Ten years ago, when Japanese developer Sato dropped out of the University of Tokyo, he did not know that he had Asperger's syndrome.
This kind of social communication disorder makes it difficult for him to integrate into different working environments after entering the society. For example, he tried a variety of jobs, including entering nursing school, learning to become a baker, etc., but in the end he couldn't adapt.
Note: The picture is from the official Google Cloud blog
(Webmaster’s home note: Asperger’s syndrome (AS) belongs to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or extensive development) Disorders (PDD), have the same social communication barriers as autism, limited interests and repetitive, stereotyped activities.)
Fortunately, there is no way to go. Unable to work normally, Sato decided to start a new experiment and independently developed an artificial intelligence (AI) website, which reached 1 million users in just 10 days.
In March 2020, Sato released an AI tool "AI Gahaku" independently completed by him, which can generate classical painting style portraits from portrait photos uploaded by users to the website. The effect is as follows:
AI Gahaku uses a pix2pix-based ML model for style transformation. pix2pix is a conditional generation confrontation network (cGAN) model, which is designed to generate specified images as conditions Realistic image. As follows:
Note: The image generated by pix2pix. The picture on the left is the condition, and the picture on the right is the generated image
The 10-day users skyrocketed from 0 to 1 million
During the development of AI Gahaku, Sato trained a model based on pix2pix. The model uses the uploaded photo as a condition to generate a realistic portrait of a classical painting.
When Sato shared his products on Twitter, the site immediately caused a sensation, first in Japan, and then in the United States and other countries. In just 10 days, AI Gahaku global users increased from 0 to 1 million.
Sato also released another interesting project called pixel-me, which is a tool that also uses pixel 2 pix technology to generate 8-bit style portraits. The difference is that he uses Pixelate images to train this model.
Note: The picture is from the official Google Cloud blog
The daily operating cost is 20 dollars
So how does Sato deal with the surge in traffic at a low cost?
When creating the website, Sato used Google cloud platform services, especially Firebase (Google's mobile platform, which can help developers quickly develop high-quality applications and grow their businesses.), serverless computing platforms Cloud Run and Colab (a free service provided by Google) Cloud platform). This allowed him to develop AI Gahaku and pixel-me while keeping costs low.
Although AI Gahaku was created by one person, since Cloud Run's serverless has auto-scaling, this tool can be automatically expanded. Now that Sato has packaged the pix2pix-based ML model into a container and deployed it to Cloud Run, he does not have to manually start or shut down the server according to the traffic load.
On the contrary, after receiving more and more requests, each instance can be started within a few seconds. If there is a sudden spike in traffic, dozens or hundreds of instances will start almost immediately, while staying within a controllable budget.
This means that Sato does not need to change the systemAnything in the system architecture, because he saw daily traffic increase from 0 to 1 million within 10 days after launch. Currently, AI Gahaku's cloud running backend uses 200 containers.
Sato said that he was surprised that the site provided millions of users with a fast and stable response time and responded to the surge in global traffic without any design changes.
It is reported that under current load, the daily operating cost of AI Gahaku is about US$20, but Sato has no plans to commercialize the website.
Sato said in an interview, "I am not interested in entrepreneurship and website expansion. I just want to continue to create something that is really interesting for me." He also added: "Through Google's serverless Cloud services allow me to easily explore those interesting ideas without worrying about initial cost, scalability and continuous operations.”
AI Gahaku This product has allowed Sato to receive many responses and great reviews from all over the world Feedback, this is probably the most valuable and meaningful moment in his life.
Note: The content of the article refers to the google cloud blog.
