[HN Gopher] AI startup Scale lays off 20% of its staff
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AI startup Scale lays off 20% of its staff
Author : bertdb
Score : 33 points
Date : 2023-01-10 10:44 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scale.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scale.com)
| [deleted]
| smoyer wrote:
| Why do these so-called leaders break the news to everyone and in
| the same letter then start our imply that "the rest of us are
| going to do great". At a minimum, save that for a follow-up to
| just those who survived. And take the "we are hiring" taking off
| your LinkedIn profile and email footer!
| m00x wrote:
| It's usually the case when they abandon some high risk
| features, or they lay off low performers, and want to message
| that the company is doing well, just re-adjusting.
| kevinwang wrote:
| Pretty surprising news, I would have thought them to be
| positioned to do well from the current ML boom
| bfeynman wrote:
| They are grifters taking advantage of boom and recruiting
| industry execs to head sales. They don't have any proprietary
| technology. The fact that private info was leaked in a fb
| channel by annotators in like south america shows that this
| company has little in the way of a meaningful product.
|
| The irony is in their name "scale", laying off 20% would be
| ringing death bell for a company that actually operated leanly.
| They basically tried to copy mechanical turk
| elzbardico wrote:
| When it seems like everybody else is doing layoffs, MBAs and
| wall street gets nervous if you don't do it
| calr wrote:
| I also am a bit surprised by this. AI is back to being the
| hotness now that crypto blew itself up. I suspect from reading
| this quote:
|
| "Many of the industries we serve, such as e-commerce and
| consumer technology, have been buoyed by the pandemic and are
| now experiencing a painful market correction."
|
| that they had an established segment of customers that were
| experimentally looking at ML to augment their core business,
| and how they could leverage with their data. Perhaps these
| companies are pulling back spend with whispers of a shaky 2023
| economy.
| threevox wrote:
| I interviewed with them recently, they've brought on lots of
| (expensive) new MLE type employees to provide ML SaaS services.
| Open-source might be putting pressure on them as these things
| become more commoditized
| markisus wrote:
| The letter frames recent advances like ChatGPT as positive
| indicators for Scale's future business. However, task specific
| bespoke human data annotation may fall away to datasets generated
| by massive self supervised multi-modal models. The other day, I
| saw that one of these image generation models can be prompted to
| create image-semantic mask pairs. And I wouldn't be surprised if
| ChatGPT could generate text along side named entity labels for
| specialized domains. The holy grail for AI has always been
| obviating the need for manual annotation and increased efficiency
| on the data we do have. Scale's data annotation business seems at
| odds with the core goals of AI researchers, and may dry up as
| those goals are increasingly realized.
| Imnimo wrote:
| Not only that, it's not clear to me that these models required
| the sort of annotation that Scale sells. He says:
|
| >Each of the big AI breakthroughs (ChatGPT, GPT-3, DALL-E) have
| been made possible through extensive data collection and
| annotation infrastructure.
|
| Maybe I'd count the RLHF stuff from ChatGPT as requiring a form
| of annotation. But like Dall-E is trained using existing
| captions/alt-text. No one is sitting in a room annotating
| images for Dall-E. Where would a company like Scale fit into
| this?
| rcme wrote:
| Yea... despite the massive amounts of data being fed into
| these models, the model quality is still data-bound. There is
| no way to produce models like GPT-3 with manually annotated
| data.
| threevox wrote:
| I interviewed with them a few months ago, got rejected, and then
| was contacted by the SAME RECRUITER to interview again a month
| and a half later. He'd forgotten who I was or that I interviewed.
| From what I could tell, they're a mess; this doesn't surprise me
| at all
| m00x wrote:
| That happened to me with Amazon and Microsoft. I asked Amazon
| to never email me again, and then I get a "got it, removing you
| from our list", and then the same recruiter emailed me saying I
| was a perfect fit.
| rat9988 wrote:
| This is the kind of things that can easily happen.I wouldn't
| judge them on it.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| er... a month and a half later? Seriously?
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