FrugalML switches between APIs to improve image classification and cut costs

Stanford University researchers developed a framework that enables developers to intelligently switch between multiple cloud AI APIs (including those from Google and Microsoft) within a budget constraint. In preliminary experiments, they claim their system -- FrugalML -- typically leads to a more than 50% cost reduction while matching the accuracy of the best single API. Third-party machine learning APIs come with several challenges. One is that companies don't price workloads the same. Moreover, different APIs perform either better or worse on different types of data.