crazymonezyy t1_jcjfp9o wrote on March 17, 2023 at 7:32 AM

Reply to comment by Oswald_Hydrabot in [P] nanoT5 - Inspired by Jonas Geiping's Cramming and Andrej Karpathy's nanoGPT, we fill the gap of a repository for pre-training T5-style "LLMs" under a limited budget in PyTorch by korec1234

> There are solutions that cost less than GPT-4, and they don't require integration of a black box that is gatekept by a single provider.

Management has a different perspective on costs than you and me. The way cost-benefit is analyzed in a company is whether by increasing the input cost X% can the profit then be increased by a corresponding Y% due to an increase in scale (number of contracts). They are also shit scared of the new guy on the block and losing existing business to the 100 or so startups that will come up over the next week flashing the shiny new thing in front of customers. They also don't have the same perspective on open as us, where they see black boxes as a partnership opportunity.

I'm not saying you're wrong, in fact I agree with your sentiment and it's the same as mine, and I've tried to put forth some of these arguments to my boss for why we should still be building products in-house instead of GPT-everything. What I realised is when you talk to somebody on the business side you'd get a very different response to the ironclad defense that works perfectly in your head.

Oswald_Hydrabot t1_jcpqshf wrote on March 18, 2023 at 4:42 PM

Those are bad managers. I certainly have had these conversations and I left companies over their response until I found one that listened.

You have to try harder. You have to stop accepting short-sighted near term profit as "just how it is" or assuming that financial malpratice at scale is "good business", because if you do not and you don't keep trying, failure is inevitable. Corruption and corporate bailouts that take our tax revenue and cost us layoffs to pay for those mistakes are inevitable. Stop being complacent if you cannot accept putting in the effort to make what you know is right a reality.

I have been involved in those conversations at the highest levels in some of the largest companies in the world. More often than not I told them to either listen to the consulting that they PAID me for, or I will take my business somewhere else, and I did. If you don't suck at what you do then firing bad clients will not hurt you; in fact is it critical to your own growth in your career. You need to treat your employer as a client.