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Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI

fastcompany.com

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Re: Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI

#21

Post by abeppu »

shamoo wrote: post #9

What stops Google, Microsoft, etc from doing the same if Cohere's solution gains traction?

Don't they try this currently? https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/docs

I think during a gold rush, it's good to sell shovels even if can't be the leading shovel sales outlet in town.

I think we're at a point where new NLP techniques will create a lot of value, but it's still hard to tell in advance which cases the current techniques can do well enough to be worthwhile, and in which cases they'll be kinda cool but not effective and so we'll continue to require humans to be involved catching errors. While we sort that out, a lot of companies will need to take a few stabs at trying to get some new model to work for their problems.

Re: Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI

#22

Post by vgeek »

abeppu wrote: post #8

Which is more "democratized": a large language model which can be downloaded, and accessed as a library, originally based from the work of the FAANG giants (e.g. huggingface transformers) or an API, where every invocation is a call that flows through Cohere's servers?

In America, money is speech-- especially in politics, so unfortunately maybe this is a "fitting" use of the word.

Re: Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI

#23

Post by tdeck »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #17
exdsq wrote: post #12

What does democratize even mean?

It's a trendy marketing word for selling to a lot of smaller businesses, in contrast with "normal" enterprise software sales which stereotypically focus on big contracts.

I think this kind of marketing language is aimed more at potential employees / investors than customers. Employees and investors often want to imagine themselves as part of a narrative where they're "democratizing" something.

Re: Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI

#26

Post by robbedpeter »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #14
timoth3y wrote: post #5

"democratize" You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The word you are looking for is "mass-market" or perhaps "sell to small business".

Or, for a darker spin, "absolve yourself of responsibility if anyone misuses your API". I actually think OpenAI gets this right with GPT-3, having fairly strict terms of use for their API, so I'm sad to see seemingly less responsible players enter the space.

EleutherAI won this fight already. The technology is freely available for anyone to use however they like, and they're responsible for whatever it is they do with it.

The 6 billion parameter model was released just last week with the huggingface api hooks. It's just a few percentage points less performant than Gpt-3 DaVinci in most metrics. You can run it on a laptop with 40gb ram, albeit slowly.

All that to say, the horse has left the barn. What openai is doing is just marketing and protecting an investment. They don't have an ethical or moral high ground.

Re: Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI

#28

Post by rahimnathwani »

timoth3y wrote: post #5

"democratize" You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The word you are looking for is "mass-market" or perhaps "sell to small business".

What they say they're doing fits one of the definitions of democratize: "make (something) accessible to everyone".

More about the etymology here: https://www.etymonline.com/word/democratize

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