Is "democratize" the hip way to spell "sell" these days?
Tuesdays are buzzword bingo nights
Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI
51–60 of 126 posts
Re: Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI
#52Is Ex-Googler still a thing when everyone is an Ex-Googler?
Re: Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI
#53Which 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?
"Democratized" in the context of a startup usually doesn't mean letting the public access something, it usually means letting a different group of investors (the funders of the startup) access a market (formerly controlled by a monopoly or oligopoly of established mega-firms).
Re: Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI
#54Is "democratize" the hip way to spell "sell" these days?
And "AI".
Re: Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI simply replicate existing bias the data already has. The downside is that it could amplify the bias if not done carefully; the upside is that now we can analyze the algorithm's bias and fix it, which is much harder to do to people with biases.
But to do this you would need unbiased people. Since those don't exist, this correction would just be matching the bias to that of the bias adjuster.
This was exactly my point -- at what inflection point is the AI's decision sound, vs when it may be based on bias from its base creation code (whatever the substrate code that 'births' an AI? WTF do we call that (as obviously an AI is meant to iteratively evolve - at what point is an AI required to 'check in changes' such that if a rollback is required across that AI's reach may be accomplished...
We need a "product recall" method that doesnt involve Blade Runners and campy one-liners...
SERIOUSLY
Re: Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI
#56Is Ex-Googler still a thing when everyone is an Ex-Googler?
I was about to post that. Anyone who reads the little PDF Google gives you when you apply there knows pretty much exactly how the interview will go, and the questions they frequently ask are all over the internet. At that point its just about cramming your brain for a couple of days.
Like, I don't know how to write an A* on top of my head, but back when I was looking at Google a while ago, they always asked that question, and the prep PDF said so. Kind of hard to fail there...
Not everyone will be able to work there, but it's certainly not the status symbol it was a long time ago. Plenty of "Ex Googlers" are code monkeys like anyone else from any other company.
Re: Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI
#57I have been thinking recently about the ethics of AI; At what point do we 'allow' AI to determine actions based on perceived (programmed) *BIAS* How can one prevent any bias on an AI's ability to be deterministic.
All of the conversations I've seen about AI bias recently seem to define "bias" as "any difference between the output and the particular rightthink ordained by whoever's speaking." Nobody cares about making the AI's output correct , they just want it to agree with them . So the glib answer is "train it on unbiased data". Depending on your philosophy, this translates either to "manually 'fix' anything you see as 'bias…
I am now convinced this is what is meant by this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros
but instead its the warning against letting AI iterate upon itself without external intervention...
Re: Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Commoditize as an alternative?
A commodity is a product that's not differentiated between suppliers (think silver, pork bellies, robusta coffee beans).
Examples of things that are democratized (accessible to virtually anyone) but not commoditized (not the same as what you can get from other providers):
- Coca cola
- iPhones
- Teslas
- Google search
- HN
If you're going to make money by creating an NLP service for wide adoption, you'd hope to create some competitive moat. Otherwise there's no way for you to earn profits to amortize your R&D.
Re: Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI
#59Large language model are the rage, it seems. Can someone a successful (not necessarily profitable) concrete application of these things, other than "gpt-3 wrote an article in Guardian and said it wouldn't kill us".
We use specifically prompted gpt-3 to generate synthetic training examples (eg paraphrases, summaries, etc). We fine tune other (much smaller than gpt3 but still large-ish) language models for controllable language generation (often augmented with synthetic data from gpt3). As a comparison point, we did try GPT Neo and it did not provide sufficiently high quality synthetic data.
Transformers in general have lots of applications (machine translation, information retrieval/reranking, ner, etc).
Re: Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI
#60"Democratize" has got to be the most abused new buzzword in tech for this decade. Right up there with "synergy" from yesteryear.
Cloud seems like it should be between those buzzwords, chronologically.