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Comment by Fiahil | Hacker News Reader

* with a heavy pinch of salt.

I work for a big AI consultancy, but we haven't seen relevant work from Meta for a while. Their non-bayesian stuff is "meh" and often seriously misguided in their business approach. (which makes sense, they're not accustomed to work as consultants on setups with limited data)

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IMO their area of expertise is in software and tooling. The fact that they maintain PyTorch is a big deal and I've used a few of their other libraries like Detectron and torch-points3d and some have become an integral part of my work.

This isn't even remotely true. wav2vec alone is the most impactful model in speech recognition in a while and their subsequent work in low-resource languages makes it pretty obvious they're working with limited data...

No clue what a "big AI consultancy" is, but as someone who works in ML on a big feed-driven social networking site, what you are saying is just not true.

I’m a consultant / data scientist for a big management consulting firm.

What the hell is a big AI consultancy? As far as I can tell, these do not exist. Why would you expect to see meta doing consulting work at all?

Probably one of those companies trying to sell SMBs a "data platform." ie. like C3.ai ...

It seems snake oil adjacent to me, at least at this point.

That caught my attention too. I work on AI consulting and have a reasonable sense of the ecosystem. There are certainly big players that claim "AI" as part of their consulting business, e.g. Deloitte, but they are well removed from any of the research and really just selling dashboards or something with a new name. The GP comments is the kind of thing I would expect a consultant working at a place like that to come out with

So if I understand correctly: they are working in a domain different from yours, thus their work isn’t relevant to you, and even though they are not claiming otherwise their reputation is overrated?

Maybe you meant something else, but that’s how your statement reads.

Their recent effort to generate training data for spotting stuff that includes unsanctioned narratives comes to mind. https://github.com/facebookresearch/AugLy

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