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Re:Amazon saves millions by replacing Sonnet 4.6 with Strand... by miki123211 on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @05:02AM (#50438160)
LLMs, and other transformer models before them like BERT for example, have the benefit of "transfer learning."

If you want to make a ticket classification model, you don't need to train across many customers doing ticket classification, who might not want you to train on their data and whose data is impossible to obtain unless you already are a large company. Instead, you can train on a completely different task which forces the model to learn the syntactic and semantic structure of the English language — say predicting missing words in Wikipedia articles, which you can't do successfully without a good understanding of English — and then fine-tune that model on your specific task with much less data.

Because the initial task is so general, you can have one company do the expensive pretraining, share the base model, and then have everybody else just do the finetuning on their (small) proprietary dataset.

LLMs and models like Jev go one step further, letting you use them as classifiers with no training at all, with nothing but rules in the prompt. And with a few tricks, you can indeed use them to get pretty high-quality labels, which you can then distill into a fine-tuning dataset for a much smaller model.

Re:Amazon saves millions by replacing Sonnet 4.6 with Strand... by thesz on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @05:47AM (#50438478)

  > say predicting missing words in Wikipedia articles, which you can't do successfully without a good understanding of English
This is word2vec model, one of - predict a word from context. The other one is to predict surrounding words (context) from a word. It did a good job when I used it, words' classes were impeccable for most practical purposes.

Word2vec is a two layer perceptron.

Re:Amazon saves millions by replacing Sonnet 4.6 with Strand... by mrbungie on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @06:15AM (#50438709)
¿Por qué no los dos? Big skill issue, you can even route known problems to a trained in-house simple classifier and low-confidence problems to Jev-like "zero shot classifiers" or LLMs.

I feel like people in the field forgot everything.

Re:Amazon saves millions by replacing Sonnet 4.6 with Strand... by cogogo on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @07:28AM (#50439376)
It will only get worse. Non-tech people will be (or are) very suspicious of anything trained in house. The bar to spend time/money on anything domain specific will only get higher.