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Alex Ratner

Co-Founder & CEO, Snorkel AI · 1 appearance on the record.

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

founderexecutivescientistacademic@ajratner ↗LinkedIn ↗ajratner.github.io ↗

While completing his computer science Ph.D. at Stanford, Ratner created and led the open-source Snorkel project, pioneering programmatic weak supervision and data-centric AI development. In 2019, he co-founded Snorkel AI to commercialize this technology into an enterprise data platform for building, evaluating, and adapting AI models.

10statements → 7claims → 5claims resolved → 60%fully supported → 3.7/5average certainty → 2.7/5average debate potential →

3 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 predictions · 4 assertions · 3 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, and 2 name 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 Alex 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

Prediction Held up
Ratner: Private data models will exceed closed models in specialized tasks
“Closed source models, like a GPT-IV, five, six, seven, whatever comes, are going to be very hard to match in terms of generalist capability for, say, consumer use cases that are reflected in the web data they're trained on and the flywheels that get powered by…”
Alex Ratner May 31, 2023 ▶ 8:11 Entering the Data-Centric Era of Foundation Models with Alex Ratner, Co-Founder & CEO of Snorkel AI

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
75% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

304 words/min while actually speaking · 36.4 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Alex Ratner: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,475 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Alex Ratner said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Alex Ratner: Traditional model-centric AI development is dying off
“Tweaking the model, finding a fancier algorithm, all this kind of traditional model-centric development that, frankly, we still mostly teach in data science one-on-one courses as what data science is, is effectively dying off.”
Alex Ratner May 31, 2023 ▶ 11:53 Entering the Data-Centric Era of Foundation Models with Alex Ratner, Co-Founder & CEO of Snorkel AI
Insight
Alex Ratner: Enterprise data is AI's only durable moat
“Enterprise data knowledge is the durable moat in AI, I'd argue the only durable one”
Alex Ratner May 31, 2023 ▶ 5:01 Entering the Data-Centric Era of Foundation Models with Alex Ratner, Co-Founder & CEO of Snorkel AI
Assertion Partly supported
Ratner: $200 of ChatGPT calls can clone closed models into open ones
“If you take a couple hundred bucks of API calls to, say, ChatGPT, and you graph that onto a model that is substantially smaller, say a seven billion parameter model like LLAMA, or now increasingly fully open for commercial use ones, like Red Pajama is one that…”
Alex Ratner May 31, 2023 ▶ 6:40 Entering the Data-Centric Era of Foundation Models with Alex Ratner, Co-Founder & CEO of Snorkel AI
Prediction Held up
Ratner: Private data models will exceed closed models in specialized tasks
“Closed source models, like a GPT-IV, five, six, seven, whatever comes, are going to be very hard to match in terms of generalist capability for, say, consumer use cases that are reflected in the web data they're trained on and the flywheels that get powered by…”
Alex Ratner May 31, 2023 ▶ 8:11 Entering the Data-Centric Era of Foundation Models with Alex Ratner, Co-Founder & CEO of Snorkel AI
Assertion Partly supported
Ratner: Distillation creates specialized models 100,000x smaller with higher accuracy
“It shows that you can take these massive kind of generalist foundation models, And not only can you tune them using that kind of programmatic labeling to be more accurate on a given task that you need to be really accurate on, but you can then distill down ver…”
Alex Ratner May 31, 2023 ▶ 19:10 Entering the Data-Centric Era of Foundation Models with Alex Ratner, Co-Founder & CEO of Snorkel AI
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ratner: Base models will open-source while production uses specialized models
“There are going to be these base models. They're probably going to be increasingly open source. And then the reality of what actually ships in production is going to be a whole kind of family tree of smaller specialized models that are tuned and adapted via da…”
Alex Ratner May 31, 2023 ▶ 19:38 Entering the Data-Centric Era of Foundation Models with Alex Ratner, Co-Founder & CEO of Snorkel AI
Assertion Supported
Ratner: DataComp benchmark beat OpenAI models purely through data curation
“Just by cleaning, curating, sampling, filtering the data, we get a new state of the art score at compute parity, beating open AI models and others.”
Alex Ratner May 31, 2023 ▶ 13:25 Entering the Data-Centric Era of Foundation Models with Alex Ratner, Co-Founder & CEO of Snorkel AI
Insight
Ratner: Foundation models are incomplete solutions for real-world enterprise AI
“In most real-world use cases and we'll get into how I define that in a bit, there's still a last mile to be traversed. So it's not that they're overhyped, per se, they're just not the complete solution.”
Alex Ratner May 31, 2023 ▶ 3:04 Entering the Data-Centric Era of Foundation Models with Alex Ratner, Co-Founder & CEO of Snorkel AI
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ratner: Foundation models will require customization on enterprise-specific data
“Most of these foundation models, like a GPT-IV, five, six, seven, are going to need to be customized on your specific data and knowledge and workloads.”
Alex Ratner May 31, 2023 ▶ 4:01 Entering the Data-Centric Era of Foundation Models with Alex Ratner, Co-Founder & CEO of Snorkel AI
Assertion Supported
Ratner: BloombergGPT achieves only low 60s accuracy on specialized financial tasks
“If you actually open the first page of the Bloomberg GPT paper, the FinServe tasks that it does better on by using private financial data are still getting low sixties in terms of accuracy.”
Alex Ratner May 31, 2023 ▶ 9:31 Entering the Data-Centric Era of Foundation Models with Alex Ratner, Co-Founder & CEO of Snorkel AI

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Entering the Data-Centric Era of Foundation Models with Alex Ratner, Co-Founder & CEO of S May 31, 2023 19m
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