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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

#101

Post by ben_w »

drdeca wrote: post #77
NhanH wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Lots of people have access to natural language AI — Google search, voice assistants, WolframAlpha, AI dungeon, GPT-J — so if you agree that Coke doesn’t get to say they’re “democratising” soda because that’s a misuse of terminology, you should also agree that commercial deployment of a natural language AI API doesn’t get to say they’re “democratising” AI because that’s also a misuse of terminology.

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

#102

Post by sciurus »

jasode wrote: post #94
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?

>Which is more "democratized": a large language model which can be downloaded, and accessed as a library, [...] or an API, where every invocation is a call that flows through Cohere's servers? I do understand the point you're trying to make: local autonomy is superior to cloud access mediated by a private commercial entity. However at this time, we may have a counterintuitive situation where API access is more "democ…

> Last time I looked, an Intel Xeon motherboard has max ram of 128GB so scaling up to 350GB RAM is not going to be cheap or trivial to build.

Even a low-end tower server can be configured with multiple terabytes of RAM.

E.G. https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/povw/poweredge-t640#tec...

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

#103

Post by jasode »

WanderPanda wrote: post #99
jasode wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Which is more "democratized": a large language model which can be downloaded, and accessed as a library, [...] or an API, where every invocation is a call that flows through Cohere's servers? I do understand the point you're trying to make: local autonomy is superior to cloud access mediated by a private commercial entity. However at this time, we may have a counterintuitive situation where API access is more "democ…

This is a strawman argument. Publishing the code/weights is not mutually exclusive to providing an API

>This is a strawman argument. Publishing the code/weights is not mutually exclusive to providing an API

You're misinterpreting my comment. I'm directly addressing this fragment by the gp: >which can be downloaded, and accessed as a library,

I'm not making any moral ideology statements about the model's "openness", "transparency", or "intellectual property".

As a person very interested in playing with something like GPT-3, I'm talking about practical concerns of even running the model. Some type of cloud API access let's me run experiments today. Hopefully the API cost is reasonable or free with limits. I believe that's true of most researchers because they can't afford the hardware in the near future to run a GPT-3-size model as local library.

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

#104

Post by ___luigi »

streetcat1 wrote: post #93
___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…

Unfortunately the new models are very big, hence they cannot be released as smaller models (as open source). They must be served as an api.

> .. They must be served as an api.

I respectfully disagree with this statement, there is a large body of work focusing on making this easier. The HW/SW stack vary from a a company to another.

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

#105

Post by ___luigi »

h0mie wrote: post #91
Tenoke wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

One of the founders said on twitter (don't remember when exactly, but less than a year I think) thay they were cash flow positive.

Yes, this is the tweet: https://twitter.com/Thom_Wolf/status/1354007933315645441

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

#106

Post by pinky1417 »

beaconstudios wrote: post #82
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?

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.

To reductio ad absurdum that - every time you see any marketing, eg “Drink Coca-Cola because it’s refreshing”, you should hear “Drink Coca-Cola because it’ll make us money.”

To your point though: “democratize x” makes my eyes roll. It’s overused hip marketing speak.

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

#107

Post by beaconstudios »

pinky1417 wrote: post #106
beaconstudios wrote: post #82

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.

To reductio ad absurdum that - every time you see any marketing, eg “Drink Coca-Cola because it’s refreshing”, you should hear “Drink Coca-Cola because it’ll make us money.” To your point though: “democratize x” makes my eyes roll. It’s overused hip marketing speak.

That's accurate though; coca cola don't care about whether you're refreshed unless it's profitable to them. The refreshment is the means towards the end of profit.

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

#108

Post by nexuist »

jasode wrote: post #103
WanderPanda wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a strawman argument. Publishing the code/weights is not mutually exclusive to providing an API

>This is a strawman argument. Publishing the code/weights is not mutually exclusive to providing an API You're misinterpreting my comment. I'm directly addressing this fragment by the gp: >which can be downloaded, and accessed as a library, I'm not making any moral ideology statements about the model's "openness", "transparency", or "intellectual property". As a person very interested in playing with something like G…

> Hopefully the API cost is reasonable or free with limits

If the model was open source you could have an API market where providers competed to build the most economic service just like virtual machine companies do with Linux. If there is only one API then everyone is stuck with them and just has to hope they don't change the prices.

There is practical concern for researchers within the possibility that what costs you $0.05 to run today will cost you $500 tomorrow (see Google Maps API for when this actually happened).

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

#109

Post by samhw »

nexuist wrote: post #108
jasode wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is a strawman argument. Publishing the code/weights is not mutually exclusive to providing an API You're misinterpreting my comment. I'm directly addressing this fragment by the gp: >which can be downloaded, and accessed as a library, I'm not making any moral ideology statements about the model's "openness", "transparency", or "intellectual property". As a person very interested in playing with something like G…

> Hopefully the API cost is reasonable or free with limits If the model was open source you could have an API market where providers competed to build the most economic service just like virtual machine companies do with Linux. If there is only one API then everyone is stuck with them and just has to hope they don't change the prices. There is practical concern for researchers within the possibility that what costs y…

It seems like quite a simple calculus to me: if ever the cost of reasonably using the API exceeds the cost of buying and operating a machine with 350GB RAM, then people will switch to the latter. Either way, I don't see how adding a new option could make anyone's situation worse.

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

#110

Post by samhw »

vkou wrote: post #53
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?

"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).

> it usually means letting a different group of investors (the funders of the startup) access a market

I guess 'democratize' rolls off the tongue more easily than 'heteroligocratize'.

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