TensorBoard.dev

» see tensorboard.dev as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The problem TensorBoard.dev existed to solve was a screenshot. If you trained a model and wanted to show somebody what the loss curve did, you took a picture of your own TensorBoard window and pasted it into a thread or a paper. The picture could not be zoomed into or hovered over, and it carried none of the thirty other scalars you had logged alongside the one in frame. Gal Oshri, the product manager who announced the service on 2 December 2019, opened with exactly that observation.

The fix was one command. You ran tensorboard dev upload against a log directory, Google took the files, and you got back a URL that anyone could open. No account for the reader, no server of your own. The hosted copy was interactive in the way the local tool is interactive, so a reviewer could drag through a chart that was sitting on somebody else's laptop two continents away.

It stayed free for the whole four years, with no published storage quota, which is what made it useful to the people who most needed it. A graduate student running experiments on borrowed GPU time has no line item for a commercial experiment tracker. For a while the free Google thing was the obvious answer, and links to it turned up in papers and in a large amount of tutorial writing that is now pointing at nothing.

I work on vision models for drones, so TensorBoard is open on my machine most weeks. The hosted half was the piece I never reached for, because when the work runs on hardware you own and the audience is in the same room, a local port already answers the question.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the reproducibility argument ~

Underneath the sharing pitch was a reproducibility argument that the machine learning field had been making loudly since about 2018. A paper reports a number. The number came from a run, the run had a learning rate schedule and a hundred decisions nobody writes down, and a reader has no way to interrogate any of it. An uploaded TensorBoard was a small, honest step toward handing over the evidence rather than the summary.

It was never full reproducibility, since you got the logs and not the code or the data. What it did hand over was the shape of the training run, which is a good deal more than a reported final number.

~ three results ~

Google posted the end notice in early October 2023. A commenter on the Hacker News thread searched the site for mentions of the product and got three results back. The first two were the announcement in 2019 and a showcase post a couple of years after it. The third was the closure notice he had just clicked on. He called it modern Google in three acts, and somebody else in the thread posted the link to killedbygoogle.com with no further comment, which by 2023 functioned as a complete argument.

The schedule was tidier than most. The site stopped accepting uploads on 1 December 2023 and users had until 31 December to export anything they wanted to keep, with the service recorded as shut down as of 1 January 2024. Google left the tombstone page up at the old address, where it still answers today with a short FAQ and a thank-you.

~ what survived ~

TensorBoard itself, the open source project, was untouched and remains the standard visualizer for anyone training a model today. The only casualty in the codebase was the tensorboard dev subcommand, which was removed from the command line tool because there was no longer anywhere for it to upload to. For sharing, Google pointed people at running TensorBoard inside a Colab notebook, which works and which also puts the file-keeping back on you.

What went with the service was every link. An uploaded experiment had a permanent-looking URL, people cited those URLs in papers and issue threads and course notes, and on 1 January 2024 all of them became dead ends at once. The free tier was always the product's reason to exist and always the reason it could not last, and the people who built their citations on it had no way of knowing which of those two facts would be decided first.

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