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Jeremy from Answer.AI here -- Answer.AI is, to some extent, the subject of this article. Perhaps worth noting here that we didn't pay the author, Eric Gilliam;
by jph00 3y ago
Jeremy from Answer.AI here -- Answer.AI is, to some extent, the subject of this article. Perhaps worth noting here that we didn't pay the author, Eric Gilliam; it's his independent analysis based on years of study of 19th & 20th century R&D labs.
I'm hoping that not only will Answer.AI be successful, but that Eric's words in the conclusion will come to pass:
> "If their USD10 million experiment works, it has the chance to spark a rush of emboldened researchers and engineers to found small research firms, leveraging the models of the once-great dragons of American industrial R&D."
I'm happy to answer any questions you have about our experiment, and my co-founder Eric Ries (@eries) is around too. (Note that there are 2 Erics mentioned here -- that can get confusing!) By way of background, Eric Ries is the creator of the "Lean Startup", coined the term "Minimal Viable Product", and created the Long Term Stock Exchange, and I'm the co-founder of fast.ai, Enlitic, Kaggle, FastMail, and Optimal Decisions Group.
- tikkun 3y agoAwesome! What sorts of products is your lab working on?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jph00 3y agoCurrently we're working on low-resource fine-tuning research (i.e. train larger models on smaller cheaper GPUs), and looking into applications in the education and legal spaces. We're also starting to look at intersections between long-tail image recognition and language models.
- tikkun 3y agoCool - thanks for answering!
- a_petrov 3y agoYesterday I had the thought of what we could achieve right now with let's say 3 x A2000 leftover GPUs from a random second-hand crypto mining rig. I think it would be awesome to be able to use GPUs from second-hand crypto mining rigs for cheaper fine-tuning research. Good luck! As an enthusiast who loves The Lean Startup and who recently started playing around with LLMs, I'm super stoked about Answer.AI
- riemannzeta 3y agoHow are you thinking about the role of patenting at Answer.AI? How about handling tech transfer issues with universities?
- jph00 3y agoI don't think we'll want to patent anything, since that's something which keeps people out -- and we want to let people in! The only reason I could think of that we'd need a patent portfolio would be for defensive purposes.
- riemannzeta 3y agoThat's different from how things worked for Edison. But similar to how they worked for Luther Burbank. I'll be rooting for you to succeed in this endeavor. I used to visit IBM ARC when I was a kid, and to my mind the academic environment is not quite the same. But as you know we really have not seen corporate R and D recover from the peaks it attained over fifty years ago.
- 5rest 3y agoJeremy, you've taken a bold, open initiative. Thank you for calling on all the small, innovative teams. To better understand the types of projects or applications that excite you and Eric most, could you share examples of companies or applications that Answer.AI currently supports or plants to invest in? Additionally, if yo u have any published articles detailing these ventures please share the link. Best wishes with your venture.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoFast.AI is awesome and how I first learned ML. Can’t than you enough for that great project and its impact on my career! How do you see Answer.AI as supporting other commercial research efforts that have some overlap with the open source community? I’m thinking of things like Unsloth, which is trying to take a wild swing at efficient fine-tuning of LLMs without getting scooped by big tech.
- jph00 3y agoVery keen to support open source work, both financially and through our own code.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoThat’s great to hear! I can’t think of better stewards for this kind of work than a team you’ve put together, especially given everything you’ve provided for the community.
- gradschoolfail 3y ago@publicdaniel asked below about the relevance of openai’s Ken Stanley of “greatness cannot be planned” fame. @jph00 Can you comment on the similarities and difference of your approach as you understand it, given that Ken is or was a research manager at OpenAI? Here is Ken talking about the concept https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI “ collaboration can sometimes thwart innovation by tacitly forcing its participants into an objective-driven mindset.”
- uu_titan 3y agoWould you consider providing an RSS feed for the list of published articles? Thank you.
- jph00 3y agoOh good point - I forgot to set that up!
- sbinnee 3y agoI like the very idea of applying this transformative AI technology to make values. I have been doing research and always been a member of research team ever since I started the ML journey. But, I've always valued applications that can solve problems and found myself inclined to building apps. I would love to work at Answer.AI. How can I apply?
- fxtentacle 3y agoMy experience is that many large companies have problems that could be solved/improved with small fine-tuned AI services, but usually they are extremely cagey about disclosing which parts of their workflow are slow/expensive and would, therefore, be the best targets for automation and/or improvements coming from AI research. The cliche example here would be to automate processing of some paper forms. And it's cliche precisely because for most companies it would help them become faster and more competitive. How do you plan to research potential problems to solve? Would it be possible to publish and discuss those to-be-solved problems, so that hobbyists can also try their luck at solving them? Initially, I thought that Kaggle competitions would be a great way to get the industry's problems into the hands of motivated problem-solvers. But I don't think I've ever seen a large car manufacturer (for example) as Kaggle competition host. So it looks like something is holding companies back.