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Thomson Reuters Launches Its Own Frontier Model

thomsonreuters.com

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Re: Thomson Reuters Launches Its Own Frontier Model

#51

Post by jll29 »

x313 wrote: post #14

Pretty cool someone is still doing this. Training in house LLMs was extremely popular in 2023-2024, back when domain-specific LLMs could easily top GPT in their field. In my field alone (tax/HR tech) I remember that Intuit, Workday, Indeed, LinkedIn were all training internal models. It eventually stopped making sense because of inference costs. Running something internal with 30% GPU utilization is just too cost ine…

What makes sense also depends on one's business model: TRI charges premium dollars for access to their systems, so there is no need to optimize for cost; trust in the answers is the currency of knowledge workers in today's complex domains.

At the Thomson Reuters family of companies (technically then: Refinitiv Ltd. sold to LSEG), the first foundational model (in the sense of "trained entirely from scratch") was trained already in 2018 (i.e., pre-ChatGPT); it would even have been earlier, but the electricity wires and fuses in the rented 5 Canada Sq, Canary Wharf office had to be replaced first at the time to deal with the current needed to serve the GPUs.

Re: Thomson Reuters Launches Its Own Frontier Model

#55

Post by simianwords »

jll29 wrote: post #48
make3 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40M$ to get a marginally better model is surprising, why not just use the free weight models

Because "bigger = better" does not work for highly specialized expertise, where the knowledge is not available on the public Web. It is naive to believe it's all open out there merely because the Web is large and we have Wikipedia. If you are a highly specialized professional intellectual property paralegal, a forensic tax investigator or a post-market pharmacovigilance analyst, you will need for-profit knowledge sou…

I’ll bet against this because of bitter lesson. Generalised models with context engineering will be more reliable and cheap than training your own.

Re: Thomson Reuters Launches Its Own Frontier Model

#56

Post by dgellow »

underlines wrote: post #47

Please challenge me and explain why this is a break through worth the headline they use for their own work. How I understand it, without really reading into it: - Thomson Reuters did not "create" a frontier model, they gave some money, maybe a bit of their data to Imperial College London, and took Alibaba's Qwen 3.6 35B A3B Model for a basic fine tune. - "They" (some undergrads at Imperial College London) used an exi…

They didn’t say they created it no? I don’t think any of those points matter. It’s a business announcing a new product. Why does it matter if they built it internally or used external teams? I find strange to focus on those details

Re: Thomson Reuters Launches Its Own Frontier Model

#57

Post by dgellow »

walrus01 wrote: post #50
underlines wrote: post #47

Please challenge me and explain why this is a break through worth the headline they use for their own work. How I understand it, without really reading into it: - Thomson Reuters did not "create" a frontier model, they gave some money, maybe a bit of their data to Imperial College London, and took Alibaba's Qwen 3.6 35B A3B Model for a basic fine tune. - "They" (some undergrads at Imperial College London) used an exi…

That's pretty wild that a Ctrl-F of "qwen" or "china" or "alibaba" on the thomson reuters announcement URL turns up no results. They want to portray it like they developed this thing from scratch, when that is by no means what actually happened.

[dead]

Re: Thomson Reuters Launches Its Own Frontier Model

#58

Post by dgellow »

make3 wrote: post #28
cootsnuck wrote: post #4

This is going to increasingly happen over the years to come. Big organizations will become more sophisticated with operationalizing their data, training and running LLMs will continue to be demystified and accessible, and over time we'll get more and more specialized / industry-specific models. It's going to become another way to monetize your informational assets if you're a big older enterprise with troves of data.…

40M$ to get a marginally better model is surprising, why not just use the free weight models

[dead]

Re: Thomson Reuters Launches Its Own Frontier Model

#59

Post by dgellow »

johnnypangs wrote: post #17

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)

Thanks, that’s great, lots of details

Re: Thomson Reuters Launches Its Own Frontier Model

#60

Post by dgellow »

hypfer wrote: post #35
make3 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the press release says this explicitly

Yep. Explicitly enough to be legally safe for sure. Which is the thing with press releases. Would've been nice to not do the bare legal minimum tho

What isn’t clear in the press release? Reads fine to me
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