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The landgrab going on in this space is ferocious. If you weren't convinced this is mania, and a 10M "seed" round for Langchain doesn't do it for you, nothing wi
by itsaquicknote 3y ago
The landgrab going on in this space is ferocious. If you weren't convinced this is mania, and a 10M "seed" round for Langchain doesn't do it for you, nothing will. Well done Harrison on the cash grab (take as much money off the table every round as you can), it's a smart move. But I can't shake the feeling that this ever increasing mania will sweep up anything OSS with vague traction and this whole AI space that used to be religiously defaulted to open and sharing will fairly quickly end up in VC-funded fiefdoms with pay-to-play being all that's left modulo the "forever free" community hobbled versions. Hope I'm wrong.
- TylerE 3y agoThe question is if the 2nd AI Winter kills python the way the first killed lisp.
- FractalHQ 3y agoGod I hope so.
- captaincaveman 3y agoCould it swap, so we can have lisp back?
- capableweb 3y agoIt would be absolute godsend if we could, so one measly error wouldn't require restarting a entire process just to rewrite some small part.
- TylerE 3y agoThat's really more erlang's niche.
- freilanzer 3y agoNo, that's really Lisps thing.
- capableweb 3y agoI meant more like dynamically re-evaluating specific functions without having to restart the process. Haven't done much Erlang, but my experience is around doing so in lisp rather, which definitely can do that.
- cossatot 3y agoPython has huge uptake outside of the ML domain. I can't see an AI winter affecting the many people using Numpy for non-ML purposes (i.e., scientists in academia, most of whom still deal with normal numerical and data analytical modeling, not ML) much less Django.
- TylerE 3y agoI'm...aware. I think a lot of us that aren't using NumPy or ML stuff are rather looking for a good excuse to get away from what the ecosystem has become. (Yeah, I'm still bitter about Py3...Python user since the 1.5.2 days)
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoPlenty of other options out there if you've fallen out of love with Python and don't need good numerical libraries. Give JS, Elixir, or Crystal a try if you want something more dynamic. Nim if you want something a bit off the beaten path. Go, Rust, Java, Kotlin, and Scala if you want something more static.
- TylerE 3y agoSadly it's what pays the bills atm.
- nl 3y agoBitterness isn't really a winning strategy. I thought the whole Python 3 thing was a huge problem. Lately I've been doing JS/Typescript dev and breaking changes like this happen continually and no one blinks.
- dbish 3y agoInterestingly this is shortly after another huge “seed” round in this space from fixie.ai (17mm). A lot of money being thrown at making it easier to chain/give LLMs access to other applications and tools.
- itsaquicknote 3y agoYeah, wow, a 17M seed round and not a hint of irony. Ferocious. Capital is DESPERATE to throw money into anything that appears to be related to LLMs. "Value creation event of our lifetimes" etc. There's grift money to made here and I'll be damned if some decent proportion of the "API wrapper + template UI" startups masquerading as AI companies aren't cashing in. Not sure I blame them.
- james-revisoai 3y agoI agree with you, and people miss that December 2022 is not when GPT became commercially possible. Look at the startup OpenAI generations 1-2 years back - they have largely sank at comparable or worse rates than any other startup from 2020/2021. The GPT-3 first wave companies, around translations, basic quizzes, summarization tools, language learning apps, and ofcourse the notorious paraphrase tools (almost entirely obsolete since ChatGPT) can't be found in that form anymore, they've all been forced to shut down or move functionality significantly. Early on, OpenAI limited output to 300 tokens max - and less for most usecases, often 50-150. Chatbots were not allowed IIRC for over a year. If ChatGPT hadn't came along, much of what langchain enables wouldn't have either, nor so many big companies willing to now risk. I can count none over 2 years old which have not since been made obsolete by raw ChatGPT access or are now default dead due to competition from existing unicorn (e.g. Duolingo, Quizlet Q chat) who are now crushing them. It must be painful to have spent $xx,xxx on GPT-3 at $0.06 a token to obtain users, and now have your market ripped from you by a $B+ company paying $0.006... So I doubt the template UI startups will sustain retention or stay about long term, unless they really find traditional startup ways to nuggle into niches and use cases/vendor lock in. This isn't an innovators dilemma for most companies, it's just an obvious sensible thing to try at this point, so startups don't have much to balance with on risk. That being the case, the market surely should seem less appealing than the open ended "blue ocean new value" of 2021 GPT tech, but - I guess not.
- chpatrick 3y agoI'm also worried that courts will decide that model weights are copyrightable and the open source free-for-all will be over.
- nwienert 3y agoIf models can’t prove they are fully free of copyrighted data I don’t think they’ll have a leg to stand on there.
- yuuuuyu 3y agoIf you are holding copyright to something, it will be on you to prove it's in there.
- manojlds 3y agoI am obviously clueless, but if it's a case, can't one demand what the training data is?
- arthurcolle 3y agoBased on what case law? In what jurisdiction?
- nl 3y ago
- legitimayzer 3y agoI think you're absolutely correct. But this is by 'design', I have very unreasonable suspicions that indeed, the whole VC 'world of entrepreneurs' is just the way the USA government does R & D on an industrial-corporate scale. The 'brilliance' behind this way of doing R&D is that they only pick up the winners after they won, so they don't "waste" money on R&D death ends nor moonshots. on the other hand, this is a good way to 'explode' for cheap the technological applications of already developed scientific innovations. meaning none of those VC-backed startups are doing innovative research, but in fact are devleoping commercial applications for corporate overlords who having seen who won, step in to buy them out. even music industry is shifting to that model, they are now only signing bands/artists/influencers who already build their audience.
- xiphias2 3y agoIt's far superior to the EU model where politicians are tasked with creating requirements for ,,the next innovations'' and creating tenders, businesses popping up / recycled to win those tenders, do the minimum to satisfy the criterion that nobody really cares about, and try to siphon out as much money as possible using trusted subcontractors, meanwhile paying a huge part of the money for the privilage of winning the tender. At least that's what's going on in Hungary, the most corrupt government in EU, I hope other parts are a bit better.