From counting words to real understanding in less than a decade.
I quit my PhD in 2015 and co-founded a natural language processing company. Back then, the state of the art was basically counting words in a glorified way. You had an idea of what the user might be talking about, but you couldn’t map it to something with certainty. You had to collect your own data and train specialized models to do one narrow task. LLMs changed that. You can use foundational models out of the box without fine-tuning. They solve many tasks already. Understanding text and mapping open-world requests to closed sets of tasks became way more accessible.
— Will LLMs scale and revolutionize the legal space? · The Edge