3 ms·

If you don’t own the weights you don’t own anything. This is why open models are so crucial. I don’t understand any business who is building fine tuned models a

If you don’t own the weights you don’t own anything. This is why open models are so crucial. I don’t understand any business who is building fine tuned models against closed models.

reaperman 3y ago
Right now the closed models are incredibly higher quality than the open models. They're useful as a stopgap for 1-2 years in hopes/expectation of open models reaching a point where they can be swapped in. It burns cash now, but in exchange you can grab more market share sooner while you're stuck using the expensive but high quality OpenAI models. It's not cost-effective, but it may be part of a valid business plan.
- ronsor 3y ago
  If you're finetuning your own model, the closed models being "incredibly higher quality" is probably less relevant.
  - claytonjy 3y ago
    That's how we all want it to work, but the reality today is that GPT-4 is better at almost anything than a fine-tuned version of any other model. It's somewhat rare to have a task and good enough dataset that you can finetune something else to be close enough in quality to GPT-4 for your task.
    - zirgs 3y ago
      GPT-4 is still heavily censored and will simply refuse to talk about many "problematic" things. How is that better than a completely uncensored model?
      - Veen 3y ago
        Depends what you’re using it for. For many use cases, the censorship is irrelevant.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    Finetuning a better model still yields better results than finetuning a worse model.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  That should be a wake up call to every corporation pinning their business on OAI models. My experience thus far is no one is seeing a need to plan an exit from OAI, and the perception is “AI is magic and we aren’t magicians.” There needs to be a concerted effort to finance and tune high quality freely available models and tool chains asap. That said I think efficiencies will dramatically improve over the next few years and over investing now probably captures very little value beyond building internal competency - which doesn’t grow with anything but time and practice. The longer you depend on OAI, the longer you will depend on OAI past your point of profound regret.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    > There needs to be a concerted effort to finance and tune high quality freely available models and tool chains asap. Absolutely. A large consortium of companies could each contribute 0.2-2% of the total cost and fund something much larger than OpenAI.
yieldcrv 3y ago
> I don’t understand any business who is building fine tuned models against closed models. Just sell access at a higher price than you get it Either directly, on on average based on your user stories
r3trohack3r 3y ago
> I don’t understand any business who is building fine tuned models against closed models Do you have any recommendations for good open models that businesses could use today? From what I've seen in the space, I suspect businesses are building fine tuned models against closed models because those are the only viable models to build a business model on top of. The quality of open models isn't competitive.
- cj 3y ago
  PSA: anyone working at a company with $50k+ of spend with AWS, reach out to your rep expressing interest in AI. You’ll be on a call with 6 solution architects and AI specialists in a matter of days. They’re incredibly knowledgeable and freely recommend non-AWS alternatives when the use case calls for it.
dragonwriter 3y ago
Owning weights is in a nebulous space right now, but if you don’t have custody of the weights and code to use them, you have nothing reliable, independent of whether the things you might wish to have are ownable (ownership is more about exclusion than ability to use, in any case.)
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Yes. But the weights and instructions of how to use them to code can follow as we’ve seen. The key is ownership is bits on your machine not someone else’s. Better still on BitTorrent / ipfs:-)
benlivengood 3y ago
My guess is that these businesses are also running inference on someone else's GPUs/TPUs so there isn't an existential advantage to owning the weights.

If you don’t own the weights you don’t own anything. This is why open models are so crucial. I don’t understand any business who is building fine tuned models against closed models.

reaperman 3y ago

Right now the closed models are incredibly higher quality than the open models. They're useful as a stopgap for 1-2 years in hopes/expectation of open models reaching a point where they can be swapped in. It burns cash now, but in exchange you can grab more market share sooner while you're stuck using the expensive but high quality OpenAI models. It's not cost-effective, but it may be part of a valid business plan.

ronsor 3y ago
If you're finetuning your own model, the closed models being "incredibly higher quality" is probably less relevant.
- claytonjy 3y ago
  That's how we all want it to work, but the reality today is that GPT-4 is better at almost anything than a fine-tuned version of any other model. It's somewhat rare to have a task and good enough dataset that you can finetune something else to be close enough in quality to GPT-4 for your task.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    GPT-4 is still heavily censored and will simply refuse to talk about many "problematic" things. How is that better than a completely uncensored model?
    - Veen 3y ago
      Depends what you’re using it for. For many use cases, the censorship is irrelevant.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  Finetuning a better model still yields better results than finetuning a worse model.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
That should be a wake up call to every corporation pinning their business on OAI models. My experience thus far is no one is seeing a need to plan an exit from OAI, and the perception is “AI is magic and we aren’t magicians.” There needs to be a concerted effort to finance and tune high quality freely available models and tool chains asap. That said I think efficiencies will dramatically improve over the next few years and over investing now probably captures very little value beyond building internal competency - which doesn’t grow with anything but time and practice. The longer you depend on OAI, the longer you will depend on OAI past your point of profound regret.
- reaperman 3y ago
  > There needs to be a concerted effort to finance and tune high quality freely available models and tool chains asap. Absolutely. A large consortium of companies could each contribute 0.2-2% of the total cost and fund something much larger than OpenAI.

yieldcrv 3y ago

> I don’t understand any business who is building fine tuned models against closed models. Just sell access at a higher price than you get it Either directly, on on average based on your user stories

r3trohack3r 3y ago

> I don’t understand any business who is building fine tuned models against closed models Do you have any recommendations for good open models that businesses could use today? From what I've seen in the space, I suspect businesses are building fine tuned models against closed models because those are the only viable models to build a business model on top of. The quality of open models isn't competitive.

cj 3y ago
PSA: anyone working at a company with $50k+ of spend with AWS, reach out to your rep expressing interest in AI. You’ll be on a call with 6 solution architects and AI specialists in a matter of days. They’re incredibly knowledgeable and freely recommend non-AWS alternatives when the use case calls for it.

dragonwriter 3y ago

Owning weights is in a nebulous space right now, but if you don’t have custody of the weights and code to use them, you have nothing reliable, independent of whether the things you might wish to have are ownable (ownership is more about exclusion than ability to use, in any case.)

fnordpiglet 3y ago
Yes. But the weights and instructions of how to use them to code can follow as we’ve seen. The key is ownership is bits on your machine not someone else’s. Better still on BitTorrent / ipfs:-)

benlivengood 3y ago

My guess is that these businesses are also running inference on someone else's GPUs/TPUs so there isn't an existential advantage to owning the weights.