FAQ#

This is a list of Frequently Asked Questions about CLIP-as-service. Feel free to suggest new entries!

What is CLIP model?

Developed by OpenAI, CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training) is a neural network trained on a variety of (image, text) pairs. The original CLIP Github repository is here. The introduction of the CLIP model can be found here.

Do I need to install clip-server and clip-client together?

No. You can install them separately on different machines. For example, on a GPU server, you just need clip-server; on your laptop, you just need clip-client.

What is CLIP-as-service based on? The codebase seems quite small

CLIP-as-service leverages features from Jina, which itself utilizes DocArray. Thanks to them CLIP-as-service can be quickly built with solid infrastructure and rich features.

I had this AioRpcError, what should I do?

If you encounter the following errors, it means you client can not connect to the server.

   GRPCClient@28632[E]:gRPC error: StatusCode.UNAVAILABLE failed to connect to all addresses
the ongoing request is terminated as the server is not available or closed already

  AioRpcError: <AioRpcError of RPC that terminated with:
          status = StatusCode.UNAVAILABLE
          details = "failed to connect to all addresses"
          debug_error_string =
  "{"created":"@1648074480.571952000","description":"Failed to pick subchannel",
  "file":"src/core/ext/filters/client_channel/client_channel.cc","file_line":312
  9,"referenced_errors":[{"created":"@1648074480.571952000","description":"faile
  d to connect to all addresses","file":"src/core/lib/transport/error_utils.cc",
  "file_line":163,"grpc_status":14}]}"

You can try .profile() to confirm it. If it still throws the same error, then your connection is broken.

While it is hard to pinpoint a network problem, also out of the scope of CLIP-as-service, we here provide you a checklist that may help you to diagnose the problem:

  • Are the IP address, port, and protocol all correct?

  • Is client and server under the same network, or a different network?

  • Is your server down?

  • Is server’s port open to public?

  • Is there a firewall on the server side that restricts the port?

  • Is there a firewall on the client side that restricts the port?

  • Is the security group (on Cloud providers) correctly configured?

Why “CLIP-as-service” why not “CLIP-as-a-service”

Kind of pay homage to BERT-as-service. It is not about grammatically correct anyhow.

What happened to the BERT-as-service.

There has been no maintenance of BERT-as-service since Feb. 2019.

CLIP-as-service is a huge upgrade of BERT-as-service, with more powerful universal embedding models that can handle both images and texts; and more solid and efficient microservice infrastructure developed in the last 2 years by Jina AI. The high-level API, especially the client side, is a drop-in replacement of the old BERT-as-service.

Where can I find the old codebase of BERT-as-service.

In the bert-as-service branch of the repository.