Hello. Thanks for coming out tonight. It's a pack house. I think we had something like a thousand people who wanted to attend. People are very excited to see Clam. There's ever-growing enthusiasm for AI. Thanks so much for making it.
I'd also like to quickly thank Edwin Lee, Ali Pavilion, Emily, for the Strype AV event, security, food, and catering team. Thank you so much for putting on this event tonight and hosting everybody.
We're going to be talking about Clam's background in origins, and so I'll keep the intro really brief, which is, you know, Clam is the CEO and co-founder of Hugging Face, which is really one of the main pieces of infrastructure that everybody uses in the AI industry. He's been working on AI for about 15 years now, and he's been in France for about 10 years. And so welcome, and thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. Excited to be able to chat.
Okay. And so, Caduce tells a lot about the origins of Hugging Face, and how you started working on it. What it was originally, how it morphed into what it is today, and how you got started? Yeah, absolutely. As you said, I've been working on AI for quite a while before it was as sexy as hot, and as popular as mainstream as today. And I think that's what gathered our co-founders with three co-founders for Hugging Face around this idea that it's becoming kind of like a new paradigm to build technology, and we were really excited about it.
好的。所以,Caduce 描述了关于 Hugging Face 的起源以及您如何开始开发它的很多信息。它最初是什么样的,如何逐渐演变成为今天的样子,以及您是如何开始的?是的,绝对是。就像您所说的,在 AI 成为热门和主流的今天之前,我一直在从事 AI 方面的工作。我想这就是我们的三位联合创始人聚集在一起,围绕着这个理念开始创立 Hugging Face 的原因,因为它正在成为一种新范式来构建技术,我们对此非常兴奋。
When we started the company, we wanted to work on something that was scientifically challenging because that's the background of one of our co-founders, Thomas. But at the same time, something fun.
And so, we actually started by building an AI Tamaguchi, something like a chat GPT, but really focused on fun and entertainment. At the time, you know, there was Siri Alexa, but without it was pretty, pretty boring to focus only on my productivity answers. And we actually did that for almost three years. We raised the first pre-seed on this idea. Some users really liked it, actually. They changed a couple of billion messages with it, but kind of like organically. And I can tell the story later, we pivoted from that to what we are right now, which is the most used open platform for AI.
What got you interested in AI to begin with? I mean, you started 15 years ago working in the area. And I feel like AI has gone through different ways of popularity, right? We had Alex Net, sparked a lot of interest. There's a CNN and Arden world. Did you start even before that, or when did you first get interested? Yes, at the time, we weren't even calling it AI or machine learning. The first startup I worked for was a company called MootStux. And we were doing machine learning for computer vision. And we were building a device. So we were building a technology to help you point your phone at an object and recognize it.
And even at the time, it was kind of like mind-blowing what you were able to do with it. I remember, I think, for me, the realization of how AI could really unlock new capabilities is when I met the founders of this startup, I was working at eBay at the time. And they told me, oh, you acquired this company called Red Laser. That is doing barcode recognition for you to recognize objects and then kind of like put up the eBay page. It told me, you guys suck. You should use machine learning. So if recognizing the barcode, you can actually recognize the objects itself. It's like, you're crazy. It's impossible. You can't do that with traditional software. You can't do that with code. There are too many objects. It's possibilities are just too broad to do that.
And they were actually managing to do that with some form of machine learning at the time. So that's when I realized, wow, you can do so many new things with this new technology. And that probably led me to where I am today.
That's cool. So you then started HuggingFace. You're going to do like AI Tamagotchi. And I think it's funny how you used to say AI and people would sneer at you and they'd be like, no, no, no, it's machine learning. And so I feel like the Lingo has shifted back to AI again, given what some of these systems can do. And then what made you decide to move in a very different direction of what HuggingFace is?
Yes, it was very organic. With one of these founding moments, it's a good thing that we had striped because I think it's Pat Kudisan who talked first about the importance of not just founding a company but having founding moments that changed the trajectory of your company. And for us that happened thanks to Thomas Wolf, one of our co-founders. I think it was like Friday night. I've seen this thing called Bert that was released by Google. But it kind of sucks because it's on TensorFlow. I think I'm going to spend the weekend porting that into PyTorch. And we're like, yeah, you do you. You know, have fun. Have fun during your weekends.
And on Monday it came back and it's like, okay, I'm going to release it. And it released it on GitHub, tweeted about it. And we got like a thousand likes, which for us at the time we were like, nobody's like French, French, nobody's. We're like, what's happening? Why are people liking this very specific, very niche, very kind of like technical tweet about PyTorch port of Bert? Like, oh, there's something there.
So we kept kind of like exploring that. We, you know, joined them, started to add other models to the GitHub repository. And the community came together. People started to fix bugs for us in the repository. We're like, why are people doing that? They started adding models. They started, for example, the first GPT. They added the next models that were released. And really fast, we ended up with like one of the most popular GitHub repository for AI. And that's kind of like what transition does from this first idea to where we are now.
Great. And could you describe for people who, I'm sure most people know, but could you describe for people what? How can you face us today and how it's used and the importance of the product and the platform and the ecosystem?
Yes. Now we look at to be the most used open platform for AI. You can think of it as, as mentioned before, some sort of a GitHub for AI. So the same way GitHub is this platform where companies host code, collaborate on code, share code, test code. We're the same way, but for machine learning artifacts. So there's been more than a million repositories that have been hosted on the hugging face platform with models.
Most of them open source. So maybe you've heard of stable diffusion, T5 Bert, originally, obviously, Bloom. For example, Whisper for audio data sets. There's over 20,000 open data sets that you can use on the platform. And demos over 100,000 demos are hosted on the platform. And more than 15,000 companies are using the platform to bring AI into their features, into their products or into their workflows.
Yeah. Some of the most popular questions on Dory or through the air table form that people asked were around the future directions. Because given the centrality of where hugging faces, there's so many directions that could go and everything from bespoke B2B hosting to tooling to other types of products or activities.
What are some of the major directions that you fix are pursuing currently in terms of product?
目前就产品而言,您所追求的主要方向是哪些?
I would say there are two main directions that we're following right now. One is like we're seeing that AI is turning from complex these niche techniques solving some problems to the default paradigm to build all tech. And for us that means going from text that is really used on the platform right now. That is also really really used and text to image to expand to every single domain right. So for example, last week we started to see the first open source text to video models right. We started to starting to see in the platform a lot of time series models right like to do financial prediction to do like your ETA when you order you over. We also starting to see more and more biology chemistry models.
So kind of like making sure that we support this broadening use cases for AI is one. So second one is making it easier for everyone to build AI including software engineers. Historically our platform has been more like designed for machine learning engineers and people who are really kind of like training models were optimizing models assessing models.
What we're seeing now especially with the AI APIs is that everyone wants to do AI right even complex software engineers product managers infrastructure engineers. So a big focus of ours and some of the things that we've released in the past few weeks and I will keep releasing is kind of like reducing the barrier to entry to using our platform. Because ultimately we think every single company or every single team should be able to use open source to train their own models right.
Everyone is is talking today about you know chat GPT about GPT4 but I think in a few months or in a few years every single company is going to build their own GPT4 and they're going to train their own GPT4. The same way today if you think of it every company has their own code repository right and there's as many code repositories as companies.
We think tomorrow every single company is going to have their own models their own machine learning capabilities not really outsource it to someone else but really have these capabilities that will allow them to differentiate themselves to cater to their specific audience or their company. So if you could speak audience or is this specific use cases.
You know it's interesting because when you talk about the future one thing that I'm really struck and buy is you know if I look back over the course of my career there have been multiple or a small number of very large paradigm shifts or platform shifts right so there was the Internet was was obviously a huge transition in terms of bringing everybody online.
You know then a few years later we ended up with mobile and cloud so suddenly you could host anything anywhere and simultaneously people could access any product from anywhere in the world. Crypto I feel was almost like a side branch that went down the financial services route but didn't become a true platform at least not yet in terms of compute.
And then now we have AI and it feels like with each platform shift you have three or four things to change right the input and output of how you program a system shifts in some ways or at least the types of data you deal with user accessibility new I shifts right how do you actually interface with something for mobile was different from the desktop. And then the size and magnitude of the implications that shift are massive right and so if we view a I as a new platform how do you view or how do you mentioned everybody will have their own forms dpd4 it seems like the nature of programming itself may change at some point.
And we can put aside the whole question around do we also create a digital species and maybe we talk about that at the end. But how does hacking face in the player role in terms of this massive transition of platforms. And then the next thing is we really like and which capacity analogy of like software 1.0 right which is the way and the methodology that we've been building technology with for the past 15 years.
And now AI is software 2.0 right it's a new methodology it's a new way of building building all technology it's a new paradigm the new default to build all technology. And if you think of that you know you need for this new paradigm better tools more adapted tools to do that. And you need better communities you need ways for teams to collaborate and for the whole ecosystem to collaborate. And that's that's what we're kind of like trying to provide like a new tooling a new collaborative platform to build AI better.
We also trying to build the future that we excited about I think a lot of people are kind of scared about AI right now and the potential and and the risks associated to it. And the way we think about things if you can build a future where everyone is able to understand AI and build AI.
You remove a lot of these risks because you involve more people so you reduce for example the poverty of very biased systems. You give the tools for regulators to actually put in place safeguards. And you give companies capabilities to align the systems that they use and provide to their users and customers with their values right which is what you want ultimately you know you want strive to be able to say you know this is our values. So this is how we building AI in the line with these values so that's also something important that we're trying trying to do.
We say sometimes that our mission is to democratize good good machine learning. And we're working really really hard on that because we think it's it's important for for the world. Yeah, it feels like I'm hugging faces always been very consistent in terms of wanting to have ethical AI or ways to participate that are strong and alignment.
I've a number of companies like for example on Thropic has this approach of like constitutional AI right where they basically say we almost provide a constitution as we train the model for how which had govern the activities or actions of the model that results. What are the approaches that you think work best and what do you hope that people are doing more of relative to alignment.
Alignment is this kind of like complicated terms because it means different things to different people. It can be taken from like the ethical standpoint in terms of like alignment between values and systems. A lot of people use it today as more kind of like accuracy improvement to be honest when they can like do some alignment work they actually make the models more accurate thanks to reinforcement learning with human feedback.
So it's kind of like hard to to to debate around that. I think in in general in my opinion you can't control improve and align a system that you don't understand. So the main thing that we're trying to push at taking face is more transparency in terms of like how the systems are built. What data they're trained on. What are the limitations. What are the biases. And I think if you create more transparency around that you can't like almost create a system that is more ethical at core. So that's kind of like the biggest thing that we're focusing on.
What is your biggest concern in terms of how open source AI could be misused or abused. There's a lot of kind of like things that can be dangerous with with AI. However, it's distributed right through API's or open source. The biggest thing is is dual use right. When you want to kind of like use it in a way that is not the right way that model builders defines. And so one thing that we've been experimenting with which is super super early and probably not a solution to everything is creating new forms of licenses for models.
So we've been we've been supporting something called rail and open rail which is responsible AI license which is supposed to be an open license for everyone to be able to use the model. But that defines uses that are prevented from the model authors. As a way to create kind of like legal challenges for people to use it the wrong way. But that's that's kind of like one one approach that that we've taken to try to mitigate some of the dual use of of AI in general.
I guess as you look at the world of open source versus close source. One of the things that's really been happening is when before many of the different industrial research labs, the Googles and the open eyes of the world would publish a model they'd actually also publish the architecture of the model they publish paper that goes in depth in terms of how the thing works. You know the original transformer paper was recently explicit. And now they're starting to curtail the amount of information that's coming out with each incremental model.
Do you think that puts open source at a disadvantage or how do you think about the future particularly on the large language model side because when I look at the image gen models they tend to be reasonably inexpensive to train they tend to be more open source heavy. And it really seems to be more along the lines of the foundation models where this could become an issue because of the ones that need massive scalability and compute.
Are you concerned about the lack of publishing that's starting to happen and how do you think about the delta between open and close source models for big foundation models. Yeah, it's definitely a challenge. I think it's good to remember that we got where we are today thanks to open science and open source right everything every system that. That is around today is built stands on on the shoulders of of giants right if there wasn't research papers for for birds for for transformers for 45 for GPT. Maybe we would be like 50 years away from where we are today I think that's what created this massive positive loop that made the progress of AI I think faster than anything you've seen before.
So we're going to start doing that it's going to slow down right it's going to take more time and we'll just kind of like move slower as as a field. But I think one thing that we're seeing is that you know life a board vacuum I think that's that's the proverb right so I think if some companies and some organizations just start to do less open research or less open source. What we think is that other organizations will take over and actually reap the benefit of it so for example we sing a lot of collective decentralized collective there's like a Luther AI that announced a non profit few few weeks ago you have organizations like Alenei in in Seattle you have organizations like stability AI runway ML you have academia that is coming back in the picture right the original stable diffusion was built in a German university in a group a research group called com this using stand for it doing more and more in open source and for open research.
So I think ultimately that's that's what we're going to see why we're going to see like different sets of organizations taking taking over and can't like contributing to open research and open source because at the end of the day it's not going to go anywhere right I mean if you look at traditional software there's always open source and close source right. And open science is not going to go anywhere because the goal of most scientists is actually to contribute to the society and not just to do something to make the company money so I think that's what's going to happen maybe like the types of companies that are doing open research and open source are going to evolve but I'm not too scared about it.
One kind of like proof of that is that the number of models and open source models number of open source data sets number of like open demos on hugging faces been actually accelerating for for the past past few months and you're right in pointing out that we're a little bit biased on text right that's when I were where appropriate to read ahead of open source right large language models.
But if you like a look at audio you know can't like the best things are like whisper for example thanks to open AI that that is open source if you look at text to image stable diffusion is huge and probably like bigger than any poverty system if you look at biology chemistry time series also open source is very powerful. So I think it's always some sort of a cycle right sometimes perpetuary gets ahead thanks to some some companies are doing a really good job that company is doing an amazing job for example right now but sometimes open source catch catches up sometimes it's going to be a head sometimes it's going to be a little bit later that's kind of like the little bit of like normal technology cycle I would say.
Yeah I think that's true if you look at passive technology cycles it looks like often the really successful large open source approaches that are offsetting commercial efforts tend to actually have a large commercial backer who wants to offset the activities of others it's almost like strategic counter positioning so for example in the 90s the biggest sponsor of Linux was IBM because they were trying to counter Microsoft and then if you look at a variety of you know open source.
You know mobile browsers webkit you know is backed by either apple or Google depending on the branch. Who do you think or do you think somebody will emerge in terms of one of the becoming one of the major sponsors of open source like is does Amazon do it to offset Google and the relationship between Microsoft and open AI in the cloud is it in video as a oracle as it a conglomeration of multiple parties or do you think a government or somebody else may enter being in this case.
Yeah I think there are a lot of big tech companies that have like kind of like good alignments with like open science and open source you mentioned some of them like Amazon has been really good backer of open source and video has been a very good support Microsoft has been supporting open source a lot too. So yeah I think some of some of these going to come from from there i'm also excited about more governments involvement in kind of like democratizing access to compute which has been kind of like one challenge for large language models.
So when when we trained with the big science group a model called bloom which at the time when we released it was the largest language models language model that was open source. We got support for from a French supercomputer called john Z so I'm excited to see that more because I think if you look at how. Public policy and and kind of like governments can have positive impact I think providing compute to universities or like independent organizations nonprofits for in order to avoid concentration of power and create more transparency is a very obvious way where they can have an impact and the positive impact on society.
So I'm also excited about that's about disability for public organizations to support more open source and open research in AI. Yeah it makes a lot of sense I guess if you look at the types of open source there's going to be models of various sizes and do your point on the large language models if you assume. You know the rumor of the public estimates are you know GPT three took 10 million dollars at the time although I guess now it would be seven million dollars to train and then GPT four say was 50 to 100 if you're to do from scratch and then maybe GPT five is 200 million dollars and GPT six is half a billion or whatever it is you keep scaling up cost and so you need these sort of large sponsors to at least be at the cutting edge of all times but then one model behind maybe dramatically cheaper and so it's interesting to ask how that world evolves relative to government.
To government intervention or corporate intervention or other things in terms of sponsoring these models. We've the caveats that we've seen that some scaling is is good. We don't really know if that's the scaling that helps the current emerging of the year to be honest and that that's one of the challenge of the lack of transparency that's that's happening right now.
Actually, I really just a question what do you think are the bases for the emerging behavior and what do you think is the biggest driver for scale going forward as a compute is a data is algorithms is it something else.
I think we're starting to realize and have like a better consensus is in the science community that data and not only the quantity of data but the quality of data is starting to matter more than just blindly scaling the content.
But I think also something that can't like is important to remember is that training a very good large model today is still very much an art. It's not just a simple recipe of saying like you have good data, you have a lot of compute, you're going to get a good model.
It's very much still like very difficult, very hard to understand technical and very it's almost like alchemy. But very small number of people really managed to do today right and maybe it's like 20 people in the world today maybe it's 50 people in the world today it's very very small number I think people sometimes don't don't realize that.
And so I think there's a lot of progress also to be made on understanding the techniques to get to a good model almost independently of computing and data.
所以我认为,在理解如何获得一个良好的模型的技术上,独立于计算和数据,还有很多进展可以取得。
Do you think it's a small number of people? It's a it's a billion dollar question right if it was easy to to know I think everyone would would be doing it. I think I think interesting me it's a mix of technical skills, science skills and kind of like almost products management skills which are kind of like unique.
That's yeah like it's not just a matter of like you know doing the right training but it's kind of like knowing how much more training you want to do it's a matter of kind of like understanding when you want to really things when you want to keep doing kind of like optimizations before launching your training run.
When you want to kind of like start the big six months three months training run or where where you should kind of like keep experimenting. So yeah it's a mix it's a mix of all of that which makes it super hard but super fun at the same time right if it was was too easy with it wasn't me fun.
But hopefully it gets it gets easier and it gets more democratized so that everyone can kind of like take advantage of that with the benefits of that learn from that and then as we said before be like better systems for for each organization.
Where do you think are the most exciting areas of AI research right now or where do you wish more people are working. I'm super excited about you know I mean it's fun to do like text right and I'm just here for short periods of time so I went to a couple of like Akkistan and there are some some really cool stuff.
But I think I think it's interesting and important to work on you know more technically challenging problems right now especially in the other domains like I'm super excited about biology. How do you apply AI to biology how do you apply AI to chemistry to kind of like both can't like have positive impact in the world but also to differentiate yourself and can't like build more technically challenging stack for for AI.
So these are some of the things I'm excited about right now.
这些是我现在感到兴奋的一些事情。
And then how do you think about that I feel like there's two views of the world and maybe neither is fully correct in terms of general purpose models versus niche models right so some people are making the argument which is you just keep scaling up models you get you make them more and more general eventually they can do anything.
And the other side of it we were saying well just do the focus small model that is targeted to the specific thing that you're trying to do with the data set that you're trying to do can be highly perform and you don't need to wait for the big generalization. Where do you think will be in three or four years.
Yeah that's a good that's a good question I've tried to stop doing predictions in AI because it's too hard these days like I say something in three months three months later it goes completely as a way around and I look like a fool so I won't I won't do too many predictions.
But I usually try to more like look at the past and data points since chat GP got released companies have uploaded to hugging face over 100,000 models right and I don't think company is like trained models for fun right if they can use something else if they don't need the training they would.
And then interesting other interesting data point is that if you look at all the models on the hugging face hub the most used ones are actually models from 500 million to 5 billion parameters.
And I think the reason why is that when you get kind of like more customized specialized models you get something that is like first like simpler to understand and iterate on you get something that is faster most of the time which sometimes can run like on on device on your phone or like on specific hardware.
Something that is cheaper cheaper to run and actually gets you better accuracy for your specific use case when you when you specialize it sometimes from some implications when you're doing a chatbot for customer supports where customers are asking for.
And then you know your last in voice you probably don't need a chatbot to be able to tell you about the meaning of life and the weather in San Francisco you know you just need it to be really good at your specific use case. And what we're seeing is that having a more specialized customized smaller model for for that usually is is a better fit. And then you use cases like if you're being for example and you want to do like a general search and giant to to be able to answer all these questions obviously like a large more general model makes makes sense. Ultimately I mean I think that's going to always be all sorts of different models the same way there are all sorts of code based right like you wouldn't like today you don't really say like my code base is better than yours you don't say like stripe code base is better than Facebook code base. I just do different things right they answer different problems to different questions the same for models you know like there's no one model these better than those are you smart like what model makes sense for your for your use case and how how can you can fly optimize it for your specific use case.
The last question I wanted to ask before we open things up to the audience is around business models and business opportunities and I'll leave the confundrum see of data bricks has this really good framework for open source where he says. With open source you first start out with some open source software and just making that work is like hitting a grand slam and baseball and then you put down the baseball bat and you pick up a golf club and you had a hole in one to have a successful business so it's almost like you need two miracles in order to build something amazing and open source sustainable as a company as well as a product. How do you think about monetization of hugging face and what are some of the directions that you all are going for and that for that.
I don't know if I agree with this no because I think open source also gives you like superpowers and things that you couldn't do with with added I know that for us you know like a said we're the kind of like random French founders and if it wasn't for for the community for the contributors for for the people helping us on the open source people sharing their models. I mean we wouldn't be where we are today right so it also creates new new capabilities not only on the challenges. For us the way we've approached it is that you know when you have kind of like an open platform like like hugging face. The way to monetize is always some sort of a premium model or some kind of like version of a premium model. So we have 15,000 companies using us right now and we have 3000 companies paying us to use to use some of our services and usually they pay for additional features like enterprise features right some companies they want security they want user management or they pay for for compute like that. They want to run on faster hardware they want to run the inference on the platform they want to run the training on the platform and like that we found kind of like a good balance where if you were company actually contributing to the community into the ecosystem you're releasing your models in open source.
我不知道我是否同意这个观点,因为我认为开源也会给你带来超能力和你在不开源的情况下做不到的一些事情。我知道对于我们这样的随机的法国创始人,如果不是社区、贡献者和那些分享他们的模型的人帮助我们,我们今天不会到达这个位置。所以这也创造了新的能力,不仅仅是挑战。对于我们来说,我们的方法是,当你拥有一个像 Hugging Face 这样的开放平台时,获利的方式总是一些高级模型或某种高级模型的版本。所以我们现在有15,000家公司使用我们,并有3,000家公司支付我们使用我们的某些服务,通常他们支付附加功能,如企业功能。有些公司他们希望有安全性、用户管理,或者他们支付计算服务,例如更快的硬件运行推理和训练。我们发现了一个良好的平衡点,如果你是在社区和生态系统中做出贡献并公开你的模型的公司,那么你就能获得好处。
It's always going to be free for you and if you company more like you know taking advantage of of the platform then you contribute in different way you contribute financially right by by helping us monetize and keep working on this. So we still early on that but we've kind of like found this kind of like differentiation between the two that allows us to keep working for the community keep doing open source keep contributing in alignment with with our values and what we want to do but at the same time make it like a good business sustainable business that allows us to to scale and go our impact. You mentioned the community a few times and I think hugging face is one of the most beloved like products and communities in the A.I. World.
What were their specific tactics you took to build out that community or things that you felt were especially important in the early days or how did you evolve something that's so powerful from a community basis perspective. I would say just the emoji you know having having the hugging face hugging face emoji as as a logo as a name that's that's only took only took to get get the love of the community. No it's hard to say how to say we're really grateful. Some of the things that we've done that that we've been happy with is that we never hired any community manager.
And we actually it's a bit counterintuitive but it led to actually every single team members every single hugging face team members to actually share this responsibility of contributing to the community talking to the community answering to the community instead of like having a couple of like team members and you know instead of having researchers being like oh I'm not going to you know do the community work because we have this community manager.
So for example our Twitter account the hugging face to your account everyone in the company can tweet from it. So if you're seeing the tweets from the hugging face Twitter account it's not for me it's not from like community manager it's from any of the hugging face team members.
Which was a kind of like a bit scary scary at the beginning especially especially as we grow we haven't had any problem yet but I apologize in advance if at some point you see like a rock, rock, rock tweets that might might be a might be a team member but yes. The smarter approach to always be able to blame someone else for exactly. Yes maybe it's going to be me actually it's going to be between the bad the bad tweets that be able to say it's an intern or something like that. Yes you must have a lot of interns just in case you're kind of smart.
Yeah. Last question for me in the will open up to the audience. What do you wish more startup founders were working on or where do you think they're interesting opportunities for people to build right now.
So I'm a bit biased on that but I wish more startup founders were actually building AI you know not just using AI systems because I think there's a big difference. So in the way I see things in the early days of software you could you know using the you could use an API you could use like weeks or square space or WordPress to build a website right and that's good that's kind of like a good way to get something up quickly and you can do beautiful things.
But I think the real power came from people actually writing code right and building building technology themselves and that's how you get kind of like the power out of these things. It's kind of like the same for AI right. You can do something quickly. And ultimately if you really want to be serious about AI you need to kind of like understand how models work, how they're trained, how you can optimize them. And that's also what's going to unlock the most potential for like truly great startups and great products and and companies that are differentiated from incumbents just like adding some like AI features.
And these companies like you know run away email announced the release of their text video I think today or yesterday that's a good example of like really kind of like AI native startup that is really actually training models building models really kind of like doing and building AI not just using using AI. That's one thing that I usually recommend startups do or if you're just using AI just you know build your company accordingly knowing that your you know mode or you were like advantage especially 30 stage won't be so much on the technical capabilities but more on you know getting customers or getting users or any you wrote a beautiful very good like article that I would recommend. Want you to read on on modes for AI they need to then kind of like take advantage of other kind of modes than in my opinion like technical modes.
Okay great let's open it up to the audience if there are any questions. Maybe we start in the corner right there. You mentioned something about like open sourcing thing it's good because like you give it to good actor and also like bad actor can use but like good actors probably are you have more good actors but how do you usually respond to claims like open AI that they don't say any details about their models they don't open source anything because they're afraid of AI safety.
I mean I respect everyone's approaches right like different organizations have different ways of like seeing seeing the future or like the current current way technology technology is building. And the fact that some technologies are built like behind closed door. You can build things like in the open you actually create much more sustainable paths in the long run for this technology to be embedded in society in general right for like regulators to be able to create the regulatory framework for for this technology is for NGOs for civil society to be able to wait.
So yeah I think we were starting from a very different position philosophically speaking but you know that's not too much of a problem in my opinion for the ecosystem you know you can have different organizations with different points of use. And like the most important thing is just that your company doing our line with your company values. Any other questions right there in the middle.
The paradox of how do they preserve the privacy of their data while improving the models is in housing open source models the solution or approaches like federated learning you know appreciate your thoughts.
We've been working a little bit on the conflict more like distributed or decentralized training which is still hard to do and I think nobody has really figured it out yet but that's what you asked me about my interest in the science science progress that's one of where we're really excited about to see more people working.
But yeah the more practical answers and solutions today are on device models or there are also some more solutions that are embedded in how you train models. So for example we're leading an initiative called a big code which is releasing some I think it released a few few weeks ago the biggest open repository of code that people can train code models on it's called the stack.
The interesting thing about it is that it we gave the ability to opt out from these data sets before training the model. I think you've seen last week the training of the Adobe model that also have been really good at training on good data where users have actually opted in for for the training. So these are also some I think important developments in the fields where you want to be a bit more intentional about the data or more transparent about it one of the challenges is that the lot of these systems today we don't really know what they've been trained on right because there's no transparency about it.
I wish there was so that we can kind of like have a better understanding of like what you're capable of doing with which data and and then kind of like find solutions to make sure it stays like privacy preserving for for people. But there's some some good development and I think we're we're making a lot of progress there.
Do you think we're going to end up with just like those robots that text right now for search do you think we'll have like AI dot text or something for you know sites to be able to opt out of using any idea that's.
你觉得我们会像现在搜索引擎所用的那些机器人一样,最终采用 AI 点击文本或其他什么东西,让网站能够选择不使用任何 AI 技术吗?
Yeah, yeah, probably we'll need to have norms around that for sure around like consent for for AI. I think that's that's really important that's really important for example for artists for digital artists or non non digital artists. That's important for for attribution and distribution of value right because we want people to who are contributing to be able to be rewired for it.
An interesting question that I don't think has a good solution right now but in the world where search is only kind of like a chat interface. What we want is kind of like the underlying creators of the of the content right if I if I pick up the website and before I was leaving because you know I was getting traffic on this website so I can do ads.
And if now the results of this website is actually shown on like a chat answer without mentioning me as a content creator. You know what's what's my incentive to create this content right so will people just stop building websites because they basically don't get the attribution or or or the reward for it. These are very very important questions I think we're just scratching the surface of what needs to be done for things like that to be resolved but very important questions.
Maybe back there towards the top. So what are the modes that can be built on top of them there's there's data there's human feedback. There's maybe to some degree being good at prompting and are there any other methods that you feel startups can build modes.
That's a good question that depends a lot on you know your skills your background as a team what what you're excited about I think there's a lot a lot to be built around specializing for you know domain-specific domain-specific use case specific industry-specific hardware right.
That's what I'm like most most excited about right kind of like trying to leverage some specific expertise or specific domain-specific kind of like problem that others bigger players are not going to be focusing on. As I said like for example biology chemistry time series all these domains where you don't see as much activity I think it's a good way to have in a way more more time as a startup to build your differentiation and your text stack to a point where you're not at the mercy of like 100 or start up select releasing exactly same thing as you did and get like losing losing your edge.
So that that would be some of my recommendations but again I mean I've told about the story for getting face right how we started with a I time a Gucci and and the poor where we are. So you know one of the main things is just to you know start working start start building listening to what you're seeing as signals it's written on things and I'm sure you land on on something that you're excited about at some point.