3 ms·
The question is: How soon? If you make a specialist model and harness that takes six months to train and launch, will you have enough time to recoup your costs
by SwellJoe 2mo ago
The question is: How soon?
If you make a specialist model and harness that takes six months to train and launch, will you have enough time to recoup your costs and make a profit before the generalists get good enough and cheap enough in your area of specialty and become the simpler option?
We already see "skills" repos containing a bunch of specialist stuff being pushed to general models via prose instructions for how to do various things and use various tools; and those models will do the tasks much more expensively and slowly, but without needing the user to find/buy/learn something specific to do the job.
The bitter lesson may be narrow, but the fact is people have been using spreadsheets for everything for 50 years, and only sometimes can a specialist tool effectively displace it in an organization. Very powerful generalist models are starting to feel like spreadsheets: The default way to solve problems in organizations. You might be able to pick off some of the specialist cases, but you might also miss.
- ahartmetz 2mo agoI think the bitter lesson (from 2019, what is now seen as the tail end of an AI winter - probably wasn't at the time) made the most sense in academia during AI winter. There is no academic fame to be had by making something a little better for a limited time. When billions are at stake, there is potentially a lot of money (and utility for customers) to be gained by doing some extra work even if the work is thrown away soon after. Most commercial products contain a ton of extra work to be slightly better than the competition in one area or another. Perhaps we can call this "The sweet dollars lesson".