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

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

#81

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?

Yes. HF is built on a tiered subscription (SaaS) model. https://huggingface.co/pricing

You can refer to this discussion for more details: https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1285204129225281536

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

#82
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?

When a startup says anything, you should hear "we plan to use this to get hella rich".

There is no such thing as a startup with altruistic intent.

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes. HF is built on a tiered subscription (SaaS) model. https://huggingface.co/pricing You can refer to this discussion for more details: https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1285204129225281536

I believe huggingface mostly subsist on investments and the amount they earn directly is still pretty small compared to expenses, is that no longer the case?

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

#88

fast.ai are doing the best work democratizing AI (machine learning and neural networks), including natural language Can't recommend the course enough and it's incredible that such a quality resource is available for essentially zero cost https://github.com/fastai/course-nlp https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtmWHNX-gukKocXQOkQju...

I am/was a huge fan and have done their courses but they've made so many weird decisions (like going all in on swift4tf for teaching newish people so early on or the dramas they involve themselves in) and have stopped doing as much that I'm not sure if they are as great of a current example anymore (but maybe they'll resurface stronger).

Huggingface are a better example closer to what Cohere do.

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

#89
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?

When a startup says anything, you should hear "we plan to use this to get hella rich". There is no such thing as a startup with altruistic intent.

Altruistic startup = a non profit ?

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

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a startup says anything, you should hear "we plan to use this to get hella rich". There is no such thing as a startup with altruistic intent.

Altruistic startup = a non profit ?

Non profits and charities can certainly be altruistic.
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