.k.a. Sherlock Holmes. 

Whimsy aside, let’s dig a little deeper into the tech behind AI training and AI inference, the differences between them, and why the distinction is important. 

Obligatory Neural Network Recap

Neural networks have emerged as the brainpower behind AI, and a basic understanding of how they work is foundational when it comes to understanding AI.  

Complex decisions, in theory, can be broken down into a series of yeses and nos, which means that they can be encoded in binary. Neural networks have the ability to combine enough of those smaller decisions, weigh how they affect each other, and then use that information to solve complex problems. And, because more complex decisions require more points of information to come to a final decision, they require more processing power. Neural networks are one of the most widely used approaches to AI and machine learning (ML). 

What Is AI Training?: Understanding Hyperparameters and Parameters

In simple terms, training an AI algorithm is the process through which you take a base algorithm and then teach it how to make the correct decision. This process requires large amounts of data, and can include various degrees of human oversight. How much data you need has a relationship to the number of parameters you set for your algorithm as well as the complexity of a problem. 

We made this handy dandy diagram to show you how data moves through the training process:

And hey—we’re leaving out a lot of nuance in that conversation because dataset size, parameter choice, etc. is a graduate-level topic on its own, and usually is considered proprietary information by the companies who are training an AI algorithm. It suffices to say that dataset size and number of parameters are both significant and have a relationship to each other, though it’s not a direct cause/effect relationship. And, both the number of parameters and the size of the dataset affect things like processing resources—but that conversation is outside of scope for this article (not to mention a hot topic in research). 

As with everything, your use case determines your execution. Some types of tasks actually see excellent results with smaller datasets and more parameters, whereas others require more data and fewer parameters. Bringing it back to the real world, here’s a very cool graph showing how many parameters different AI systems have. Note that they very helpfully identified what type of task each system is designed to solve:

So, let’s talk about what parameters are with an example. Back in our very first AI 101 post, we talked about ways to frame an algorithm in simple terms: 

Machine learning does not specify how much knowledge the bot you’re training starts with—any task can have more or fewer instructions. You could ask your friend to order dinner, or you could ask your friend to order you pasta from your favorite Italian place to be delivered at 7:30 p.m. 

Both of those tasks you just asked your friend to complete are algorithms. The first algorithm requires your friend to make more decisions to execute the task at hand to your satisfaction, and they’ll do that by relying on their past experience of ordering dinner with you—remembering your preferences about restaurants, dishes, cost, and so on. 

The factors that help your friend make a decision about dinner are called hyperparameters and parameters. Hyperparameters are those that frame the algorithm—they are set  outside the training process, but can influence the training of the algorithms. In the example above, a hyperparameter would be how you structure your dinner feedback. Do you thumbs up or down each dish? Do you write a short review? You get the idea. 

Parameters are factors that the algorithm derives through training. In the example above, that’s what time you prefer to eat dinner, which restaurants you enjoy after eating, and so on. 

When you’ve trained a neural network, there will be heavier weights between various nodes. That’s a shorthand of saying that an algorithm will prefer a path it knows is significant, and if you want to really get nerdy with it, this article is well-researched, has a ton of math explainers for various training methods, and includes some fantastic visuals. For our purposes, here’s one way people visualize a “trained” algorithm: 

The “dropout method” is essentially adding weight to the relationships an AI algorithm has found to be significant for the dataset it’s working on. It can then de-prioritize (or sometimes even eliminate) the other relationships. 

Once you have a trained algorithm, then you can use it with a reasonable degree of certainty that it will give you good results, and that leads us to inference. 

What Is AI Inference?

Once you’ve trained your algorithm, you can send it out in the world to do its job (and make yours easier). When you present a trained AI algorithm with a problem and it gives you an answer, that’s called inference. It’s using the way it was trained to draw conclusions or make predictions, depending on how it was built, and once an algorithm is in the “inference stage”, it’s no longer learning (usually). 

Here’s our diagram for how data might move through an inference process: 

As we’ve seen in the real world, this does not mean that the AI model will give you a perfect answer every time—depending on, for example, the AI’s access to new or current information, the complexity of training, etc., the algorithm might give you a better or worse (more or less accurate) answer. But, it will be able to look at a new piece of information or dataset, and return a response. 

When I asked our friend ChatGPT about this, it broke down inference and defined it in relation to the logical underpinnings of different types of algorithms. (As a mere human, how could I resist using inference while writing about inference?) Sure, ChatGPT may be merely mimicking human-like dialogue based on its ingestion of the whole internet, then giving me the most likely answer based on its specialized neural network that predicts the likelihood of the next word in response to my conversational query and without access to data after January 2022, but here’s what our AI friend had to say for itself: 

• Machine Learning Inference: In machine learning, after a model has been trained on a dataset, it is deployed to make predictions or classifications on new, unseen data. During inference, the model takes the input data, processes it, and produces an output or a prediction based on the patterns and relationships it learned during training. For example, a trained machine learning model might be used to classify images, predict stock prices, or identify spam emails.
• Deep Learning Inference: Deep learning, a subfield of machine learning, involves neural networks with multiple layers. In deep learning, inference means feeding an input through a trained deep neural network and obtaining an output. This is commonly used in applications like image recognition, natural language processing, and speech recognition. Inference in deep learning can be computationally intensive, and specialized hardware, such as GPUs and TPUs, are often used to accelerate the process.
• Rule-Based Systems Inference: In rule-based AI systems, inference is the process of applying logical rules to make decisions or draw conclusions. These systems use a set of predefined rules and facts to reason and infer new information. For example, in an expert system for medical diagnosis, inference involves applying a set of rules to patient symptoms and medical knowledge to arrive at a diagnosis.
• Probabilistic Inference: In probabilistic AI, inference is used to estimate probabilities and uncertainty. Bayesian networks and Markov decision processes are examples of probabilistic models that perform inference to compute probabilities of events or make decisions based on probabilities.

You’ll notice that each of these are saying basically the same thing: the AI algorithm applies its decision-making paradigm to a problem. 

Why Stop Learning During the Inference Stage?

In general, it’s important to keep these two stages—training and inference—of an AI algorithm separate for a few reasons: 

• Efficiency: Training is typically a computationally intensive process, whereas inference is usually faster and less resource-intensive. Separating them allows for efficient use of computational resources.
• Generalization: The model’s ability to generalize from training data to unseen data is a key feature. It should not learn from every new piece of data it encounters during inference to maintain this generalization ability.
• Reproducibility: When using trained models in production or applications, it’s important to have consistency and reproducibility in the results. If models were allowed to learn during inference, it would introduce variability and unpredictability in their behavior.

There are some specialized AI algorithms that want to continue learning during the inference stage—your Netflix algorithm is a good example, as are self-driving cars, or dynamic pricing models used to set airfare pricing. On the other hand, the majority of problems we’re trying to solve with AI algorithms deliver better decisions by separating these two phases—think of things like image recognition, language translation, or medical diagnosis, for example.

Training vs. Inference (But, Really: Training Then Inference)

To recap: the AI training stage is when you feed data into your learning algorithm to produce a model, and the AI inference stage is when your  algorithm uses that training to make inferences from data. Here’s a chart for quick reference: 

The difference may seem inconsequential at first glance, but defining these two stages helps to show implications for AI adoption particularly with businesses. That is, given that it’s much less resource intensive (and therefore, less expensive), it’s likely to be much easier for businesses to integrate already-trained AI algorithms with their existing systems. 

And, as always, we’re big believers in demystifying terminology for discussion purposes. Let us know what you think in the comments, and feel free to let us know what you’re interested in learning about next.

The post AI 101: Training vs. Inference appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Post Syndicated from Stephanie Doyle original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ai-101-do-the-dollars-make-sense/

Welcome back to AI 101, a series dedicated to breaking down the realities of artificial intelligence (AI). Previously we’ve defined artificial intelligence, deep learning (DL), and machine learning (ML) and dove into the types of processors that make AI possible. Today we’ll talk about one of the biggest limitations of AI adoption—how much it costs. Experts have already flagged that the significant investment necessary for AI can cause antitrust concerns and that AI is driving up costs in data centers. 

To that end, we’ll talk about: 

• Factors that impact the cost of AI.
• Some real numbers about the cost of AI components. 
• The AI tech stack and some of the industry solutions that have been built to serve it.
• And, uncertainty.

Defining AI: Complexity and Cost Implications

While ChatGPT, DALL-E, and the like may be the most buzz-worthy of recent advancements, AI has already been a part of our daily lives for several years now. In addition to generative AI models, examples include virtual assistants like Siri and Google Home, fraud detection algorithms in banks, facial recognition software, URL threat analysis services, and so on. 

That brings us to the first challenge when it comes to understanding the cost of AI: The type of AI you’re training—and how complex a problem you want it to solve—has a huge impact on the computing resources needed and the cost, both in the training and in the implementation phases. AI tasks are hungry in all ways: they need a lot of processing power, storage capacity, and specialized hardware. As you scale up or down in the complexity of the task you’re doing, there’s a huge range in the types of tools you need and their costs.   

To understand the cost of AI, several other factors come into play as well, including: 

• Latency requirements: How fast does the AI need to make decisions? (e.g. that split second before a self-driving car slams on the brakes.)
• Scope: Is the AI solving broad-based or limited questions? (e.g. the best way to organize this library vs. how many times is the word “cat” in this article.)
• Actual human labor: How much oversight does it need? (e.g. does a human identify the cat in cat photos, or does the AI algorithm identify them?)
• Adding data: When, how, and what quantity new data will need to be ingested to update information over time? 

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it gives you an idea of the considerations that can affect the kind of AI you’re building and, thus, what it might cost.

The Big Three AI Cost Drivers: Hardware, Storage, and Processing Power

In simple terms, you can break down the cost of running an AI to a few main components: hardware, storage, and processing power. That’s a little bit simplistic, and you’ll see some of these lines blur and expand as we get into the details of each category. But, for our purposes today, this is a good place to start to understand how much it costs to ask a bot to create a squirrel holding a cool guitar.

First Things First: Hardware Costs

Running an AI takes specialized processors that can handle complex processing queries. We’re early in the game when it comes to picking a “winner” for specialized processors, but these days, the most common processor is a graphical processing unit (GPU), with Nvidia’s hardware and platform as an industry favorite and front-runner. 

The most common “workhorse chip” of AI processing tasks, the Nvidia A100, starts at about $10,000 per chip, and a set of eight of the most advanced processing chips can cost about $300,000. When Elon Musk wanted to invest in his generative AI project, he reportedly bought 10,000 GPUs, which equates to an estimated value in the tens of millions of dollars. He’s gone on record as saying that AI chips can be harder to get than drugs. 

Google offers folks the ability to rent their TPUs through the cloud starting at $1.20 per chip hour for on-demand service (less if you commit to a contract). Meanwhile, Intel released a sub-$100 USB stick with a full NPU that can plug into your personal laptop, and folks have created their own models at home with the help of open sourced developer toolkits. Here’s a guide to using them if you want to get in the game yourself. 

Clearly, the spectrum for chips is vast—from under $100 to millions—and the landscape for chip producers is changing often, as is the strategy for monetizing those chips—which leads us to our next section. 

Using Third Parties: Specialized Problems = Specialized Service Providers

Building AI is a challenge with so many moving parts that, in a business use case, you eventually confront the question of whether it’s more efficient to outsource it. It’s true of storage, and it’s definitely true of AI processing. You can already see one way Google answered that question above: create a network populated by their TPUs, then sell access.   

Other companies specialize in broader or narrower parts of the AI creation and processing chain. Just to name a few, diverse companies: there’s Hugging Face, Inflection AI, CoreWeave, and Vultr. Those companies have a wide array of product offerings and resources from open source communities like Hugging Face that provide a menu of models, datasets, no-code tools, and (frankly) rad developer experiments to bare metal servers like Vultr that enhance your compute resources. How resources are offered also exist on a spectrum, including proprietary company resources (i.e. Nvidia’s platform), open source communities (looking at you, Hugging Face), or a mix of the two. 

This means that, whichever piece of the AI tech stack you’re considering, you have a high degree of flexibility when you’re deciding where and how much you want to customize and where and how to implement an out-of-the box solution. 

Ballparking an estimate of what any of that costs would be so dependent on the particular model you want to build and the third-party solutions you choose that it doesn’t make sense to do so here. But, it suffices to say that there’s a pretty narrow field of folks who have the infrastructure capacity, the datasets, and the business need to create their own network. Usually it comes back to any combination of the following: whether you have existing infrastructure to leverage or are building from scratch, if you’re going to sell the solution to others, what control over research or dataset you have or want, how important privacy is and how you’re incorporating it into your products, how fast you need the model to make decisions, and so on. 

Welcome to the Spotlight, Storage

And, hey, with all that, let’s not forget storage. At the most basic level of consideration, AI uses a ton of data. How much? Going knowledge says at least an order of magnitude more examples than the problem presented to train an AI model. That means you want 10 times more examples than parameters. 

That 10x number is just the amount of data you store for the initial training model—clearly the thing learns and grows, because we’re talking about AI. 

Preserving both your initial training algorithm and your datasets can be incredibly useful, too. As we talked about before, the more complex an AI, the higher the likelihood that your model will surprise you. And, as many folks have pointed out, deciding whether to leverage an already-trained model or to build your own doesn’t have to be an either/or—oftentimes the best option is to fine-tune an existing model to your narrower purpose. In both cases, having your original training model stored can help you roll back and identify the changes over time. 

The size of the dataset absolutely affects costs and processing times. The best example is that ChatGPT, everyone’s favorite model, has been rocking GPT-3 (or 3.5) instead of GPT-4 on the general public release because GPT-4, which works from a much larger, updated dataset than GPT-3, is too expensive to release to the wider public. It also returns results much more slowly than GPT-3.5, which means that our current love of instantaneous search results and image generation would need an adjustment. 

And all of that is true because GPT-4 was updated with more information (by volume), more up-to-date information, and the model was given more parameters to take into account for responses. So, it has to both access more data per query and use more complex reasoning to make decisions. That said, it also reportedly has much better results.

Storage and Cost

What are the real numbers to store, say, a primary copy of an AI dataset? Well, it’s hard to estimate, but we can ballpark that, if you’re training a large AI model, you’re going to have at a minimum tens of gigabytes of data and, at a maximum, petabytes. OpenAI considers the size of its training database proprietary information, and we’ve found sources that cite that number as  anywhere from 17GB to 570GB to 45TB of text data. 

That’s not actually a ton of data, and, even taking the highest number, it would only cost $225 per month to store that data in Backblaze B2 (45TB * $5/TB/mo), for argument’s sake. But let’s say you’re training an AI on video to, say, make a robot vacuum that can navigate your room or recognize and identify human movement. Your training dataset could easily reach into petabyte scale (for reference, one petabyte would cost $5,000 per month in Backblaze B2). Some research shows that dataset size is trending up over time, though other folks point out that bigger is not always better.

On the other hand, if you’re the guy with the Intel Neural Compute stick we mentioned above and a Raspberry Pi, you’re talking the cost of the ~$100 AI processor, ~$50 for the Raspberry Pi, and any incidentals. You can choose to add external hard drives, network attached storage (NAS) devices, or even servers as you scale up.

Storage and Speed

Keep in mind that, in the above example, we’re only considering the cost of storing the primary dataset, and that’s not very accurate when thinking about how you’d be using your dataset. You’d also have to consider temporary storage for when you’re actually training the AI as your primary dataset is transformed by your AI algorithm, and nearly always you’re splitting your primary dataset into discrete parts and feeding those to your AI algorithm in stages—so each of those subsets would also be stored separately. And, in addition to needing a lot of storage, where you physically locate that storage makes a huge difference to how quickly tasks can be accomplished. In many cases, the difference is a matter of seconds, but there are some tasks that just can’t handle that delay—think of tasks like self-driving cars. 

For huge data ingest periods such as training, you’re often talking about a compute process that’s assisted by powerful, and often specialized, supercomputers, with repeated passes over the same dataset. Having your data physically close to those supercomputers saves you huge amounts of time, which is pretty incredible when you consider that it breaks down to as little as milliseconds per task.

One way this problem is being solved is via caching, or creating temporary storage on the same chips (or motherboards) as the processor completing the task. Another solution is to keep the whole processing and storage cluster on-premises (at least while training), as you can see in the Microsoft-OpenAI setup or as you’ll often see in universities. And, unsurprisingly, you’ll also see edge computing solutions which endeavor to locate data physically close to the end user. 

While there can be benefits to on-premises or co-located storage, having a way to quickly add more storage (and release it if no longer needed), means cloud storage is a powerful tool for a holistic AI storage architecture—and can help control costs. 

And, as always, effective backup strategies require at least one off-site storage copy, and the easiest way to achieve that is via cloud storage. So, any way you slice it, you’re likely going to have cloud storage touch some part of your AI tech stack. 

What Hardware, Processing, and Storage Have in Common: You Have to Power Them

Here’s the short version: any time you add complex compute + large amounts of data, you’re talking about a ton of money and a ton of power to keep everything running. 

Fortunately for us, other folks have done the work of figuring out how much this all costs. This excellent article from SemiAnalysis goes deep on the total cost of powering searches and running generative AI models. The Washington Post cites Dylan Patel (also of SemiAnalysis) as estimating that a single chat with ChatGPT could cost up to 1,000 times as much as a simple Google search. Those costs include everything we’ve talked about above—the capital expenditures, data storage, and processing. 

Consider this: Google spent several years putting off publicizing a frank accounting of their power usage. When they released numbers in 2011, they said that they use enough electricity to power 200,000 homes. And that was in 2011. There are widely varying claims for how much a single search costs, but even the most conservative say .03 Wh of energy. There are approximately 8.5 billion Google searches per day. (That’s just an incremental cost by the way—as in, how much does a single search cost in extra resources on top of how much the system that powers it costs.) 

Power is a huge cost in operating data centers, even when you’re only talking about pure storage. One of the biggest single expenses that affects power usage is cooling systems. With high-compute workloads, and particularly with GPUs, the amount of work the processor is doing generates a ton more heat—which means more money in cooling costs, and more power consumed. 

So, to Sum Up

When we’re talking about how much an AI costs, it’s not just about any single line item cost. If you decide to build and run your own models on-premises, you’re talking about huge capital expenditure and ongoing costs in data centers with high compute loads. If you want to build and train a model on your own USB stick and personal computer, that’s a different set of cost concerns. 

And, if you’re talking about querying a generative AI from the comfort of your own computer, you’re still using a comparatively high amount of power somewhere down the line. We may spread that power cost across our national and international infrastructures, but it’s important to remember that it’s coming from somewhere—and that the bill comes due, somewhere along the way. 

The post AI 101: Do the Dollars Make Sense? appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Post Syndicated from Stephanie Doyle original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ai-101-gpu-vs-tpu-vs-npu/

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) is driving innovation, particularly when it comes to processing data at scale. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms, designed to solve complex problems and self-learn over time, are exploding the possibilities of what computers are capable of. 

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) is driving innovation, particularly when it comes to processing data at scale. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms, designed to solve complex problems and self-learn over time, are exploding the possibilities of what computers are capable of. 

As the problems we ask computers to solve get more complex, there’s also an unavoidable, explosive growth in the number of processes they run. This growth has led to the rise of specialized processors and a whole host of new acronyms.

Joining the ranks of central processing units (CPUs), which you may already be familiar with, are neural processing units (NPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and tensile processing units (TPUs). 

So, let’s dig in to understand how some of these specialized processors work, and how they’re different from each other. If you’re still with me after that, stick around for an IT history lesson.  I’ll get into some of the more technical concepts about the combination of hardware and software developments in the last 100 or so years.

Central Processing Unit (CPU): The OG

Think of the CPU as the general of your computer. There are two main parts of a CPU, an arithmetic-logic unit (ALU) and a control unit. An ALU allows arithmetic (add, subtract, etc.) and logic (AND, OR, NOT, etc.) operations to be carried out. The control unit controls the ALU, memory, and IO functions, which tells them how to respond to the program that’s just been read from the memory. 

The best way to track what the CPU does is to think of it as an input/output flow. The CPU will take the request (input), access the memory of the computer for instructions on how to perform that task, delegate the execution to either its own ALUs or another specialized processor, take all that data back into its control unit, then take a single, unified action (output). 

For a visual, this is the the circuitry map for an ALU from 1970:

But, more importantly, here’s a logic map about what a CPU does: 

CPUs have gotten more powerful over the years as we’ve moved from single-core processors to multicore processors. Basically, there are several ALUs executing tasks that are being managed by the CPU’s control unit, and they perform tasks in parallel. That means that it works well in combination with specialized AI processors like GPUs. 

The Rise of Specialized Processors

When a computer is given a task, the first thing the processor has to do is communicate with the memory, including program memory (ROM)—designed for more fixed tasks like startup—and data memory (RAM)—designed for things that change more often like loading applications, editing a document, and browsing the internet. The thing that allows these elements to talk is called the bus, and it can only access one of the two types of memory at one time.  

In the past, processors ran more slowly than memory access, but that’s changed as processors have gotten more sophisticated. Now, when CPUs are asked to do a bunch of processes on large amounts of data, the CPU ends up waiting for memory access because of traffic on the bus. In addition to slower processing, it also uses a ton of energy. Folks in computing call this the Von Neumann bottleneck, and as compute tasks like those for AI have become more complex, we’ve had to work out ways to solve this problem.

One option is to create chips that are optimized to specific tasks. Specialized chips are designed to solve the processing difficulties machine learning algorithms present to CPUs. In the race to create the best AI processor, big players like Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Nvidia have solved this with specialized processors that can execute more logical queries (and thus more complex logic). They achieve this in a few different ways. So, let’s talk about what that looks like: What are GPUs, TPUs, and NPUs?

Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

GPUs started out as specialized graphics processors and are often conflated with graphics cards (which have a bit more hardware to them). GPUs were designed to support massive amounts of parallel processing, and they work in tandem with CPUs, either fully integrated on the main motherboard, or, for heavier loads, on their own dedicated piece of hardware. They also use a ton of energy and thus generate heat. 

GPUs have long been used in gaming, and it wasn’t until the 2000s that folks started using them for general computing—thanks to Nvidia. Nvidia certainly designs chips, of course, but they also introduced a proprietary platform called CUDA that allows programmers to have direct access to a GPU’s virtual instruction set and parallel computational elements. This means that you can set up compute kernels, or clusters of processors that work together and are ideally suited to specific tasks, without taxing the rest of your resources. Here’s a great diagram that shows the workflow:

This made GPUs wildly applicable for machine learning tasks, and they benefited from the fact that they leveraged existing, well-known processes. What we mean by that is: oftentimes when you’re researching solutions, the solution that wins is not always the “best” one based on pure execution. If you’re introducing something that has to (for example) fundamentally change consumer behavior, or that requires everyone to relearn a skill, you’re going to have resistance to adoption. So, GPUs playing nice with existing systems, programming languages, etc. aided wide adoption. They’re not quite plug-and-play, but you get the gist. 

As time has gone on, there are now also open source platforms that support GPUs that are supported by heavy-hitting industry players (including Nvidia). The largest of these is OpenCL. And, folks have added tensor cores, which this article does a fabulous job of explaining.

Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) 

Great news: the TL:DR of this acronym boils down to: It’s Google’s proprietary AI processor. They started using them in their own data centers in 2015, released them to the public in 2016, and there are some commercially available models. They run on ASICs (hard-etched chips I’ll talk more about later) and Google’s TensorFlow software. 

Compared with GPUs, they’re specifically designed to have slightly lower precision, which makes sense given that this makes them more flexible to different types of workloads. I think Google themselves sum it up best:

If it’s raining outside, you probably don’t need to know exactly how many droplets of water are falling per second—you just wonder whether it’s raining lightly or heavily. Similarly, neural network predictions often don’t require the precision of floating point calculations with 32-bit or even 16-bit numbers. With some effort, you may be able to use 8-bit integers to calculate a neural network prediction and still maintain the appropriate level of accuracy.

Google Cloud Blog

GPUs, on the other hand, were originally designed for graphics processing and rendering, which relies on each point’s relationship to each other to create a readable image—if you have less accuracy in those points, you amplify that in their vectors, and then you end up with Playstation 2 Spyro instead of Playstation 4 Spyro.

Another important design choice that deviates from CPUs and GPUs is that TPUs are designed around a systolic array. Systolic arrays create a network of processors that are each computing a partial task, then sending it along to the next node until you reach the end of the line. Each node is usually fixed and identical, but the program that runs between them is programmable. It’s called a data processing unit (DPU).  

Neural processing unit (NPU)

“NPU” is sometimes used as the category name for all specialized AI processors, but it’s more often specifically applied to those designed for mobile devices. Just for confusion’s sake, note that Samsung also refers to its proprietary chipsets as NPU. 

NPUs contain all the necessary information to complete AI processing, and they run on a principle of synaptic weight. Synaptic weight is a term adapted from biology which describes the strength of connection between two neurons. Simply put, in our bodies if two neurons find themselves sharing information more often, the connection between them becomes literally stronger, making it easier for energy to pass between them. At the end of the day, that makes it easier for you to do something. (Wow, the science between habit forming makes a lot more sense now.) Many neural networks mimic this. 

When we say AI algorithms learn, this is one of the ways—they track likely possibilities over time, and give more weight to that connected node. The impact is huge when it comes to power consumption. Parallel processing runs each task next to each other, but isn’t great at accounting for the completion of tasks, especially as your architecture scales and processing units might be more separate.

Quick Refresh: Neural Networks and Decision Making in Computers

As we discuss in AI 101, when you’re thinking about the process of making a decision, what you see is that you’re actually making many decisions in a series, and often the things you’re considering before you reach your final decision affect the eventual outcome. Since computers are designed on a strict binary, they’re not “naturally” suited to contextualizing information in order to make better decisions. Neural networks are the solution. They’re based on matrix math, and they look like this: 

Basically, you’re asking a computer to have each potential decision check in with all the other possibilities, to weigh the outcome, and to learn from their own experience and sensory information. That all translates to more calculations being run at one time. 

Recapping the Key Differences

That was a lot. Here’s a summary: 

1. Functionality: GPUs were developed for graphics rendering, while TPUs and NPUs are purpose-built for AI/ML workloads. 
2. Parallelism: GPUs are made for parallel processing, ideal for training complex neural networks. TPUs take this specialization further, focusing on tensor operations to achieve higher speeds and energy efficiencies. 
3. Customization: TPUs and NPUs are more specialized and customized for AI tasks, while GPUs offer a more general-purpose approach suitable for various compute workloads.
4. Use Cases: GPUs are commonly used in data centers and workstations for AI research and training. TPUs are extensively utilized in Google’s cloud infrastructure, and NPUs are prevalent in AI-enabled devices like smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets.
5. Availability: GPUs are widely available from various manufacturers and accessible to researchers, developers, and hobbyists. TPUs are exclusive to Google Cloud services, and NPUs are integrated into specific devices.

Do the Differences Matter?

The definitions of the different processors start to sound pretty similar after a while. A multicore processor combines multiple ALUs under a central control unit. A GPU combines more ALUs under a specialized processor. A TPU combines multiple compute nodes under a DPU, which is analogous to a CPU. 

At the end of the day, there’s some nuance about the different design choices between processors, but their impact is truly seen at scale versus at the consumer level. Specialized processors can handle larger datasets more efficiently, which translates to faster processing using less electrical power (though our net power usage may go up as we use AI tools more). 

It’s also important to note that these are new and changing terms in a new and changing landscape. Google’s TPU was announced in 2015, just eight years ago. I can’t count the amount of conversations I’ve had that end in a hyperbolic impression of what AI is going to do for/to the world, and that’s largely because people think that there’s no limit to what it is. 

But, the innovations that make AI possible were created by real people. (Though, maybe AIs will start coding themselves, who knows.) And, chips that power AI are real things—a piece of silicon that comes from the ground and is processed in a lab. Wrapping our heads around what those physical realities are, what challenges we had to overcome, and how they were solved, can help us understand how we can use these tools more effectively—and do more cool stuff in the future.

Bonus Content: A Bit of a History of the Hardware

Which brings me to our history lesson. In order to more deeply understand our topic today, you have to know a little bit about how computers are physically built. The most fundamental language of computers is binary code, represented as a series of 0s and 1s. Those values correspond to whether a circuit is closed or open, respectively. When a circuit is closed, you cannot push power through it. When it’s open, you can. Transistors regulate current flow, generate electrical signals, and act as a switch or gate. You can connect lots of transistors with circuitry to create an integrated circuit chip.   

The combination of open and closed patterns of transistors can be read by your computer. As you add more transistors, you’re able to express more and more numbers in binary code. You can see how this influences the basic foundations of computing in how we measure bits and bytes. Eight transistors store one byte of data: two possibilities for each of the eight transistors, and then every possible combination of those possibilities (2^8) = 256 possible combinations of open/closed gates (bits), so 8 bits = one byte, which can represent any number between 0 and 255.

Improvements in reducing transistor size and increasing transistor density on a single chip has led to improvements in capacity, speed, and power consumption, largely due to our ability to purify semiconductor materials, leverage more sophisticated tools like chemical etching, and improve clean room technology. That all started with the integrated circuit chip. 

Integrated circuit chips were invented around 1958, fueled by the discoveries of a few different people who solved different challenges nearly simultaneously. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments created a hybrid integrated circuit measuring about 7/16” by 1/16” (11.1 mm by 1.6 mm). Robert Noyce (eventual co-founder of Intel) went on to create the first monolithic integrated circuit chip (so, all circuits held on the same chip) and it was around the same size. Here’s a blown-up version of it, held by Noyce:

Note those first chips only held about 60 transistors. Current chips can have billions of transistors etched onto the same microchip, and are even smaller. Here’s an example of what a integrated circuit looks like when it’s exposed:

And, for reference, that’s about this big:

And, that, folks, is one of the reasons you can now have a whole computer in your pocket in the guise of a smartphone. As you can imagine, something the size of a modern laptop or rack-mounted server can combine more of these elements more effectively. Hence, the rise of AI.

One More Acronym: What are FGPAs?

So far, I’ve described fixed, physical points on a chip, but chip performance is also affected by software. Software represents the logic and instructions for how all these things work together. So, when you create a chip, you have two options: you either know what software you’re going to run and create a customized chip that supports that, or you get a chip that acts like a blank slate and can be reprogrammed based on what you need. 

The first method is called application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC). However, just like any proprietary build in manufacturing, you need to build them at scale for them to be profitable, and they’re slower to produce. Both CPUs and GPUs typically run on hard-etched chips like this. 

Reprogrammable chips are known as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA). They’re flexible and come with a variety of standard interfaces for developers. That means they’re incredibly valuable for AI applications, and particularly deep learning algorithms—as things rapidly advance, FPGAs can be continuously reprogrammed with multiple functions on the same chip, which lets developers test, iterate, and deliver them to market quickly. This flexibility is most notable in that you can also reprogram things like the input/output (IO) interface, so you can reduce latency and overcome bottlenecks. For that reason, folks will often compare the efficacy of the whole class of ASIC-based processors (CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, TPUs) to FPGAs, which, of course, has also led to hybrid solutions. 

Summing It All Up: Chip Technology is Rad

Improvements in materials science and microchip construction laid the foundation for providing the processing capacity required by AI, and big players in the industry (Nvidia, Intel, Google, Microsoft, etc.) have leveraged those chips to create specialized processors. 

Simultaneously, software has allowed many processing cores to be networked in order to control and distribute processing loads for increased speeds. All that has led us to the rise in specialized chips that enable the massive demands of AI. 

Hopefully you have a better understanding of the different chipsets out there, how they work, and the difference between them. Still have questions? Let us know in the comments.

The post AI 101: GPU vs. TPU vs. NPU appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Post Syndicated from Stephanie Doyle original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ai-101-how-cognitive-science-and-computer-processors-create-artificial-intelligence/

Recently, artificial intelligence has been having a moment: It’s gone from an abstract idea in a sci-fi movie, to an experiment in a lab, to a tool that is impacting our everyday lives. With headlines from Bing’s AI confessing its love to a reporter to the struggles over who’s liable in an accident with a self-driving car, the existential reality of what it means to live in an era of rapid technological change is playing out in the news. 

The headlines may seem fun, but it’s important to consider what this kind of tech means. In some ways, you can draw a parallel to the birth of the internet, with all the innovation, ethical dilemmas, legal challenges, excitement, and chaos that brought with it. (We’re totally happy to discuss in the comments section.)

So, let’s keep ourselves grounded in fact and do a quick rundown of some of the technical terms in the greater AI landscape. In this article, we’ll talk about three basic terms to help you define the playing field: artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL).

What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

If you were to search “artificial intelligence,” you’d see varying definitions. Here are a few from good sources. 

From Google, and not Google as in the search engine, but Google in their thought leadership library:

Artificial intelligence is a broad field, which refers to the use of technologies to build machines and computers that have the ability to mimic cognitive functions associated with human intelligence, such as being able to see, understand, and respond to spoken or written language, analyze data, make recommendations, and more. 

Although artificial intelligence is often thought of as a system in itself, it is a set of technologies implemented in a system to enable it to reason, learn, and act to solve a complex problem.

From IBM, a company that has been pivotal in computer development since the early days:

At its simplest form, artificial intelligence is a field, which combines computer science and robust datasets, to enable problem-solving. It also encompasses sub-fields of machine learning and deep learning, which are frequently mentioned in conjunction with artificial intelligence. These disciplines are comprised of AI algorithms which seek to create expert systems which make predictions or classifications based on input data.

From Wikipedia, the crowdsourced and scholarly-sourced oversoul of us all:

Artificial intelligence is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by humans or by other animals. “Intelligence” encompasses the ability to learn and to reason, to generalize, and to infer meaning. Example tasks… include speech recognition, computer vision, translation between (natural) languages, as well as other mappings of inputs.

Allow us to give you the Backblaze summary: Each of these sources are saying that artificial intelligence is what happens when computers start thinking (or appearing to think) for themselves. It’s the what. You call a bot you’re training “an AI;” you also call the characteristic of a computer making decisions AI; you call the entire field of this type of problem solving and programming AI. 

However, using the term “artificial intelligence” does not define how bots are solving problems. Terms like “machine learning” and “deep learning” are how that appearance of intelligence is created—the complexity of the algorithms and tasks to perform, whether the algorithm learns, what kind of theoretical math is used to make a decision, and so on. For the purposes of this article, you can think of artificial intelligence as the umbrella term for the processes of machine learning and deep learning. 

What Is Machine Learning (ML)?

Machine learning (ML) is the study and implementation of computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience. In contrast with AI and in keeping with our earlier terms, AI is when a computer appears intelligent, and ML is when a computer can solve a complex, but defined, task. An algorithm is a set of instructions (the requirements) of a task. 

We engage with algorithms all the time without realizing it—for instance, when you visit a site using a URL starting with “https:” your browser is using SSL (or, more accurately in 2023, TLS), a symmetric encryption algorithm that secures communication between your web browser and the site. Basically, when you click “play” on a cat video, your web browser and the site engage in a series of steps to ensure that the site is what it purports to be, and that a third-party can neither eavesdrop on nor modify any of the cuteness exchanged.

Machine learning does not specify how much knowledge the bot you’re training starts with—any task can have more or fewer instructions. You could ask your friend to order dinner, or you could ask your friend to order you pasta from your favorite Italian place to be delivered at 7:30 p.m. 

Both of those tasks you just asked your friend to complete are algorithms. The first algorithm requires your friend to make more decisions to execute the task at hand to your satisfaction, and they’ll do that by relying on their past experience of ordering dinner with you—remembering your preferences about restaurants, dishes, cost, and so on. 

By setting up more parameters in the second question, you’ve made your friend’s chances of a satisfactory outcome more probable, but there are a ton of things they would still have to determine or decide in order to succeed—finding the phone number of the restaurant, estimating how long food delivery takes, assuming your location for delivery, etc. 

I’m framing this example as a discrete event, but you’ll probably eat dinner with your friend again. Maybe your friend doesn’t choose the best place this time, and you let them know you don’t want to eat there in the future. Or, your friend realizes that the restaurant is closed on Mondays, so you can’t eat there. Machine learning is analogous to the process through which your friend can incorporate feedback—yours or the environment’s—and arrive at a satisfactory dinner plan.

Machines Learning to Teach Machines

A real-world example that will help us tie this down is teaching robots to walk (and there are a ton of fun videos on the subject, if you want to lose yourself in YouTube). Many robotics AI experiments teach their robots to walk in simulated, virtual environments before the robot takes on the physical world.

The key is, though, that the robot updates its algorithm based on new information and predicts outcomes without being programmed to do so. With our walking robot friend, that would look like the robot avoiding an obstacle on its own instead of an operator moving a joystick to avoid the obstacle. 

There’s an in-between step here, and that’s how much human oversight there is when training an AI. In our dinner example, it’s whether your friend is improving dinner plans from your feedback (“I didn’t like the food.”) or from the environment’s feedback (the restaurant is closed). With our robot friend, it’s whether their operator tells them there is an obstacle, or they sense it on their own. These options are defined as supervised learning and unsupervised learning. 

Supervised Learning

An algorithm is trained with labeled input data and is attempting to get to a certain outcome. A good example is predictive maintenance. Here at Backblaze, we closely monitor our fleet of over 230,000 hard drives; every day, we record the SMART attributes for each drive, as well as which drives failed that day. We could feed a subset of that data into a machine learning algorithm, building a model that captures the relationships between those SMART attributes (the input data) and a drive failure (the label). After this training phase, we could test the algorithm and model on a separate subset of data to verify its accuracy at predicting failure, with the ultimate goal of preventing failure by flagging problematic drives based on unlabeled, real-time data.

Unsupervised Learning

An AI is given unlabeled data and asked to identify patterns and probable outcomes. In this case, you’re not asking the bot for an outcome (“Find me an article on AI.”), you’re asking what exists in the dataset (“What types of articles are in this library? What’s the best way to organize this library?”). For example, Google News uses unsupervised learning to categorize articles on the same story from various online news outlets. It recognizes clusters of contemporaneous articles that share key words, and groups them under a suitable heading.

Generative AI: ChatGPT and Bing, DALL-E and Lensa

Most folks’ exposure to AI has been in the form of generative AI. What generative AIs have done that’s revolutionary is to allow us to make a human-speak query to generate “new” material. You can almost think of a generative AI as a DJ with a huge song library—it’s rapidly pulling information from a huge dataset, remixing that information, and presenting you the result. 

So, when you ask ChatGPT to write you a story about a spy, they’re going to go back to all the spy text they’ve seen and give you a story based on those patterns. If you ask it to write a story about James Bond, it’s got a more limited dataset with more predictable patterns. If you ask it to write a six sentence paragraph giving you a good spy plot based on James Bond with the main character Oogly Boogly, you might confuse it (or come up with something totally awesome) because “Oogly Boogly” doesn’t really sound like a name you’d see in spy novels. 

As a tool, generative AI certainly has both possibilities and limitations. In order to train an AI, you need huge amounts of data, which can come from various sources—one example is when consumers share data in exchange for free or improved apps or services, as evidenced by some (ahem) surprising photos surfacing from a Roomba. 

Also, just to confuse things before we’ve even gotten to defining deep learning: Some people are calling generative AI’s processes “deep machine learning” based on its use of metadata as well as tools like image recognition, and because the algorithms are designed to learn from themselves in order to give you better results in the future. 

An important note for generative AI: It’s certainly not out of the question to make your own library of content—folks call that “training” an AI, though it’s usually done on a larger scale. Check out Backblaze Director of Solution Engineers Troy Liljedahl’s article on Stable Diffusion to see why and how you might want to do that. 

What Is Deep Learning (DL)?

Deep learning is the process of training an AI for complex decision making. “Wait,” you say. “I thought ML was already solving complex tasks.” And you’re right, but the difference is in orders of magnitude, branching possibilities, assumptions, task parameters, and so on. 

To understand the difference between machine learning and deep learning, we’re going to take a brief time-out to talk about programmable logic. And, we’ll start by using our robot friend to help us see how decision making works in a seemingly simple task, and what that means when we’re defining “complex tasks.” 

The direction from the operator is something like, “Robot friend, get yourself from the lab to the front door of the building.” Here are some of the possible decisions the robot then has to make and inputs the robot might have to adjust for: 

• Now?
  • If yes, then take a step.
  • If no, then wait.
    • What are valid reasons to wait?
    • If you wait, when should you resume the command?
• Take a step.
  • That step could land on solid ground.
  • Or, there could be a pencil on the floor.
    • If you step on the pencil, was it inconsequential or do you slip?
      • If you slip, do you fall?
        • If you fall, did you sustain damage?
        • If yes, do you need to call for help? 
        • If not or if it’s minor, get back up.
          • If you sustained damage but you could get back up, do you proceed or take the time to repair? 
        • If there’s no damage, then take the next step.
          • First, you’ll have to determine your new position in the room.
• Take the next step. All of the first-step possibilities exist, and some new ones, too.
  • With the same foot or the other foot? 
  • In a straight line or make a turn? 

And so on and so forth. Now, take that direction that has parameters—where and how—and get rid of some of them. Your direction for a deep learning AI might be, “Robot, come to my house.” Or, it might be telling the robot to go about a normal day, which means it would have to decide when and how to walk for itself without a specific “walk” command from an operator. 

Neural Networks: Logic, Math, and Processing Power

Thus far in the article, we’ve talked about intelligence as a function of decision making. Algorithms outline the decision we want made or the dataset we want the AI to engage with. But, when you think about the process of decision making, you’re actually talking about many decisions getting made in a series. With machine learning, you’re giving more parameters for how to make decisions. With deep learning, you’re asking open-ended questions. 

You can certainly view these definitions as having a big ol’ swath of gray area and overlap in their definitions. But at a certain point, all those decisions a computer has to make starts to slow a computer down and require more processing power. There are processors for different kinds of AI by the way, all designed to increase processing power. Whatever that point is, you’ve reached a deep learning threshold. 

If we’re looking at things as yes/nos, we assume there’s only one outcome to each choice. Ultimately, yes, our robot is either going to take a step or not. But all of those internal choices, as you can see from the above messy and incomplete list, create nested dependencies. When you’re solving a complex task, you need a structure that is not a strict binary, and that’s when you create a neural network. 

Neural networks learn, just like other ML mechanisms. As its name suggests, a neural network is an interlinked network of artificial neurons based on the structure of biological brains. Each neuron processes data from its incoming connections, passing on results to its outgoing connections. As we train the network by feeding it data, the training algorithm adjusts those processes to optimize the output of the network as a whole. Our robot friend may slip the first few times it steps on a pencil, but, each time, it’s fine-tuning its processing with the goal of staying upright.

You’re Giving Me a Complex!

As you can probably tell, training is important, and the more complex the problem, the more time and data you need to train to consider all possibilities. All possibilities necessarily means providing as much data as possible so that an AI can learn what’s relevant to solving a problem and give you a good solution to your question. Frankly, if or when you’ve succeeded, often scientists have difficulty tracking how neural networks make decisions.

That’s not surprising, in some ways. Deep learning has to solve for shades of gray—for the moment when one user would choose one solution and another would use another solution and it’s hard to tell which was the “better” solution between the two. Take natural language models: You’re translating “I want to drive a car” from English to Spanish. Do you include the implied subject—”yo quiero” instead of “quiero”—when both are correct? Do you use “el coche” or “el carro” or “el auto” as your preferred translation of “car”? Great, now do all that for poetry, with its layers of implied meanings even down to using a single word, cultural and historical references, the importance of rhythm, pagination, lineation, etc. 

And that’s before we even get to ethics. Just like in the trolley problem, you have to define how you define what’s “better,” and “better” might just change with context. The trolley problem presents you with a scenario: a train is on course to hit and kill people on the tracks. You can change the direction of the train, but you can’t stop the train. You have two choices:

• You can do nothing, and the train will hit five people. 
• You can pull a lever and the train will move to a side track where it will kill one person. 

The second scenario is better from a net-harm perspective, but it makes you directly responsible for killing someone. And, things become complicated when you start to add details. What if there are children on the track? Does it matter if the people are illegally on the track? What if pulling the lever also kills you—how much do you/should you value your own survival against other peoples’? These are just the sorts of scenarios that self-driving cars have to solve for. 

Deep learning also leaves room for assumptions. In our walking example above, we start with challenging a simple assumption—Do I take the first step now or later? If I wait, how do I know when to resume? If my operator is clearly telling me to do something, under what circumstances can I reject the instruction? 

Yeah, But Is AI (or ML or DL) Going to Take Over the World?

Okay, deep breaths. Here’s the summary:

• Artificial intelligence is what we call it when a computer appears intelligent. It’s the umbrella term. 
• Machine learning and deep learning both describe processes through which the computer appears intelligent—what it does. As you move from machine learning to deep learning, the tasks get more complex, which means they take more processing power and have different logical underpinnings. 

Our brains organically make decisions, adapt to change, process stimuli—and we don’t really know how—but the bottom line is: it’s incredibly difficult to replicate that process with inorganic materials, especially when you start to fall down the rabbit hole of the overlap between hardware and software when it comes to producing chipsets, and how that material can affect how much energy it takes to compute. And don’t get us started on quantum math.

AI is one of those areas where it’s easy to get lost in the sauce, so to speak. Not only does it play on our collective anxieties, but it also represents some seriously complicated engineering that brings together knowledge from various disciplines, some of which are unexpected to non-experts. (When you started this piece, did you think we’d touch on neuroscience?) Our discussions about AI—what it is, what it can do, and how we can use it—become infinitely more productive once we start defining things clearly. Jump into the comments to tell us what you think, and look out for more stories about AI, cloud storage, and beyond.

The post AI 101: How Cognitive Science and Computer Processors Create Artificial Intelligence appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Post Syndicated from Stephanie Doyle original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/amazon-sunsets-cloud-drive/

Another one bites the dust. Amazon announced they’re putting Amazon Cloud Drive in the rearview to focus on Amazon Photos in a phased deprecation through December 2023. Today, we’ll dig into what this means for folks with data on Amazon Cloud Drive, especially those with files other than photos and videos.

Dear Amazon Drive User

When Amazon dropped the news, they explained the phased approach they would take to deprecating Amazon Drive. They’re not totally eliminating Drive—yet. Here’s what they’ve done so far, and what they plan to do moving forward:

• October 31, 2022: Amazon removed the Drive app from iOS and Android app stores. The app doesn’t get bug fixes and security updates anymore.
• January 31, 2023: Uploading to the Amazon Drive website will be cut off. You will have read-only access to your files.
• December 31, 2023: Amazon Drive will no longer be supported and access to files will be cut off. Every file stored on Amazon Drive, except photo or video files, needs a new home. Users can access photo and video files on Amazon Photos.

Now, users face two options for what to do with files stored on Amazon Drive:

1. Follow instructions to download Amazon Photos for iOS and Android devices. And, use the Amazon Drive website to download and store all other files locally or with another service.
2. Transfer your entire library of photos, videos, and other data to another service.

A Quick History of Amazon Cloud Drive

In 2014, Amazon offered free, unlimited photo storage on Amazon Cloud Drive as a loyalty perk for Prime members. The following year, they rolled out a subscription-based offering to store other types of files in addition to photos—video, documents, etc.—on Cloud Drive.

Then, in 2017, they capped the free tier at 5GB. This was just one of many in a string of cloud storage providers ending a free offering and forcing users to pay or move.

All Amazon account holders—regardless of whether they paid for Prime or not—got 5GB for photos and other file types free of charge. If you wanted or needed more storage than that, you had to sign up for the subscription-based offering starting at $11.99 per year for 100GB of storage, and prices went up from there.

You might consider this the beginning of the end for Amazon Cloud Drive.

Why Say Goodbye?

When tech companies deprecate a feature—as Amazon has done with Drive—it’s for any number of reasons:

1. To combine one feature with another.
2. To rectify naming inconsistencies.
3. When a newer version makes supporting the older one impossible or impractical.
4. To avoid flaws in a necessary feature.
5. When a better alternative replaced the feature.
6. To simplify the system as a whole.

Amazon’s reason for deprecating Drive? To provide a dedicated solution for photos and videos. The company stated, “We are taking the opportunity to more fully focus our efforts on Amazon Photos to provide customers a dedicated solution for photos and video storage.” Unfortunately, that leaves folks who store anything else high and dry.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The bottom line: Amazon Drive customers must park emails, documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, and text files somewhere else. If you’re an Amazon Drive customer looking to move your files out before you lose access, we invite you to try Backblaze B2. The first 10GB is on us.

How to Get Started with Backblaze B2

1. If you’re not a customer, first sign up for B2 Cloud Storage.
2. If you’re already a customer, enable B2 Cloud Storage in your “My Settings” tab. You can follow our Quick Start Guide for more detailed instructions.



3. Download your data from Amazon Drive.
4. Upload your data to Backblaze B2. Many customers choose to do so directly through the web interface, while others prefer to use integrated transfer solutions like Cyberduck, which is free and open-source, or Panic’s Transmit for Macs.
5. Sit back and relax knowing your data is safely stored in the Backblaze B2 Storage Cloud.

The post Amazon Sunsets Cloud Drive appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.