Insight certainty 3/5 debate potential 3/5

Shensi Ding: Companies over-engineer by training custom models instead of using generic LLMs

Shensi Ding · "We Don't Trust Agents" - What This CTO Knows That You Don't · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Jun 1, 2026 · at 50:29

Shensi Ding, co-founder and CEO of Merge, discusses common industry misconceptions about AI development with host Molly O'Shea.

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“One hot take that I have is that I've noticed a lot of companies, like, kind of over-engineering their, like, ML usage. Like, they'll have, like, They'll build their own custom models. They'll try to train their own models when really, like, you should, you could probably just use the generic model and then focus more on making your product better.”

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