this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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For real. Being a software engineer with basic knowledge in ML, I'm just sick of companies from every industry being so desperate to cling onto the hype train they're willing to label anything with AI, even if it has little or nothing to do with it, just to boost their stock value. I would be so uncomfortable being an employee having to do this.
For sure, it seems like 90% of ai startups are nothing more than front end wrappers for a gpt instance.
They're all built on top of OpenAI which is very unprofitable at the moment. Feels like the whole industry is built on a shaky foundation.
Putting the entire fate of your company in a different company (OpenAI) is not a great business move. I guess the successful AI startups will eventually transition to self-hosted models like Llama, if they survive that long.
Most projects I've been in contact with are very aware of that fact. That's why telemetry is so big right now. Everybody is building datasets in the hopes of fine tuning smaller, cheaper models once they have enough good quality data.
My company is realizing that hosting a model which will be private, cost-effective, and performing better than traditional algorithms is like finding a unicorn. Few months back, the top execs were jumping around GenAI like a bunch of kids. Fortunately, the Sr. research head beat some sense into them.
You're lucky there's a higher up that could talk down the even higher ups. Though, sometimes it's not even about the r&d teams.
I saw company wide HR educational emails or courses telling you how to improve you work quality/efficiency, and one of them tells us to "research AI" and learn how to utilize it, talking about how great it is and improved the work efficiency by 30%. Sure, it has its uses, but I won't go touting how great it is. And with how ChatGPT works, you have to be the biggest idiot in the world to upload all your sensitive stuff to ChatGPT just for it to make a spreadsheet faster. But without these disclaimers in the email, I doubt regular clerical staff knows about this, and it's extremely dangerous.
What kind of use-cases was it, where you didn't find suitable local models to work with ? I've found that general "chatbot" things are hit and miss but more domain-constrained tasks (such as extracting structured entities from unstructured text) are pretty reliable even on smaller models. I'm not counting my chickens yet as my dataset is still somewhat small but preliminary testing has been very promising in that regard.
Any time you ask very domain specific questions; eg "i have collected some soil samples from the mesolithic age near the Amazon basin which have high sulfur and phosphorus content compared to my other samples. What factors could contribute to this distribution?", both of-the-shelf local models & OpenAI fail.
The main reason is because these models are not trained on highly-specialized domains of text. Sometimes the models start hallucinating and which reduces our trust upon them.
Haha yeah the top execs were tripping balls if they thought some off-the-shelf product would be able to answer this kind of expert questions. That's like trying to replace an expert craftsman with a 3D printer.
As someone who was working really hard trying to get my company to be able use some classical ML (with very limited amounts of data), with some knowledge on how AI works, and just generally want to do some cool math stuff at work, being asked incessantly to shove AI into any problem that our execs think are “good sells” and be pressured to think about how we can “use AI” was a terrible feel. They now think my work is insufficient and has been tightening the noose on my team.
This. Exactly.