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Did I miss a memo somewhere that said "every single AI related announcement must pretend as if you are bringing peace to the world and solving all forms of ineq

by alexb_ 4y ago

Did I miss a memo somewhere that said "every single AI related announcement must pretend as if you are bringing peace to the world and solving all forms of inequality forever"? I mean come on, "democratize machine learning"? Even the langauge of "accessible" which is constantly used by AI people over and over is just absurd. It feels like whoever wrote this mashed together Social Justice Words until they got something intelligable. Example: >“The future of AI is here, but it’s not evenly distributed,” said Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face. “Accessibility and transparency are the keys to sharing progress and creating tools to use these new capabilities wisely and responsibly. Amazon SageMaker and AWS-designed chips will enable our team and the larger machine learning community to convert the latest research into openly reproducible models that anyone can build on.”

Zetice 4y ago
I agree completely with this sentiment. I don’t want to create great new works of literature, I just wanna label some text with metadata and learn the bare minimum about some random tech I’m supposed to use next quarter. I predict the next year will be companies promising AI will fix everything wrong about my life, and approximately zero will deliver. The companies who will do well will be the companies who don’t even advertise their AI use, but incorporate it into their existing value prop.
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
I get what you're saying but I'd put hugging face as an exception. When I read democratizing access, I see a company making models freely available to the masses who do not necessarily have the resources to train them themselves. Is it solving global poverty or hunger? No of course not. Is it helping to tear down the ivory tower of academia or fill in the moats surrounding megacorps? Yes. But now they're just another cog in a megacorp..
minimaxir 4y ago
> I mean come on, "democratize machine learning"? That slogan made more sense back when Hugging Face first launched in 2019 and training models was prohibitively expensive and required sorting through poor model training codebases, but nowadays it's less applicable. (cost/efficiency of GPUs is much better and lots of higher level libraries, including Hugging Face's transformers, reduces a lot of the pain)
deleted 4y ago
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Der_Einzige 4y ago
Huggingface has done more to democratize ML than any other entity in our field except maybe the folks making sklearn and other high profile tools. They get to use this kind of language, stop critisizing them for it as though they aren't really the only bastion of openness we have. They really are the only one's doing what they do.

by alexb_ 4y ago

Zetice 4y ago

I agree completely with this sentiment. I don’t want to create great new works of literature, I just wanna label some text with metadata and learn the bare minimum about some random tech I’m supposed to use next quarter. I predict the next year will be companies promising AI will fix everything wrong about my life, and approximately zero will deliver. The companies who will do well will be the companies who don’t even advertise their AI use, but incorporate it into their existing value prop.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

I get what you're saying but I'd put hugging face as an exception. When I read democratizing access, I see a company making models freely available to the masses who do not necessarily have the resources to train them themselves. Is it solving global poverty or hunger? No of course not. Is it helping to tear down the ivory tower of academia or fill in the moats surrounding megacorps? Yes. But now they're just another cog in a megacorp..

minimaxir 4y ago

> I mean come on, "democratize machine learning"? That slogan made more sense back when Hugging Face first launched in 2019 and training models was prohibitively expensive and required sorting through poor model training codebases, but nowadays it's less applicable. (cost/efficiency of GPUs is much better and lots of higher level libraries, including Hugging Face's transformers, reduces a lot of the pain)

deleted 4y ago

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Der_Einzige 4y ago

Huggingface has done more to democratize ML than any other entity in our field except maybe the folks making sklearn and other high profile tools. They get to use this kind of language, stop critisizing them for it as though they aren't really the only bastion of openness we have. They really are the only one's doing what they do.