Alex Ratner (@ajratner) / X

Alex Ratner

1,837 posts

Alex Ratner

@ajratner

@SnorkelAI @uwcse / prev @StanfordAILab – Interested in data management systems for machine learning, weak supervision, and impactful applications.

Menlo Park, CA

Joined November 2013

Pinned
Alex Ratner
@ajratner
Feb 15
This week we launched the Open Benchmarks Grant with a $3M initial commitment from @SnorkelAI + partner support from @huggingface @togethercompute @PrimeIntellect @PyTorch @harborframework & others, in order to close the evaluation gap in AI. Our ability to measure AI has been
Open Benchmarks Grant for Agentic AI | Snorkel AI
From benchmarks.snorkel.ai
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Alex Ratner
@ajratner
May 29, 2025
Agentic AI will transform every enterprise–but only if agents are trusted experts. The key: Evaluation & tuning on specialized, expert data. I’m excited to announce two new products to support this–@SnorkelAI Evaluate & Expert Data-as-a-Service–along w/ our $100M Series D! ---
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Alex Ratner
@ajratner
Dec 18, 2022
1/ 2023 AI prediction: the gap between generative and predictive AI will widen. Despite product & business model innovation in generative AI, real-world ROI will remain concentrated around predictive AI- leading to frustrated expectations. This gap will all come down to data...
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Alex Ratner
@ajratner
Apr 2, 2023
1/ Prediction: Everyone will soon be using foundation models (FMs) like GPT-4. However, they'll be using FMs trained on their own data & workloads: "GPT-You", not GPT-X Tl/dr: - Closed APIs aren't defensible - The durable moat is data - The last mile generates the real value
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Alex Ratner
@ajratner
Feb 23, 2023
arxiv.org/abs/2302.10724: ChatGPT is "jack of all trades, master of none"- on avg 25% worse than SOTA. Specialized ML models can be better, faster, and cheaper! But: foundation models like ChatGPT can actually be used to accelerate the development of these specialist models...
arxiv.org
ChatGPT: Jack of all trades, master of none
OpenAI has released the Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) and revolutionized the approach in artificial intelligence to human-model interaction. Several publications on ChatGPT...
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Alex Ratner
@ajratner
Nov 18, 2022
1/ Foundation models (FMs) like GPT-3 are amazing at generative, human-in-the-loop tasks. But *adapting* and *deploying* them for real enterprise use cases is still a major challenge. Today, we're excited to share @SnorkelAI's new data-centric approach to bridging this gap.
Alex Ratner
@ajratner
Dec 3, 2022
1/ Labeling training data is one of the biggest pain points in ML today (whether training or fine-tuning). As a result- we get lots of claims of "automating it away" :) Ofc there's no such thing- but there are ways to make it 10-100x+ faster, which come down to three questions:
Alex Ratner
@ajratner
Sep 2, 2023
1/ Lots of debate on "fine tuning vs. RAG" for LLMs. It's a completely false dichotomy! - FT: For adjusting a model's behavior - RAG: For providing external context Eg to make good diagnoses, a doctor needs specialty training (FT) *and* access to the patient's chart (RAG)
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Alex Ratner
@ajratner
Aug 20, 2023
Prediction: Enterprise AI will be 1000's of specialist models per org, not one big generalist. They'll be derived from OSS base models, tuned + distilled for specific use cases & settings. Why? - Specialists >> generalists on acc/perf - OSS FMs + fine-tuning = good enough now
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Alex Ratner
@ajratner
May 6, 2023
The future of AI is many smaller "specialist" models that are faster *and* cheaper on specific datasets & use cases- not one large "generalist" model. Very excited to share our work on doing this via more efficient distillation, with @GoogleAI & led by the amazing @cydhsieh !!
Cheng-Yu Hsieh
@cydhsieh
May 5, 2023
Excited to introduce Distilling Step-by-Step! ⚗️🪜 A simple mechanism to train small task-specific models to outperform LLMs, by leveraging less data needed by standard finetuning/distillation. Camera-ready paper and code release coming soon! 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2305.02301 🧵(1/n)
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Alex Ratner
@ajratner
Jan 13, 2025
arxiv.org/abs/2408.16737 - example of a noisier dataset with *greater diversity and coverage* outperforming an equivalent-cost dataset that is higher-quality but narrower. Key idea: AI datasets are about quality *and* coverage/diversity- a key tradeoff space to be explored
arxiv.org
Smaller, Weaker, Yet Better: Training LLM Reasoners via...
Training on high-quality synthetic data from strong language models (LMs) is a common strategy to improve the reasoning performance of LMs. In this work, we revisit whether this strategy is...
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Alex Ratner
@ajratner
Aug 15, 2023
The ChatGPT hype cycle: - Stage 1: "GPT-X is out-of-the-box magic!" - Stage 2: "We need to use our data" (where we are now) - Stage 3: "We need to develop our data" From 2 -> 3, enterprises will realize not enough to just dump in a data lake... use case-specific dev is key!👇🧵
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Alex Ratner
@ajratner
Jan 15, 2023
1/ In classical ML, development was "model-centric" (tuning/editing your model). As deep learning models emerged, "data-centric" dev (labeling/curating your data) became increasingly important. In the foundation model era: data-centric is the *only* viable type of development.
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Alex Ratner
@ajratner
Jun 11, 2025
Scale alone is not enough for AI data. Quality and complexity are equally critical. Excited to support all of these for LLM developers with @SnorkelAI Data-as-a-Service, and to share our new leaderboard! — Our decade-plus of research and work in AI data has a simple point:
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