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by ericjang 1095 days ago
I am an AI researcher. Most actual AI researchers and engineers use very few of these tools - the only one being model providers like OpenAI API and public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP). The rest of these are infra-centric tools that a16z is highly incentivized to over-inflate the importance of.
5 comments

This does look like the sort of complex ecosystem that emerges when there is an inflection point and then, before consolidation happens. It reminds me of adtech in the early 2010s.

That said, while much of this might not have any real traction long-term, looking at what researchers use seems to miss the mark a bit. It’s like saying network technology researchers aren’t using Vercel.

There are some other useful ones in there. Hugging Face jumps out. W&B. I haven't used Mosaic but I could see myself for bigger projects, I know of at least two PIs @ Stanford using them.
I think the diagram was just meant to be comprehensive. The writeup itself doesn’t imply all the tool nonsense.
Yes, because you're not working on applications.
This blog post is not about AI researchers — it's about developers who make products out of LLMs.