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

fastcompany.com

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

#121

Post by twelfthnight »

robbedpeter wrote: post #65
twelfthnight wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about https://huggingface.co/EleutherAI/gpt-neo-1.3B ?

Huggingface more generally, but I'd highlight https://huggingface.co/EleutherAI/gpt-j-6B , the currently largest model, which is almost as good as DaVinci in most respects. It's not about particular models, though, but the ease of use in numerous cloud or self hosted scenarios. What's the value add for Cohere?

Oh, somehow I've missed that one. Thanks. Agreed about numerous scenarios. Personally I think there is value in managing the models since getting the multiple T/GPUs and setting up REST apis is not trivial. Serverless style GPU rental is a little tricky right now in my experience. But, HuggingFace is doing something similar and the moat isn't too wide.

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

#122

Post by MauranKilom »

samhw wrote: post #109
nexuist wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> the cost of reasonably using the API exceeds the cost of buying and operating a machine with 350GB RAM

Capex and opex of these two are quite different.

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

#123

Post by DebtDeflation »

joaogui1 wrote: post #118
DebtDeflation wrote: post #116

>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…

ADA is the company doing chatbots/conversational AI, cohere is providing them with language models to do it, that's not the same thing as cohere being a company in the chatbot field

I understand that. However, the companies I listed are providing BOTH the raw NLP APIs as well as chatbot builder APIs.

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

#124

Post by drdeca »

ben_w wrote: post #101
drdeca wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes.

(I mean, like coke, they could say it, but it wouldn’t make sense.)

Possibly one could claim something is democratizing access to some specific aspect?

I do think it probably best to tend away from using the term unless it is a particularly good fit though. (“Best” as in “what I would prefer”, not as in “most profitable”)

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

#125

Post by d13 »

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.

GPT-J is huge and completely open source

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

#126

Post by fxtentacle »

___luigi wrote: post #105
h0mie wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thank you :)

I guess I'm now "old" in the sense that it never occurred to me to search for this kind of info on Twitter.

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