As an MLE who has been failing to get anyone interested in classifiers for many years, the hype around Jev makes me scream internally.
Yes, I get that a zero-shot classifier is more convenient than the traditional kind, it's very cool. Kind of. But then again plain LLMs have been perfectly cheap and serviceable as zero-shot classifiers for quite some time now, so again I'm back to my internal screaming.
> But then again plain LLMs have been perfectly cheap and serviceable as zero-shot classifiers for quite some time now, so again I'm back to my internal screaming.
It's the scale of "perfectly cheap", jev (specifically) is so dirt cheap and fast that you can throw it at things that should not be justifiable in the past and you barely have to do any work other then quick testing.
I think part of what made Jev catch on is that the API is like an if(...) or switch statement
People are just so used to the chat style APIs that they didn't even consider doing things like sending a bunch of emojis to a chat model and then asking for the optimal one in this context etc. Also chat models are pricier for the same behavior and can also output something random like a refusal
But yeah ironically I think in the initial breakthrough LLM paper on GPT-3 in 2020 some of the multiple choice questions were answered by comparing token probabilities of specific continuations rather than fill in the blank
Maybe I should have spent less time pitching to PMs and more time pitching ground up to devs, who have the right foundation to intuitively understand the usefulness.
Yes, I get that a zero-shot classifier is more convenient than the traditional kind, it's very cool. Kind of. But then again plain LLMs have been perfectly cheap and serviceable as zero-shot classifiers for quite some time now, so again I'm back to my internal screaming.
It's the scale of "perfectly cheap", jev (specifically) is so dirt cheap and fast that you can throw it at things that should not be justifiable in the past and you barely have to do any work other then quick testing.
People are just so used to the chat style APIs that they didn't even consider doing things like sending a bunch of emojis to a chat model and then asking for the optimal one in this context etc. Also chat models are pricier for the same behavior and can also output something random like a refusal
But yeah ironically I think in the initial breakthrough LLM paper on GPT-3 in 2020 some of the multiple choice questions were answered by comparing token probabilities of specific continuations rather than fill in the blank
Maybe I should have spent less time pitching to PMs and more time pitching ground up to devs, who have the right foundation to intuitively understand the usefulness.
Is it a better thing? Yeah. Does it affect me in any tangible way? No.
But come on, really people? All you needed was like one tiny bell & whistle to take this from nothing to the hottest thing of all time?