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> starting from a strong open-source foundation and investing $40 million to train Thomson Sounds like they spent $40 million finetuning an open weight model on their own data? I wonder what they built on.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/thomson-reuters-builds-ai-mo...
I don't trust that they'll be able to make back that $40M. This feels very much like a news agency getting into crypto or launching its own NFT line. Or IBM selling Watson. Or Mozilla chasing every which thing. They're not stakeholders in the future of work. They're just wanting to stay relevant and pattern matching against what they see. Reuters is too important for this. If they were trying to use this as a narrati…
It's likely split between two goals:
1. Marketing and expressing to their customers that they are not falling behind, and
2. Insulating themselves from frontier labs jacking up prices, nerfing the models they depend on, or otherwise unexpected changes in behavior.
I think the main goal is #2. Thomson Reuters might be a $40B company, but.... at this point it's not clear that that holds any weight in terms of not being fucked over by 2 companies aiming for $2t+ IPO valuations.
Edit: On second thought, there is probably a #3 too. They can serve inference for their own models significantly cheaper than frontier lab rates (assuming they're capturing continuous use of their hardware). I still think #2 is the primary goal.
> Our evaluation found Thomson’s citation quality generally competitive with leading frontier models, even when tested on Canadian employment-law questions without a Canada-specific setting. That’s it? It was generally competitive with leading frontier models? Neat, but why would someone pay for frontier models and also a generally competitive additional product?
It eventually stopped making sense because of inference costs. Running something internal with 30% GPU utilization is just too cost inefficient compared to using an API. Idk how Reuters will manage to solve this fundamental problem.
I don't trust that they'll be able to make back that $40M. This feels very much like a news agency getting into crypto or launching its own NFT line. Or IBM selling Watson. Or Mozilla chasing every which thing. They're not stakeholders in the future of work. They're just wanting to stay relevant and pattern matching against what they see. Reuters is too important for this. If they were trying to use this as a narrati…
Reuters, the news agency, is only roughly 10% of TR's revenue. They're still a pretty big player in Legal and Tax.
https://ir.thomsonreuters.com/news-releases/news-release-det...
Has anyone found a link to the technical report? They don’t seem very keen to publicise their performance on evals…
https://huggingface.co/thomsonreuters/Thomson-1.0-Small
(Full disclosure I’m a TR employee, although I had nothing to do with making this)
> starting from a strong open-source foundation and investing $40 million to train Thomson Sounds like they spent $40 million finetuning an open weight model on their own data? I wonder what they built on.
I don't trust that they'll be able to make back that $40M. This feels very much like a news agency getting into crypto or launching its own NFT line. Or IBM selling Watson. Or Mozilla chasing every which thing. They're not stakeholders in the future of work. They're just wanting to stay relevant and pattern matching against what they see. Reuters is too important for this. If they were trying to use this as a narrati…
I doubt the point is to "make the money back". It's likely split between two goals: 1. Marketing and expressing to their customers that they are not falling behind, and 2. Insulating themselves from frontier labs jacking up prices, nerfing the models they depend on, or otherwise unexpected changes in behavior. I think the main goal is #2. Thomson Reuters might be a $40B company, but.... at this point it's not clear t…
It's exactly the same sorta thinking re; Microsoft potentially fucking over the PC videogames industry that Valve used to justify the zillions of dollars and countless man-hours put into their big push for Linux gaming rather than tie themselves to a single proprietary company that could try to kick them out of the gaming industry. So far it's going pretty well for them. Depending on how they play their cards, this could also work out really well for Thomson Reuters as well.
Here is some more technical information on how this was trained, as well as a download link. https://huggingface.co/thomsonreuters/Thomson-1.0-Small (Full disclosure I’m a TR employee, although I had nothing to do with making this)