It's not free because it's cheap for them to run. It's free because they are burning that late-stage VC dollars. Despite what you might believe if you only follow them on twitter the biggest input to their product, aka a search index, is mostly based on brave/bing/serpAPI and those numbers are pretty tight. Big expectations for ads will determine what the company does.
This works better because it gives a secondary set of conditions for which the decoder (generating text) is conditioning its generation. Assume instead of their demo you are doing Speech2Text for Oncologists. Out of the Box Whisper is terrible because the words are new and rare, especially in YouTube videos. If you just run ASR through it and run NER, it will generate regular words over cancer names. Instead, if you condition generation on topical entities the generation space is constrained and performance will improve. Especially when you can tell the model what all the drug names are because you have a list (https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/treatment/drug...)
Not mentioned in their blog posts but on the model cards on huggingface:
"Molmo 72B is based on Qwen2-72B and uses OpenAI CLIP as vision backbone. Molmo-72B achieves the highest academic benchmark score and ranks second on human evaluation, just slightly behind GPT-4o." Others are based on Qwen 7B. What happened to the Olmo chain?
I think the "Molmo-7B-O" and "MolmoE-1B" models are using Olmo, judging by the fact its LLM backbone is the only one listed as having open data.
EDIT: From the post "For the LLM, we have trained models on a variety of choices at different scales and degrees of openness including: the fully open-weight and data OLMo-7B-1024 (using the October, 2024 pre-released weights, which will be public at a later date), the efficient fully open-weight and data OLMoE-1B-7B-0924, open-weight Qwen2 7B, open-weight Qwen2 72B, open-weight Mistral 7B, open-weight Gemma2 9B, and Phi 3 Medium). Today we are releasing 4 samples from this family."
As someone who has tried to push back against what execs ask for many times, if they want it bad enough, it doesn't matter. They will push forward no matter what the objections are. And if the person objecting won't give in, they'll find someone else to do it.
Company-wide internal push to shoehorn AI into every product and service. All recognition and rewards are given to the sychophants, no matter how ludicrous their proposals.
Even Principal and Senior developers are dragged into meetings with senior leadership to provide suggestions on how AI can be used in their microcosm. Whether it should be used is completely out of the question.
It’s a complete circus right now. Plenty of us just ignoring it and opting-out but it might reflect on our bonuses.
About a year ago my mom had said "you worked at these powerful international companies, I'd expect you to have confidence in the people working in their ranks to protect the things that you deem valuable", my response was "unfortunately that's exactly the reason why I have no hope that anyone will stand up".
Non-sycophant employees are shut down and ignored once the whole corporate culture has bought in to the hype du jour. If you are the sole dissenter, it can even make you look like a “bad” employee for not recognizing the “opportunity” that the new hyped thing will supposedly bring.
