A new old kind of R&D lab

Hi folks -- Jeremy from Answer.AI (and fast.ai!) here. Happy to answer any questions you have about this new thing that Eric and I are building.<p>One thing I&#x27;m particularly keen to explore is working closely with academic groups to help support research that might help make AI more accessible (e.g. requiring less data or compute, or becoming easier to use, etc). This includes the obvious stuff like quantization, fine-tuning adaptors, model merging, distillation, etc, but also looking for new directions and ideas as well which might otherwise be hard to fund (since academia tends to like to build on established research directions.)<p>I&#x27;ve opened my DMs at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jeremyphoward" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jeremyphoward</a> for a while so feel free to ping me there, or also on Discord (&#x27;jeremyhoward&#x27;).

Eric Ries here, happy to answer questions about Answer.AI or any of the related themes Jeremy talked about in the announcement post: rapid iteration, R&amp;D, startup governance, long-term thinking, etc.<p>Excited to see what comes out of this new lab. And if you&#x27;re interested in joining the cause, please do get in touch. Both Jeremy and I are on this thread and generally reachable.

For those who aren&#x27;t family familiar with Jeremy Howard.<p>Jeremy was a cofounder and chief scientist of Kaggle (a competitive ML platform)<p>Jeremy also started Fast AI with Rachel Thomas. Fastai is one of the best ways to learn Deep learning even today.<p>Jeremy is a great teacher and have been a voice of debunking AI paranoia and closed models.<p>Really rooting for Jeremy!

Hi Jeremy &amp; Eric, great to see your newest endeavor. I hope that Answer.AI builds on the success and impact that fast.ai has already enjoyed.<p>Given new developments in hardware (by companies not named NVIDIA), I&#x27;m wondering if you are keen on exploring the next generation of model architectures and optimization procedures that might exploit newer hardware. In other words, will research directions pivot based on the hardware lottery?[1] Are you in conversations with companies developing these alternative chips?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2009.06489" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2009.06489</a>

Is there really a shortage of companies that are trying to do foundational AI research, and also build the results of that research into end-user products? Off the top of my head, the list of such companies would include... you know, literally every large tech company. If the idea here is that they can do it at a much smaller scale, and more cheaply, that&#x27;s great. But it&#x27;s not clear to me from this article what the radical new approach is that will enable that.<p>I wonder if putting out effectively a press release before actually doing the work is the right approach. If they launch a product or two and they flop, people will say this approach was doomed from the start. It would be better to create a compelling product in stealth, successfully launch it, then reveal how it was done. That would create more buy-in to the idea that such small R&amp;D labs can work.

Very excited to see how the Lean Startup guy applies his own ideas!

Sounds like a lab I was born for.<p>I think there’s a big group of individuals out there that are misfits both for regular jobs and science. Entrepreneur-ish generalists.

Will you still be working on educational content on the side? (e.g. updating fast.ai and&#x2F;or making one off lectures like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jkrNMKz9pWU" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jkrNMKz9pWU</a>)<p>Either way thank you for all the amazing free content you&#x27;ve already put out and good luck on the new endeavor!

Building on top of what exists makes sense. There&#x27;s science and then engineering and we need more engineering. I am curious though how far the $10M will go and what the plan is. Building on top still needs some kind of training and the money won&#x27;t go very far for anything large scale. I know they know this, I&#x27;m just interested to know the plan.

Here&#x27;s a short thread on the announcement, from Jeremy Howard, one of the founders: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jeremyphoward&#x2F;status&#x2F;1734606378331951318" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jeremyphoward&#x2F;status&#x2F;1734606378331951318</a>

Thank you for fast.ai. I&#x27;m glad the sweet VC is moving to smaller players to increase the diversity of ideas instead of it all being captured by OpenAI.<p>The world needs more players doing tinkering. AI is only going to work for everyone if everyone knows how it works and can tinker with it, instead of only the big corps and governments having access to it.<p>We need all of Mistral, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta FAIR, MS Research, Deepmind, Tinycorp, Answer AI, Perplexity, Stability AI, Huggingface and 1000 others to be GPU rich and idea rich.<p>We need NVidia, AMD, and 100s of other Chip makers. We need Huawai, Xiomi, Samsung and tons of others to be players.<p>AI only works if it is highly distributed and battle tested by many. We die when power is held by the few to oppress the masses.

Some questions, if you are still around to answer, because this is exciting!<p>1) Have you read about Vannevar Bush, and what he has written, and his body of work?! :)<p>2) What sort of people are you looking for &#x2F; to work with?<p>3) Would it need to be full-time? Are you looking to hire people full time (the generalists you mention), or are you comfortable working with people who are happy not cashing a cheque from you because they have jobs and other commitments &#x2F; priorities, but still believe in what you are building and would like to invest significant time in supporting &#x2F; driving the mission forward for some limited (or no) financial compensation? Because I’d like to check if I fit! :)<p>(I’ve also spammed you on twitter with a dm, but with more personal details, etc.)<p>Thank you!

fast.ai (the first iteration) was what got me into ML, when I was a sophomore undergrad. It played a big role in my career choice and progression!<p>To this day it still is my first recommendation for those learning. Congrats on the launch, excited about the future!

Is there a way of contacting these people? If you&#x27;re in this thread could you email me please? (in my profile), I can show you some cool ideas and what I am building!

Hi Jeremy, thanks for fast.ai and Kaggle and that refreshingly honest &amp; open interview on Latent Space. It sounds like you and Lattner are on good terms. Any plans to partner up with Modular?

I&#x27;m excited by this, and I wish y&#x27;all the best!

&gt; deep-tech generalists<p>What is meant by this?

&gt; a new kind of AI R&amp;D lab which creates practical end-user products based on foundational research breakthroughs<p>This isn&#x27;t new and if anything it&#x27;s the de facto standard for just about every AI research lab these days. OpenAI is the obvious example of an AI lab with tightly coupled product and research roadmaps and ChatGPT is the most prominent example of a successful research-driven AI product. A few years ago it could be argued that DeepMind and (fka) FAIR were siloed off from their respective orgs, but these days they are littered with product teams and their research roadmaps reflect this influence as well.<p>They do try to claim that what they are doing is different from OpenAI because they are focused on applications of AI whereas OpenAI is focused on building AGI, which is a laughable mischaracterization of OpenAI&#x27;s current roadmap. I personally have a hard time believing that path to AGI runs through the GPT store.<p>Accomplished researchers in AI can fundraise on their reputations alone, and Jeremy is no exception. The primary differentiator of any new startup in this space is the caliber of its researchers and engineers. But this post is really grasping at straws to claim that their value is from some new approach to R&amp;D, which is a totally unnecessary framing.

I’m just glad this exists! Very Wright Brothers vibe.

<i>&quot;but they were also on their way to being controlled and understood by a tiny exclusive slither of society.&quot;</i><p>I think that should be &quot;sliver&quot;.

So many people writing their pitches start by talking about scientists from the 1800s, these days. It&#x27;s a pretty big red flag to me.

When will the hype curve finally end...