187 karma · joined December 14, 2021
Where start-ups like Stability need to be rising to compete will have to be AI-native e.g. products re-thought of from the ground up like an AI image editor or as foundation-level AI research companies, agents or AI infrastructure companies.
There's no reason Stability can't play in both B2B and API if planned and strategized well and OpenAI can definitely pull it off with their tech and talent. But Stability has a few important differentiators from OpenAI where I believe if they launch an AI-native product in the multimodal space, they stand to differentiate significantly: - People join because they believed in Emad's vision of open source so it is their job to figure out a commercial model for open source. They can retain AI talent by ensuring a commitment to open source here. If they need to ensure their moat is retained and can commercialize, they should delay releasing model weights until a product surrounding the weights has been released first. Still open source and open weights but give them time to figure out a commercial strategy to capitalize their research. However because of this promise, they will not be able to license their technology to other companies. - Stability's strong research DNA (unsure about their engineering) is so badly fumbled by a lack of a cohesive product strategy that it leads to sub-par product releases. In agreement to the 3 'layers' argument, that's exactly Stability's greatest strength and weakness. Their focus on foundational models is incredibly strong and has come at the cost of the interface layer (and ultimately the data layer as it has a flywheel effect).
The company currently screams a need for effective leadership that can add on interface and data layers to their product strategy so they can build a strong moat outside of a strong research team which has shown it can disappear at any moment...
For those interested, I have a link for a form for people to fill in if there's interest - https://tally.so/r/3xaxlE
Also agreed git is terrible right now for version-controlling workflows in AI (I have a fairly large .gitignore file with S3-hosted things ever for my NextJS + FastAPI apps - pain in the butt
As more companies integrate LLM/RAG applications into their operations, ensuring the effectiveness, reliability and safety of these models is hard.
About DeepEval We started with consulting on a few RAG projects and quickly realised how many issues came up when we iterated on our prompts, chunking methodologies, added function calls, added guardrails, etc. Very quickly we realised this had downstream effects that caused unexpected problems and results.
DeepEval, inspired by Pytest, aims to make iterating on these RAG and agent applications as easy as possible by building evaluation into part of their CI/CD workflow. The goal is to make deployment of LLMs as straightforward as getting all tests to pass.
Some features of DeepEval include: - Opinionated tests for answer relevancy, factual consistency, toxicness, bias. - Web UI to view tests, implementations, comparisons. - Opinionated flow for synthetic dataset creation.
We are currently in a fully operational beta release and would love your feedback and suggestions to continue improving DeepEval.
We are happy to answer any questions you have!
We automate writing these tests by having ChatGPT generate sample queries and answers based on a given text. These test cases can then be run through the testing framework and can be run similarly to PyTest.
Disclaimer: I worked in this space for a few years as an ML engineer so it might be quite different for new entrants in the field.
- HuggingFace Evaluate (and their 3 dashboards) - OpenAIEval - AnthropicEval