Create ML — It’s a Wonderful Thing

What’s this Create ML thing?

Create ML is a Swift-only framework designed to help build Machine Learning (ML) models from within Xcode.

Why should you care?

Here’s some background information to set the stage. At WWDC 2017, Apple introduced CoreML. This is a set of libraries for using on-device machine learning. Developers could use pre-trained ML models for image recognition, sentiment analysis, data analysis, and so on.

A really big stumbling block for many developers is that the creation of these ML models is not a simple task. While CoreML can use models generated by multiple different tool sets, conquering those tool sets was a task beyond many developers’ reach (and definitely mine). After all, I have software to ship on a regular basis, so I can’t spend my time figuring out why this one particular model generator failed to build something for me after 24 hours of occupying my CPU, plus the time to get all the right dependencies for Python in place, and so on.

I’m being real here. As developers, we try to pretend that we can know it all, but that’s not practical.

(cue 1024 comments of “a real developer…”. Spare me.)

Great, what makes it so amazing?

Create ML makes building these models a trivial exercise. And I mean trivial. I compared notes with several co-workers, and we all independently experimented with Create ML the first night it was available. We were all able to generate image recognition models in no time flat. Time expenditure was measured in minutes, not hours. Not just model generation, but the whole setup experience.

We can now legitimately set up trial balloons for seeing if something is a problem likely to be solved with ML. It works with the language we love most (Swift), in the toolset we love most (macOS & Xcode).

Create ML has only been public for a day or two and is still under development. When we hit the full release day, I look forward to sharing tutorials, samples, and further applications of the technology.

Hopefully this explains what Create ML is and why you might care about it.