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What’s really special about this new era of ML is its accessibility.

Every business had problems with probabilistic solutions. ML is the way to do that. But the barrier to entry has been so high for so long. And so you had to be in big tech or a highly specialized shop to play.

Now all you need is an API key and one line of code to call the most powerful models in the world.

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I agree, but it's worth mentioning explicitly that the main driver of accessibility has been generalizability. The fact that LLMs are so effective at zero-shot and few-shot learning tasks is what made out-of-the-box API access practical for a wide range of use cases. Products like SageMaker tried to automate away some of the complexity of training bespoke models, but they're still way more complicated than using an off-the-shelf model.

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