Whales, Generative AI and Enterprise use cases

Whales are symbol of vastness, communication and wisdom across the world, power of whales has inspired numerous stories including Mobi Dick amongst other. The race of illusive 'white whale' is now shifted in digital ocean in the world of Generative AI.

This article shares how language models are evolving with analogy of whales and how small units of focused models (Orca) should be the focus area for enterprise AI and Analytics.

Why Whales and Language Models

Nomenclature of language models as whales is not just a coincidence, the metaphor has strong correlation.

Whale-Beluga-Orca

Whale-beluga-orca metaphor highlights the dynamic relationship between large and small language models, Large Models a.k.a. foundational models provides vast knowledge with sizable processing power, hence termed whale (blue whale), Small Models leverage foundational models to become specific and agile for one of more set of tasks. Interesting metaphor includes 'Free Willy' models with the idea of smaller models breaking free from the constraints of LLMs, Microsoft Research's Orca and Orca 2 are built for specific usage of Models with emphasis on research.

Taxonomy: Whales and Models

An illustrative comparison of reasons for naming a model and a whale.

Blue Whale: The largest animal on Earth, known for its deep, haunting vocalizations. Potential LLM association: OpenAI's GPT or AI at Meta's LlaMa2 due to its vast size and impressive text generation capabilities.

Fin Whale: Another large whale, known for its speed. Potential LLM association: NVIDIA AI's Megatron Turing NLG - massive model boasting performance in various tasks.

Beluga: 'Sea Canaries' Vocal and playful (able to swim backward). Potential Model Association: Stability AI's Free Willy 2, Beluga 1 & 2 for its focus on reasoning and complex question answering, mimicking the intricacies of Beluga.

Orca (Killer Whale): Intelligent and social, known for advanced hunting techniques and vocalizations. Potential Model association: Microsoft's Orca(#) models are specifically designed to analyze and understand complex behaviors and interactions.

Enterprise Use cases: LLM and SLM

A use case comparison will help illustrate the broad stroke and a fined-tuned use case of language models, do note that with the advancement of industry-specific GenAI models, there will be further classification on SLMs.

Conclusion:

With multiple SLM and LLM options, it's important to know the use case, Mistral AI's Mistral 7B and Orca 2 can be a good starting point for an enterprise to embark on 'data-driven AI journey'