AI startup Scale lays off 20% of its staff
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: AI startup Scale lays off 20% of its staff
#2Pretty surprising news, I would have thought them to be positioned to do well from the current ML boom
Re: AI startup Scale lays off 20% of its staff
#3The letter frames recent advances like ChatGPT as positive indicators for Scale's future business. However, task specific bespoke human data annotation may fall away to datasets generated by massive self supervised multi-modal models. The other day, I saw that one of these image generation models can be prompted to create image-semantic mask pairs. And I wouldn't be surprised if ChatGPT could generate text along side named entity labels for specialized domains. The holy grail for AI has always been obviating the need for manual annotation and increased efficiency on the data we do have. Scale's data annotation business seems at odds with the core goals of AI researchers, and may dry up as those goals are increasingly realized.
Re: AI startup Scale lays off 20% of its staff
#4The letter frames recent advances like ChatGPT as positive indicators for Scale's future business. However, task specific bespoke human data annotation may fall away to datasets generated by massive self supervised multi-modal models. The other day, I saw that one of these image generation models can be prompted to create image-semantic mask pairs. And I wouldn't be surprised if ChatGPT could generate text along side…
Not only that, it's not clear to me that these models required the sort of annotation that Scale sells. He says:
>Each of the big AI breakthroughs (ChatGPT, GPT-3, DALL-E) have been made possible through extensive data collection and annotation infrastructure.
Maybe I'd count the RLHF stuff from ChatGPT as requiring a form of annotation. But like Dall-E is trained using existing captions/alt-text. No one is sitting in a room annotating images for Dall-E. Where would a company like Scale fit into this?
Re: AI startup Scale lays off 20% of its staff
#5The letter frames recent advances like ChatGPT as positive indicators for Scale's future business. However, task specific bespoke human data annotation may fall away to datasets generated by massive self supervised multi-modal models. The other day, I saw that one of these image generation models can be prompted to create image-semantic mask pairs. And I wouldn't be surprised if ChatGPT could generate text along side…
Not only that, it's not clear to me that these models required the sort of annotation that Scale sells. He says: >Each of the big AI breakthroughs (ChatGPT, GPT-3, DALL-E) have been made possible through extensive data collection and annotation infrastructure. Maybe I'd count the RLHF stuff from ChatGPT as requiring a form of annotation. But like Dall-E is trained using existing captions/alt-text. No one is sitting i…
Yea… despite the massive amounts of data being fed into these models, the model quality is still data-bound. There is no way to produce models like GPT-3 with manually annotated data.
Re: AI startup Scale lays off 20% of its staff
#6Pretty surprising news, I would have thought them to be positioned to do well from the current ML boom
I also am a bit surprised by this. AI is back to being the hotness now that crypto blew itself up. I suspect from reading this quote:
"Many of the industries we serve, such as e-commerce and consumer technology, have been buoyed by the pandemic and are now experiencing a painful market correction."
that they had an established segment of customers that were experimentally looking at ML to augment their core business, and how they could leverage with their data. Perhaps these companies are pulling back spend with whispers of a shaky 2023 economy.
Re: AI startup Scale lays off 20% of its staff
#7Pretty surprising news, I would have thought them to be positioned to do well from the current ML boom
When it seems like everybody else is doing layoffs, MBAs and wall street gets nervous if you don't do it
Re: AI startup Scale lays off 20% of its staff
#8Pretty surprising news, I would have thought them to be positioned to do well from the current ML boom
I interviewed with them recently, they've brought on lots of (expensive) new MLE type employees to provide ML SaaS services. Open-source might be putting pressure on them as these things become more commoditized
Re: AI startup Scale lays off 20% of its staff
#9I interviewed with them a few months ago, got rejected, and then was contacted by the SAME RECRUITER to interview again a month and a half later. He'd forgotten who I was or that I interviewed. From what I could tell, they're a mess; this doesn't surprise me at all
Re: AI startup Scale lays off 20% of its staff
#10Pretty surprising news, I would have thought them to be positioned to do well from the current ML boom
They are grifters taking advantage of boom and recruiting industry execs to head sales. They don't have any proprietary technology. The fact that private info was leaked in a fb channel by annotators in like south america shows that this company has little in the way of a meaningful product.
The irony is in their name "scale", laying off 20% would be ringing death bell for a company that actually operated leanly. They basically tried to copy mechanical turk