OCI Data Science vs.

Google AI Platform By Rupesh Varma, Wes Prichard, Elena Sunshine, Mark Hornick | July 2020
Google provides a series of tools for their AI and ML product suite:

Cloud AI solutions
• Document Understanding AI
It offers a scalable, serverless platform to automatically classify, extract, and digitize data within the scanned or digital
documents.
• Contact Center AI
Google is collaborating with integrations provided by Cisco, Five9, Genesys, Mitel, Twilio, and Vonage. The purpose of this tool is
to help businesses build customer care experiences with the help of Google AI.
• Recommendations AI
For a retail-oriented business, Recommendations AI helps deliver personalized product recommendations to customers at scale.
• Visual Product Search
Visual Product Search helps to deliver relevant products to customers by matching customer-generated images with images from
product catalog. These results reduce purchasing friction for customers by prompting them with products based on their
interests.
Cloud AutoML
• AutoML Natural Language custom entity extraction and sentiment analysis
These additions to AutoML Natural Language let users identify and isolate custom fields from input text and also train and serve
sentiment analysis models on unstructured data, including customer feedback.
• AutoML Tables
AutoML Tables lets users turn structured data into predictive insights by training models without coding. It can ingest data for
modeling from BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and other sources.
• AutoML Vision object detection
AutoML Vision helps detect multiple objects in images by its enhanced image classification abilities, providing bounding boxes to
identify object locations.
• AutoML Vision Edge
AutoML Vision Edge helps deploy models at the edge, and trigger real-time actions based on local data by running classifier
models on edge devices. AutoML Video Edge supports a variety of edge devices where low latency is critical, including Edge TPUs
for fast inference.
• AutoML Video
For those who need custom video classification models with custom labels capabilities beyond the Video Intelligence API,
AutoML Video lets users upload video footage and custom tags, in order to train models that are specific to business needs for
tagging and retrieving video with custom attributes.
BigQuery ML
• BigQuery Insights: BigQuery ML core
BigQuery ML is generally available, and users can use new model types with SQL code.
• BigQuery: k-means clustering ML
K-means clustering helps establish groupings of data points based on axes or attributes, and can establish groupings for data via
convergence, from Standard SQL in BigQuery.
• BigQuery: Import TensorFlow Models
Users can import their TensorFlow models and call them straight from BigQuery to create classifier and predictive models right
from BigQuery.
• BigQuery: TensorFlow DNN classifier
Deep neural networks (DNNs) can help classify data on a large number of features or signals. Users can train and deploy a DNN
model of choosing straight from BigQuery’s Standard SQL interface.
• BigQuery: TensorFlow DNN regressor
If a regression is more useful to fit data than a classifier, users can design a regression in TensorFlow and then call it to analyze
the data in BigQuery.
Data Science platform
• AI Platform—notebooks, data labeling, SDKs, and console interface
AI Platform allows to select models, or train models and set them up to serve in production. This includes a development
environment, Jupyter notebooks, pre-built algorithms, customer containers, custom user code support for prediction, and 4-core
support for prediction.
• AI Platform Notebooks
If the requirement is to test out models and hyperparameter configurations in an interactive and shared environment, users can
deploy JupyterLab iPython notebooks on a semi-managed service.
• Cloud AI Data Labeling Service
Cloud AI provides a paid service to request labelers to classify uploaded data for use in training models, or use automated tools
that let efficiently label data at scale.
• Hybrid SDK
This is the underlying technology that helps users move their ML code from their on-premise cluster running on Kubeflow to GCP
with almost no code changes.
• AI Platform Online Prediction: User Code Support
AI Platform’s online prediction functionality supports user-supplied custom code, which helps pre-process data both at training
time and at deployment time.
• AI Hub
AI Hub allows users to test out and share APIs, Google-provided models, third-party models, learning content, and data science
notebooks, as users experiment and iterate machine learning models.
• Kubeflow 0.5
Kubeflow helps orchestrate machine learning training pipelines across on-prem and cloud-based resources. As a cloud-native
platform that integrates Kubernetes with TensorFlow, users can containerize training and serving infrastructure.
Pre-trained machine learning API updates
• Cloud Vision API—bundled enhancements
The Vision API operates on batches of images through batch prediction, and document text detection supports online annotation
of PDFs, as well as files that contain a mix of scanned and rendered text.
• Cloud Natural Language API—bundled enhancements
Cloud Natural Language includes support for Russian and Japanese languages, as well as built in entity-extraction for receipts and
invoices.
• Cloud Translation API V3
Translation API helps to maintain and control brand by defining the vocabulary and terminology within translations. Users can
then easily integrate their added brand-specific terms into translation workflows.
• Video Intelligence API—bundled enhancements
The Video Intelligence API lets content creators search for tagged aspects of their video footage. The API supports optical
character recognition (generally available), object tracking (also generally available), and new streaming video annotation
capability.
Strengths of Google AI Platform
• Enterprise focus: Google has widespread presence in the developer community but has expanded its focus on designing
enterprises solutions across multiple industries. It has also democratized ML via AutoML and Kubeflow. This lets citizen
developers and nontechnical users quickly build AIbased solutions.
• Extending its NLP capabilities: Google dominates the market with text mining capabilities, speech synthesis and analysis for
speech-to-text (STT) and text-to-speech (TTS). It also provides extensive support for translation across more than 100 languages,
making it easier for enterprises to have a global reach with their implementations of virtual agents using Dialogflow.
• Human vision emulation: Google has an extensive set of features backed by optimized hardware to support DNNs that have been
extensively trained. Google also has a vast set of image and streaming video capabilities for enhancing user experiences. Apart
from the basic features of classification, object and landmark identification, it can moderate explicit content moderation within
images and streaming content. It is leveraged across document understanding, product searches, smart stores and processing
streaming content from drones for maintenance within the energy and ONGC domains.
• Massive amount of data sources: Google assets — Google Search, Google Analytics, YouTube, Android OS, Chrome and its other
products and services — provide a competitive advantage for the AI services. It can adapt its products for its users because of
smarter algorithms trained on large volumes of diversified data.

Weaknesses of Google AI Platform

• Text summarization: Even though it is backed with a significant amount of NLP techniques and features such as text extraction,
entity extraction and sentiment analysis, the text summarization feature is missing from its set of capabilities.
• Holding back on open exchange of models: In the battleground for free and open, none of the big players are pushing for closed-
source ML and deep learning solutions when it comes to Keras, TensorFlow, MXNet, Caffe2 and PyTorch. The ONNX format
initiative was launched by Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft — in support with AMD, Advanced RISC Machine (ARM), IBM, Intel,
Huawei, NVIDIA and Qualcomm hardware providers — to support interoperability. The format has been included in most well-
known frameworks except Google’s TensorFlow. Google has little interest in upending its dominance for the sake of openness.
The company is committed to its own TensorFlow model and weight file format, SavedModel, and to building its own ecosystem
around that format, including TensorFlow Server, Estimators and Tensor2Tensor.
• Facial recognition with streaming video: Google has made a conscious decision not to include support for facial detection,
matching, recognition and identifying emotions in its streaming video services today. This is in contrast to the same support
provided within the image classification services via Cloud Vision API.
• Security integration: GCP’s native security controls are good but currently have weaker integrations with on-premises
technologies and security approaches. Organizations with mature security operations teams may find it easier to work with
Google’s competitors when integrating enterprise solutions with ML and AI services.

Oracle Differentiators
Oracle engages with organizations seeking to achieve business benefit from data by applying machine learning and data science. Oracle
machine learning solutions accelerate the process of building and deploying machine learning models enabling organization to realize
and maintain the desired business benefits. Oracle provides tools for the data scientist to build machine learning models, but we also
help organizations with their end-to-end data science process with data integration, data management, data catalog, and data
transformation services. Oracle’s high-performance tools for building machine learning models combined with a full-featured data
science platform allows for complete data science solutions tailored to the specific needs of the customer.
Products:
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science: OCI Data Science is fully managed service for teams of data scientists to collaborate
on training, deploying, and managing models on Oracle Cloud infrastructure for development of ML models. OCI Data Science
enables data scientists to build, train, deploy, and manage machine learning models on Oracle Cloud
• Oracle Machine Learning (OML) in Database: OML moves the algorithms to the data as it runs ML within the database, where
the data reside. It minimizes or eliminates data movement, achieves scalability, preserves data security, and accelerates time-
to-model deployment
 • Data Science Virtual Machines on Oracle Cloud: OCI Data Science VM leverages Oracle Linux GPU Image to deploy Deep
Learning Frameworks, HPC Applications and Visualization Applications seamlessly and provides flexibility to run on VM GPU
instances as well as run production workloads on Bare-Metal instances.

Oracle Differentiators for Data Science:

• OCI provides differentiated performance & scale with support for elasticity for bare metal compute with NVMe SSDs as well
as it provides HA, security, etc.
• OCI Data Science provides access to Jupyter Notebook to build/train models. OCI Data Science provides cognitive services and
support AI frameworks. OML for ADW provides Zeppelin notebook access to provide flexibility to users.
• Oracle provides a cloud native, open data lake infrastructure on OCI. OCI Data Science provides data
preparation/transformation capabilities to normalize datasets, remove duplication, etc.

Sales Guidance
Oracle has a holistic strategy towards artificial intelligence and machine learning across its entire product portfolio built around a
framework spanning Oracle Applications, Oracle Cloud and Autonomous. The branding around this is "Ready-to-Go" (AI embedded in
Oracle Applications), "Ready-to-Work (AI/ML powered Autonomous Database services) and "Ready-to-Build (services and
technologies for building AI/ML solutions).

• From a SaaS and “ready-to-go” AI point of view, Oracle differentiates on level of investment in embedding AI into
applications and services.
o Oracle Applications provides a capability known as Adaptive Intelligent Applications that provides built in machine
learning to drive 'next best' actions across Oracle's SaaS portfolio of HCM, ERP, EPM and CX (next best hire, next best
campaign, next best supplier etc.). Some of this machine learning driven capabilities are further powered by 3rd
party consumer data from the Oracle Data Cloud and recent acquisitions for B2B data from DataFox.
o Oracle also embeds our ML algorithms in other Oracle Applications. Oracle is much further ahead of Google to fuse
AI/ML into all of our cloud services to automate operations and reduce operational cost, and to enable customers to
build more intelligent apps.
o Oracle Analytics Cloud provides built in machine learning capabilities to enable the line of business user to get
predictive insights from their data.
OCI Data Science is a single platform which provides a comprehensive experience for data scientists on OCI. In contrast,
GCP’s AI Platform toolchain involves multiple interconnected components and has a significant learning curve.
• From an autonomous service and “ready-to-work” AI point of view vs. Google, with Oracle’s Autonomous Database, machine
learning is working behind the scenes to automate security patching, backups, and optimize database query performance,
which helps to eliminate repetitive manual tasks. Oracle has sophisticated machine learning built directly into the Oracle
Database itself. This enables high performance machine learning processing of data and advanced analytics support in the
Oracle database itself.
OCI Data Science offers a simple workflow to use deep learning frameworks such as Tensorflow, PyTorch, MXNet, and
XGBoost on OCI GPU VMs. In comparison, GCP infrastructure is complex and requires significant technical expertise to
understand.
• From a platform and “ready-to-build” AI point of view vs. Google, Oracle has OCI Data Science as well as Oracle Machine
Learning for ADW. Oracle’s ready-to-build AI platform gives data scientists and application developers a range of cloud
services to easily build, train, deploy, and manage AI-powered solutions.
o OCI Data Science:
▪ Oracle was rated a strong leader in Forrester Wave: Notebook-Based Predictive Analytics and Machine
Learning Solutions. Google appears to be included in in the bottom wave in this Forrester Wave.
▪ Oracle provides several set of tools to enable data scientists to build, train, deploy and manage machine
learning models, built in notebook capabilities in the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse and line of
business tools like OAC discussed above.
▪ All of Oracle's AI/ML capabilities will run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure which provides a high performance,
low cost platform for large scale data science and AI processing. Beyond bare metal services, non-
 oversubscribed networking, high performance storage infrastructure and native Kubernetes for big data and
analytic workloads. Oracle also has partnered with NVIDIA and offers the latest GPU infrastructure for deep
learning and other data science processing.
o Oracle Machine Learning for ADW:
▪ Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse has 25+ in-database implementations of machine learning algorithms
built right into the database itself enabling data scientists to drive predictive analytics from the data inside
Oracle Database—and eliminate data movement, take advantage of the DB’s strengths, build “predictive”
applications, etc.
▪ Oracle Machine Learning for ADW provides access to Apache Zeppelin-based ML SQL Notebook to allow data
scientists to collaborate in the Oracle ADW. This enables teams to collaborate to build, evaluate and deploy
predictive models and analytical methodologies in the Oracle ADW. Multi-user collaboration enables the
same notebook to be opened simultaneously by different users. In contrast, Google services for AI does not
support Zeppelin technology for multi-user collaborations.
Oracle provides complete support for ML and AI infusion at every level of the enterprise. OML provides integrated text
mining and Explicit Semantic Analysis feature extraction. With GCP, many of GCP AI tools are still in public beta (e.g., AI Hub,
AI Platform Data Labeling Service, Cloud AutoML Tables). There are too many fragmented and overlapping offerings with
Cloud and AI tools. The text summarization feature is missing even though they have semantic analysis.
• Lastly, two new Apps are now up taking our Oracle Machine Learning Microservices for model deployment beyond the
Database and our new cognitive analytics for images and text - Oracle Content and Experience and Oracle Integration
Cloud. Both have been presented publicly at our recent Analytics and Data Summit.

• Email questions or comments about this document to rupesh.varma@oracle.com.

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