8 ms·
A new old kind of R&D lab
- IceMichael 3y agoWhen will the hype curve finally end...
- malux85 3y agoIs there a way of contacting these people? If you're in this thread could you email me please? (in my profile), I can show you some cool ideas and what I am building!
- andyjohnson0 3y ago"but they were also on their way to being controlled and understood by a tiny exclusive slither of society." I think that should be "sliver".
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- OJFord 3y agoI was going to say they're synonymous; checked Wiktionary which calls it 'nonstandard' for sliver, though common in the UK (where I am from and live) blaming 'th fronting'. I assume that's the name for, ahem, 'that is just anovver word for it'.
- jph00 3y agoI'm Australian so I didn't know about this -- I guess I'll switch to "sliver" since it seems it's more broadly understood. Thanks for letting me know!
- OJFord 3y agoNo wuckers ;) I didn't know either, I only really checked because I was curious if they had a completely different etymology and only happened to be spelt^ and used similarly. (^or if, like spelt and spelled, the same root had just come to be used in two ways for the same.) So, note to self, slither is not a noun! (Except to mean limestone rubble apparently, but I think I can ignore that.)
- arketyp 3y agoNote to self, "a sliver of hope" is not to be confused with "the silver lining".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoIn American English, "slither" is more frequently associated with the movement of snakes, specifically. A snake "slithers" by "moving smoothly over a surface with a twisting or oscillating motion." [0] [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+slither https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+slither
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoDepends on your opinion of the reptile nature of those doing the controlling.
- agravier 3y agoAn animal muppet would know.
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- hiddencost 3y agoSo many people writing their pitches start by talking about scientists from the 1800s, these days. It's a pretty big red flag to me.
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- CamperBob2 3y agoHow so?
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoScope issues, mostly. I'm left unsure of what products to expect, so I'm less likely to follow up/check in later on. A lot of time is spent on the analogy, too, which may mean there's not much substance to say yet. It may have been worth waiting to announce until they had something specific to present. I don't know! I'm just an outsider/random person's perspective.
- nl 3y ago> which may mean there's not much substance to say yet They don't need to talk about substance. Jeremy Howard + Eric Ries gives more than enough just with their names.
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoElon has taught me not to believe in that idea.
- nl 3y agoI don't think much of Elon either, but if he was starting a new company it's probably a good bet it's going to succeed (despite the Twitter debacle). I don't think there is a better predictor of future success than past success. Or at least I can't think of one - can you?
- andy99 3y agoBuilding on top of what exists makes sense. There's science and then engineering and we need more engineering. I am curious though how far the $10M will go and what the plan is. Building on top still needs some kind of training and the money won't go very far for anything large scale. I know they know this, I'm just interested to know the plan.
- jph00 3y agoYeah we actually have to make money! We can't just spend.
- JohnHammersley 3y agoHere's a short thread on the announcement, from Jeremy Howard, one of the founders: https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1734606378331951318 https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1734606378331951318
- jph00 3y agoHi folks -- Jeremy from Answer.AI (and fast.ai!) here. Happy to answer any questions you have about this new thing that Eric and I are building. One thing I'm particularly keen to explore is working closely with academic groups to help support research that might help make AI more accessible (e.g. requiring less data or compute, or becoming easier to use, etc). This includes the obvious stuff like quantization, fine-tuning adaptors, model merging, distillation, etc, but also looking for new directions and ideas as well which might otherwise be hard to fund (since academia tends to like to build on established research directions.) I've opened my DMs at https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward for a while so feel free to ping me there, or also on Discord ('jeremyhoward').
- manu-sapiens 3y agoVery interesting read. My name is Emmanuel Lusinchi, and together with my colleague Georg Zoeller, we represent Omnitool.ai, a fledgling platform in the AI landscape with a mission that resonates deeply with the ethos of Answer.AI. Firstly, congratulations on the launch of Answer.AI and the vision you've set forth. We have been following your work with great admiration - I took the FastAI course in what feels like an eternity ago (3 years) and I have been recommending it to anyone interested in foundational AI. But more to your post’s point: your commitment to harnessing AI's potential to create practical end-user products is not only inspiring but aligns with our own philosophy. We have developed an open-source "AI lab-in-a-box". A platform that seamlessly integrates a multitude of AI models, both locally and cloud-hosted, through a single unified interface. The aim is to simplify access to the latest developments in AI - both on the technical side (knowledge to run AI models and connect them together) and on the financial side (access to GPUs) . We believe this to be useful to accelerate experimentation and iteration but also facilitate teaching AI - giving teachers a simple, consistent tool and giving students practical experience with the latest models so they can experience first hand complex and often too abstract concepts such as Bias. By reducing friction and lowering barriers of entry, our platform aims at democratizing access to the latest AI technologies, providing almost anyone with the tools and flexibility needed to push the boundaries of what's possible with AI. And we do believe that our platform could serve as a valuable tool in your R&D processes, speeding up Answer.AI ability to rapidly prototype and refine applications that leverage foundational research breakthroughs. Moreover, we share your concern about the widening gap in understanding AI's capabilities and its implications. We believe that transparency, education, and open-source collaboration are key to bridging this gap, ensuring that AI's benefits are widely distributed and its risks are responsibly managed. We are reaching out to explore potential avenues for collaboration. Whether it's simply helping you evaluate and perhaps use our platform into your R&D workflow, co-developing new tools, or simply engaging in a dialogue to share insights, we are eager to contribute to the incredible work you're undertaking at Answer.AI. We would be honored to discuss this further with you. Please find more information about our platform and its capabilities on our GitHub: https://github.com/omnitool-ai/omnitool https://github.com/omnitool-ai/omnitool. We are also open to setting up a demonstration or a meeting at your convenience to explore synergies between our organizations. Warm regards, Emmanuel Lusinchi Co-founder, Omnitool.ai emmanuel@omnitool.ai Georg Zoeller Co-founder, Omnitool.ai georg@omnitool.ai P.S. A few links: Intro video we made for Replicate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbKVUhWCYOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbKVUhWCYOI The interesting part is around 0:40, showing how any Replicate model (https://replicate.com/explore https://replicate.com/explore) can be added to the platform and connected to others in two clicks. Github: https://github.com/omnitool-ai/omnitool https://github.com/omnitool-ai/omnitool Website: https://omnitool.ai/ https://omnitool.ai/
- Centigonal 3y agoI'm excited by this, and I wish y'all the best!
- eries 3y agothank you!
- kaycebasques 3y agoVery excited to see how the Lean Startup guy applies his own ideas!
- kaycebasques 3y agoHi Jeremy, thanks for fast.ai and Kaggle and that refreshingly honest & open interview on Latent Space. It sounds like you and Lattner are on good terms. Any plans to partner up with Modular?
- jph00 3y agoI love Chris and his work is amazing. I certainly hope we can work closely with Modular, although nothing specific in place yet. I was at ModCon last week and I think that Mojo might just be the future...
- eries 3y agoEric Ries here, happy to answer questions about Answer.AI or any of the related themes Jeremy talked about in the announcement post: rapid iteration, R&D, startup governance, long-term thinking, etc. Excited to see what comes out of this new lab. And if you're interested in joining the cause, please do get in touch. Both Jeremy and I are on this thread and generally reachable.
- patcon 3y agoThanks! What are your thoughts on this model of promoting breakthrough innovation? How to fund Breakthrough Innovations in Science (Puja Ohlhaver @ DeSci.Berlin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guLDNMAOn24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guLDNMAOn24 Puja has a few talks on such things, many very related and worth listening to imho. But most relevant: she's been working on a mechanism design to use quadratic funding in an existing hierarchy to move funding power from funders to on-the-ground researchers who best predict "breakthrough research" areas -- i.e. at which intersections. This idea of "breakthrough innovation" is objectively measured and rewarded as "research that becomes highly cited, and which draws together disparate source citations that have never before appeared together." So the idea is that in successive funding rounds, funding power slowly accrues in the people who best predict where research innovation will appear. Even if that turns out to be *gasp* grad students. (I'm particularly interested to see Polis, a "wiki survey" tool I've been using since 2016, be used as one of the signals in such a system. It can help make the landscape of beliefs and feelings that ppl bring to the process more legible, especially at the collective level. Which is important, because high-dimensional "feeling data", when placed out-of-scope in other systems, are often a reason why we get trapped in local minima of innovation that inhibit the recombination of ideas.)
- amrrs 3y agoFor those who aren't family familiar with Jeremy Howard. Jeremy was a cofounder and chief scientist of Kaggle (a competitive ML platform) Jeremy also started Fast AI with Rachel Thomas. Fastai is one of the best ways to learn Deep learning even today. Jeremy is a great teacher and have been a voice of debunking AI paranoia and closed models. Really rooting for Jeremy!
- ssheth 3y agoHe is also the cofounder of Fastmail .. a popular email provider with others here..
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jwuphysics 3y agoHi Jeremy & Eric, great to see your newest endeavor. I hope that Answer.AI builds on the success and impact that fast.ai has already enjoyed. Given new developments in hardware (by companies not named NVIDIA), I'm wondering if you are keen on exploring the next generation of model architectures and optimization procedures that might exploit newer hardware. In other words, will research directions pivot based on the hardware lottery?[1] Are you in conversations with companies developing these alternative chips? [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06489 https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06489
- jph00 3y agoYes I think it's a big opportunity too, although I'm mainly looking at leveraging the work Modular will be doing to harness diverse hardware, rather than handle that ourselves.
- ghj 3y agoWill you still be working on educational content on the side? (e.g. updating fast.ai and/or making one off lectures like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkrNMKz9pWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkrNMKz9pWU) Either way thank you for all the amazing free content you've already put out and good luck on the new endeavor!
- jph00 3y agoYes I think so, although I haven't decided quite how to best do that yet.
- moh_maya 3y agoSome questions, if you are still around to answer, because this is exciting! 1) Have you read about Vannevar Bush, and what he has written, and his body of work?! :) 2) What sort of people are you looking for / to work with? 3) Would it need to be full-time? Are you looking to hire people full time (the generalists you mention), or are you comfortable working with people who are happy not cashing a cheque from you because they have jobs and other commitments / priorities, but still believe in what you are building and would like to invest significant time in supporting / driving the mission forward for some limited (or no) financial compensation? Because I’d like to check if I fit! :) (I’ve also spammed you on twitter with a dm, but with more personal details, etc.) Thank you!
- jph00 3y agoYes I'm reasonably familiar with Vannevar Bush's amazing body of work. We're likely to hire passionate and interesting outsiders on the whole, but really anyone who is extremely curious, pragmatic, and happy to get their hands dirty on everything from the lowest levels of implementation detail on up could be a good fit. It's easiest to work with people full-time, but I wouldn't set any hard and fast rules.
- ansk 3y ago> a new kind of AI R&D lab which creates practical end-user products based on foundational research breakthroughs This isn't new and if anything it's the de facto standard for just about every AI research lab these days. OpenAI is the obvious example of an AI lab with tightly coupled product and research roadmaps and ChatGPT is the most prominent example of a successful research-driven AI product. A few years ago it could be argued that DeepMind and (fka) FAIR were siloed off from their respective orgs, but these days they are littered with product teams and their research roadmaps reflect this influence as well. They do try to claim that what they are doing is different from OpenAI because they are focused on applications of AI whereas OpenAI is focused on building AGI, which is a laughable mischaracterization of OpenAI's current roadmap. I personally have a hard time believing that path to AGI runs through the GPT store. Accomplished researchers in AI can fundraise on their reputations alone, and Jeremy is no exception. The primary differentiator of any new startup in this space is the caliber of its researchers and engineers. But this post is really grasping at straws to claim that their value is from some new approach to R&D, which is a totally unnecessary framing.
- NtochkaNzvanova 3y agoIs there really a shortage of companies that are trying to do foundational AI research, and also build the results of that research into end-user products? Off the top of my head, the list of such companies would include... you know, literally every large tech company. If the idea here is that they can do it at a much smaller scale, and more cheaply, that's great. But it's not clear to me from this article what the radical new approach is that will enable that. I wonder if putting out effectively a press release before actually doing the work is the right approach. If they launch a product or two and they flop, people will say this approach was doomed from the start. It would be better to create a compelling product in stealth, successfully launch it, then reveal how it was done. That would create more buy-in to the idea that such small R&D labs can work.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- your_friend 3y agoSounds like a lab I was born for. I think there’s a big group of individuals out there that are misfits both for regular jobs and science. Entrepreneur-ish generalists.
- sundalia 3y agofast.ai (the first iteration) was what got me into ML, when I was a sophomore undergrad. It played a big role in my career choice and progression! To this day it still is my first recommendation for those learning. Congrats on the launch, excited about the future!
- Havoc 3y ago> deep-tech generalists What is meant by this?
- zharknado 3y agoI’m just glad this exists! Very Wright Brothers vibe.
- nojvek 3y agoThank you for fast.ai. I'm glad the sweet VC is moving to smaller players to increase the diversity of ideas instead of it all being captured by OpenAI. The world needs more players doing tinkering. AI is only going to work for everyone if everyone knows how it works and can tinker with it, instead of only the big corps and governments having access to it. We need all of Mistral, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta FAIR, MS Research, Deepmind, Tinycorp, Answer AI, Perplexity, Stability AI, Huggingface and 1000 others to be GPU rich and idea rich. We need NVidia, AMD, and 100s of other Chip makers. We need Huawai, Xiomi, Samsung and tons of others to be players. AI only works if it is highly distributed and battle tested by many. We die when power is held by the few to oppress the masses.