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Comment by m3kw9 | Hacker News Reader

The problem with all these model releases is they have no demos or even video of it working. It’s all just download it and run it, like it’s an app.

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They're intended for researchers/professionals not consumers, and I'm not sure how a video is going to be helpful?

And the issue with a live demo is that these are resource-intensive, they're not just webpages. It's an entire project to figure out how to host them, scale them to handle peaks, pay for them, implement rate-limiting, and so forth.

For the intended audience, download-and-run-it doesn't seem like an issue at all. I don't see how any questions are going to be answered by a video.

Its so weird to me that they'd do 99% of the effort and just skip past the 1% of work to provide a dumbed-down summary and instructions for broader appeal. Clearly these are released in part for public-relations and industry clout.

Don't get me wrong they published this, it took a ton of work, they didn't have to do it. But its ultimately a form of gatekeeping that seems to come straight out of Academia. And honestly, that part of Academia sucks.

A good research team is a handful of people working on a focused set of questions.

A good product team is probably around a dozen people minimum? Especially if you need to hit the quality bar expected of a release from a BigCorp. You've got frontend, UX, and server components to design, in addition to the research part of the project. The last real app I worked on also included an app backend (ie, local db and web API access, separate from the display+UX logic) and product team. Oh yeah, also testing+qa, logging, and data analysis.

And after all that investment, God help you if you ever decide the headcount costs more than keeping the lights on, and you discontinue the project...

Public app releases are incredibly expensive, in other words, and throwing a model on GitHub is cheap.

It's not 1% of the work. If you have ever written public documentation, or half-decent internal documentation that is understandable to people outside your team, you would know that it takes a lot of effort to get it right. Let alone something highly technical like this. If you get things wrong or skip things you think are trivial but not to others, you get more questions. And it is not a one-time thing, it is a living document that needs to be updated and revised over time.

We're all research professionals now.

Even researchers and professionals appreciate a sample or two.

Here's the blog post with video of it working: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/multilingual-model-speech-recog...

I'd argue that having a "download and run" approach is so much better than videos or demos. Why do you think this is a problem?

Because to download and run it you need to have a laptop nearby to download and run it on, with the correct operating system and often additional dependencies too.

I do most of my research reading on my phone. I want to be able to understand things without breaking out a laptop.

There's a paper associated with it that you can read on your phone. And I don't think demo videos are really associated with "research". I agree they could've added both, but let's be honest here you'll have demo videos on this in the next 12 hours for sure.

That's a related complaint: everyone continues to insist on releasing papers as PDFs, ignoring the fact that those are still pretty nasty to read on a mobile device.

Sure, release a PDF (some people like those), but having an additional responsive web page version of a paper makes research much more readable to the majority of content consumption devices. It's 2023.

I'll generally use https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/ to generate those but that doesn't work with this specific paper since it's not hosted on arXiv.

Would you like a back rub while I'm at it?

fwiw, i know the topic of the thread has deviated, but i share the frustration about reading PDFs on my device. In my case, it's an accessibility issue - I can't see well, so zooming with reflow would make my life materially better since I'd be able to read research papers on my morning commute.

Sometimes users have needs that may seem superfluous and beg for a snarky reply, but there are often important reasons behind them, even though they may not be actionable.

I'd pay $x000 for an app that does some sort of intelligent pdf-to-epub conversion that doesn't require human-in-the-loop management/checking.

PDFs are pretty shite on mobile.

Interesting that there isn’t a common solution for this. I guess it’s rather niche?

It's a lot bigger investment. It'd be nice to at least see a video; that's easier than expecting people to download and run something just to see it.

Why should we have any marketing materials, ever? Why do we show pictures of products? Sometimes people want to see the capabilities before they completely dive in and spend their time working on something.

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