Together AI CTO Ce Zhang explains the company's core thesis on AI inference optimization to Latent Space hosts.
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,…”
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…”
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 …”
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…”
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…”
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.”