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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Words don't have to mean what their Ancient Greek component parts mean. Meaning = use.
Is "democratize" the hip way to spell "sell" these days?
I think so. That's why suddenly so many care about the rights of minority groups, too. It might not get you rich, but a lot of technically-mediocre people with questionable work ethics have found success getting involved with that sort of things. It's pretty clear that they have no interests in helping anyone but themselves.
Yes, as we all know, that idea was invented in 2004. Before that, it was unheard of to worry about the rights of minorities. The founding fathers of the US were famously not concerned about a tyranny of the majority.
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…
If you're targeting medium-to-large businesses, I suspect lots of them will buy a licence just to make sure they can't be sued (e.g. https://majadhondt.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/googles-9-lines/), even if it would be realistically near-impossible to detect if they 'stole' it.
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…
I think the issue people have with centralised cloud APIs for this sort of thing is that there's still a single gatekeeper with their finger on the off switch. In my opinion, instead of throwing out cloud APIs altogether a better scenario would be many gatekeepers with a deliberate diversity of socio-political backgrounds.
>Cohere, he says, offers a platform containing a “full stack” of NLP functions, including sentiment classification, question answering, and text classification.
Google (Cloud Natural Language, Dialogflow), Microsoft (Azure LUIS, Bot Service), Amazon (Lex), and IBM (Watson Assistant, Watson Discovery) all offer Conversational AI and NLP APIs that do exactly what these guys are trying to do here. What is new or unique about them? I work in this space, and the Chatbot/Conversational AI market has been flooded with startups all doing the exact same thing for the last 3-4 years.
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.
>For example, Cohere is providing the NLP capability for Ada, a recent unicorn company in the chatbot space. Ada has experimented with the Cohere natural-language models to match customer chat requests with available support information. Rather than trying to anticipate all the possible wordings of a request, Cohere’s model tries to understand the intent behind it, Gomez says. >Cohere, he says, offers a platform cont…
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…
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).
"Democracy" and especially "the people" can mean lots of different and completely contradictory things to lots of different people. I'm always very cautious of anyone who invokes "democracy" and "the people" directly, I don't automatically consider them untrustworthy but I prefer a direct argument for a particular idea. If someone's truly a democrat, they'd be unafraid to make their point without such potentially dishonest tactics as people would democratically choose that idea anyway.
* I'm massively oversimplifying here - there's such things as Blairism and One-Nation Conservatism which blur these lines enormously.