LLM approaches were evaluated on my own time and but published (I left research after obtaining my PhD).
Excluding the part in the middle because I don't wanna repost potential issues for you. I just wanted to comment that that is terrible. People often talk about the siloed nature of research in industry, without considering that academia supports the draconian publishing system. I understand IP protection, but IP protection doesn't have to mean no access. This is such a huge issue in the bio- world (biostats, genetics, etc).
I think this is default policy for thesis based on publication agreements here.
In any case, I am not too worried.
I have skimmed through it and it's truly amazing how good annotation of the dataset can lead to impressive results.
I apologise in advance if the question seems ignorant: The blog post talked about fine-tuning models online. Given that BERT models can run comfortably on even iPhone hardware, were you able to finetune your models locally or did you have to do it online too? If so, are there any products that you recommend?
I doubt you can fine-tune BERT-large on a phone. A quantized, inference optimised pipeline can be leaps and bounds more efficient and is not comparable with the huggingface training pipelines on full models I did at the time. For non-adapter based training you're going to need GPUs ideally.