Ce Zhang

Co-founder & CTO, Together AI · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveacademicscientistzhangce.github.io ↗

Ce Zhang co-founded Together AI, an AI cloud and infrastructure company specializing in large-scale model training, inference optimization, and open-source foundation models. Formerly an associate professor at ETH Zurich, his academic and industrial work focuses on democratizing machine learning through data-centric systems, decentralized training, and scalable AI infrastructure.

9statements → 2claims → 1claims resolved → 3.56/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 1 assertion · 1 opinion · 6 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertion are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Ce argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

Zhang: RedPajama-V2 features 40 pre-computed quality signals for custom filtering

“So that's why in REST-PYRON V-II, we kind of overlay the data set, it's like, 40 different pre-computed quality signal, right? If you want to reproduce your best effort, like, C-Four filter, it's kind of like, 20 lines of code.”

Ce Zhang Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 13:29 Building an open AI company - with Ce and Vipul of Together AI

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Ce Zhang on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

What they said9 Episodes1

Everything Ce Zhang said on Latent Space that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion

Zhang: The world is not running out of AI training data

“I don't think we are running out of data on earth. Right, so think about it globally... But I do think there are many organizations in the world have enough data to actually train, like, very, very good models, right? So, I mean, they are not public available,…”

Ce Zhang Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 20:56 Building an open AI company - with Ce and Vipul of Together AI

Insight

Zhang: ML systems optimization is fundamentally always about data movement

“Fundamentally, the thing we are actually optimizing is actually not that different. It's always about data movement across essentially all the stacks, right? So when you do distributed, like computing, it's about communication across different machines. When y…”

Ce Zhang Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 6:19 Building an open AI company - with Ce and Vipul of Together AI

Insight

Zhang: Pre-training data evolved from a model byproduct into a standalone asset

“So, so I think one fundamental thing that changed in the last year, essentially, in the beginning when people think about data, is, is always like a byproduct of the model, right? You release the model, you also release the data, right? The data side is there …”

Ce Zhang Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 14:43 Building an open AI company - with Ce and Vipul of Together AI

Insight

Zhang: Targeted task training yields smaller, cheaper, and more accurate models

“The benefit you can get out of that is you could build a, Better open model, often smaller, often easier to do inference if you know what you want, right? So I think the whole trade-off would be, and the x-axis would be how generic the hosting will be. The y-a…”

Ce Zhang Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 19:54 Building an open AI company - with Ce and Vipul of Together AI

Insight

Zhang: Next 10x AI inference gain requires multi-layer co-optimization

“If you only push on one direction, you are going to reach diminution return really, really quickly. Yeah, there's only that much you can do on the system side, only that much you can do on the algorithm side. And since the only big thing that's going to happen…”

Ce Zhang Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 40:16 Building an open AI company - with Ce and Vipul of Together AI

Insight

Zhang: Good benchmarks must anticipate how developers over-optimize toward metrics

“A good benchmark should think about how it's going to incentivize the field to actually move forward, right? So the benchmark will become kind of standard. How are people going to over optimize to the benchmark because people are going to do that? And when peo…”

Ce Zhang Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 44:23 Building an open AI company - with Ce and Vipul of Together AI

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Zhang predicts much faster, diverse new embedding models within couple years

“So I think for the next couple years, yeah, we will see a whole bunch of new embeddings maybe of different sites, and much, much faster than today.”

Ce Zhang Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 53:29 Building an open AI company - with Ce and Vipul of Together AI

Insight

Zhang: Combining fine-tuning and RAG provides superior performance boosts

“Combining all those techniques all together, right? So we'll give you essentially another boost, right? So that kind of one thing that we learn on the technical side.”

Ce Zhang Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 1:08:27 Building an open AI company - with Ce and Vipul of Together AI

Assertion Supported

Zhang: RedPajama-V2 features 40 pre-computed quality signals for custom filtering

Ce Zhang Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 13:29 Building an open AI company - with Ce and Vipul of Together AI

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
Building an open AI company - with Ce and Vipul of Together AI	Feb 8, 2024	24m

Ce Zhang

The record, in short

Their most notable supported claim

How they sound: not measured why? →

Appearances (1)

Turn any episode into a week of clips.