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In 2012 meta had 4600 employees.

In 2018, 35,500.

From 2019 to 2022, 44k to 86k.

2026, as of now, 70k, 26k higher than 2019.

Using relative comparison is not appropriate for a software company, which is incredibly scalable by nature. Yoy is not the appropriate metric here. These are not workers on the line in a widget factory.










What stops Google, Microsoft, etc from doing the same if Cohere's solution gains traction?


Don't they try this currently? https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/docs

I think during a gold rush, it's good to sell shovels even if can't be the leading shovel sales outlet in town.

I think we're at a point where new NLP techniques will create a lot of value, but it's still hard to tell in advance which cases the current techniques can do well enough to be worthwhile, and in which cases they'll be kinda cool but not effective and so we'll continue to require humans to be involved catching errors. While we sort that out, a lot of companies will need to take a few stabs at trying to get some new model to work for their problems.


Bureaucratic inertia, sunk cost fallacy, interdepartmental resource hoarding, corporate bloat, and finally, HR and middle management all jealously guarding their petty kingdoms.

Oh, and the fact that Cohere is an expensive solution for a problem that's already been solved for free by open source groups.



Huggingface more generally, but I'd highlight https://huggingface.co/EleutherAI/gpt-j-6B , the currently largest model, which is almost as good as DaVinci in most respects.

It's not about particular models, though, but the ease of use in numerous cloud or self hosted scenarios. What's the value add for Cohere?


Oh, somehow I've missed that one. Thanks. Agreed about numerous scenarios. Personally I think there is value in managing the models since getting the multiple T/GPUs and setting up REST apis is not trivial. Serverless style GPU rental is a little tricky right now in my experience. But, HuggingFace is doing something similar and the moat isn't too wide.


I wonder if either of the two companies have introduced many new products recently?

When you only have $1m you might as well poke around various ideas and see if you can get another million or ten. Now, if you're sitting on tens of billions of dollars your priorities change - it's far more profitable to grow a $10b pie by 10% than a $1m by 1000%. I'm pretty sure that's what happened to Oracle and IBM, hence we rarely hear about them anymore.


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