• 8 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • When this whole ‘training’ trend started a few years ago, there were companies offering image and video labelling services.

    It turned out they were mostly sweatshops in low-income countries, where people sat in front of monitors and just dragged boumding boxes around sections of images and picked from an icon menu. Here’s a car, here’s a person, here’s an apple. That sort of thing. You didn’t even need to know how to read or write.

    Of course, the quality was questionable, so they needed a second layer of supervisors verifying the choices. But even with that, the cost was way lower than having an engineer or QA person do it. IIRC, there was a bit of hue and cry when stories came out of big tech companies supporting sweatshop conditions.

    Sounds like it’s still ongoing.








  • I’ve been using ChatGPT, specialized ones on Huggingface, and a bunch of local ones using ollama. A colleague who is into this deep says Claude is giving him best results.

    Thing is, depends on the task. For coding, I’ve found all suck. ChatGPT gets you up to a point, then puts out completely wrong stuff. Gemini, Microsoft, and CodeWhisperer put out half-baked rubbish. If you don’t already know the domain, it will be frustrating finding the bugs.

    For images, I’ve tried DALL-E for placeholder graphics. Problem is, if you change a single prompt element to refine the output, it will generate completely different images with no way to go back. Same with Adobe generators. Folks have recommended Stability for related images. Will be trying that next.

    Most LLMs are just barely acceptable. Good for casual messing around, but I wouldn’t bet the business on any of them. Once the novelty wears off, and the CFOs tally up the costs, my prediction is a lot of these are going away.