Comment by spwa4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spwa4 | Hacker News Reader

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That's not true, because everyone, everyone, everyone seems to want to do training. Which results in a 50 person company training, say, a voice model that then fails, because it's just not good enough.

In reality the problem is that it gets blasted out of the water by a much worse architecture trained on 10000x the infrastructure. And while I'm sure the freshly brought in ML student came up with a 10%, even 30% better architecture, it just doesn't matter. (and never mind that even OpenAI hasn't really solved a voice model yet. Try it. It can probably match 2026-quality call centers, but it's no substitute for an actually empowered human)

... and yet, if you look at what hyperscalers are getting paid for ... comfortably more than half the income is training. Which makes no sense on so many levels.

e.g. https://valueaddvc.com/blog/inference-chips-vs-training-chip... (I get it, not great first source, but st

The big question is whether companies hold enough proprietary data to do useful things that for e.g. Anthropic, etc. can't easily replicate.

For some very niche cases I think this is probably the case but for the vast majority, the company's data isn't as useful as they think it is or anywhere near the size needed.

Everyone says they want to do training, because it's sexy and an easy way to justify raising mad funding rounds. Some manage, most don't.

I don't know where you are located, but in EU, in China, and yes even in Silicon Valley, the vast majority of companies do not do any real AI engineering. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just not a smart path for most purposes. You can do amazing things without training, and if you try to train, you cannot get anything amazing unless you burn millions.

Very few people can afford to play the long game and cross that dessert. And, sure, you will not get far without good engineering, but good engineering is definitely not sufficient and is not the primary bottleneck.

It took a long time to cross that desert, and no sane company would want to get stuck in a desert, unless it's specifically an R+D "desert crossing" company.

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