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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

#71

Post by dna_polymerase »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #28
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

All that source tells us is that the word has been wrongly used since the french revolution. Democracy means governance by the masses. Has nothing to do with making things accessible to the masses.

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

#73

Post by fxtentacle »

How does the business model work here?

For a language processing SDK to be useful, it needs to work inside an offline capable app on my phone. But doesn't that make it way too easy for someone to extract the network and use it to train their "own" AI with distillation learning?

And if they instead only run the AI on their servers so users need to connect through an API, how is that any different from the language AI APIs that Google, Amazon, Microsoft already offer?

And let's say they foot the bill to train a new type of language AI, what stops the big cloud providers from just training something similar? A 200mio non-recurring expense won't stop Google if you have proven that it's a viable business for you.

Asking because I'm pondering similar issues for my AI project.

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

#75

Post by fxtentacle »

___luigi wrote: post #68

In the ML industry, there are two type of companies. 1/ Open source companies like huggingface ( https://github.com/huggingface ), explosion ( https://github.com/explosion ), Fast.ai that democratized access to ML and provided a set of tools & language models for engineers. These companies didn't only manage to build a company and open source projects, they built a welcoming community and it's impressive to see all t…

Do you know how Huggingface can pay their bills? How do you monetize an AI that everyone can freely download?

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

#76

Post by yobbo »

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?

Not only that, democratize would imply that the general public has influence on the project through voting, for example.

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

#77

Post by drdeca »

NhanH wrote: post #66
rahimnathwani wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 creat…

So from your definition and example, it means that Coke want to democratize soda, Apple want to democratize iPhone and Tesla want to democratize EV. I don't think those sentence would have your expected meaning when someone else read them.

Well, no, because the current state of affairs isn’t that very few people have access to smartphones / soda .

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

#78

Post by tsjq »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #70
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The former. "Data dumps" are privacy-friendly. For example, a user can download Wikipedias dumps and search through them to her hearts content, and never use the network. Zero data collection by third parties. All those observing the network can see is that she downloaded some data dumps. "Web APIs" are "tech" company and surveillance-friendly. Network access is required and all activity is observed and recorded. Web…

Reminds me of a joke. "They say New Yorkers are selfish and unfriendly, but its all untrue. When I visited, a guy overheard I was a tourist and came right up and offered me a great deal on Staten Island Ferry tickets. Just $7.50 for a round trip!" (In case you don't know, the Staten Island Ferry is free).

Information arbitrage

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

#79

Post by sanxiyn »

joe_the_user wrote: post #34

Large 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".

GitHub Copilot?

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

#80

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

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?

If the former has equivalent performance (as in output quality) etc., then the former obviously.

If the former doesn't exist (at a comparable quality), then the latter is better than the nothing.

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