Usama Bin Shafqat: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Like, I think the bar that we tried to get to before even starting formal evals with raters and everything was much higher than I think other projects would. Like, because that's, as you said, like, the traditional advice, right? Like, get that ASAP. Like, what are you looking to improve on? Whatever benchmark it is. So there was a lot of just, like, critical listening. And I think a lot of making sure that those improvements actually could go into the model. And, like, we're happy with that human element of it. And then eventually we had to obviously distill those down into an eval set. But, like, still there's, like, the team is just, like, a very, very, like, avid user of the product at all stages. I think you just have to be really opinionated. I think that sometimes, if you are, your intuition is just sharper and you can move a lot faster on the product. Because it's like, if you hold that bar high, right? Like, if you think about, like, the iterative cycle, it's like, hey, we could take, like, six months to ship this thing. To get it to, like, mid where we were. Or we could just, like, listen to this and be like, yeah, that's not it, right? And I don't need a rater to tell me that. That's my preference, right? And collectively, like, if I have two other people listen to it, they'll probably agree. And it's just kind of this step of, like, just keep improving it to the point where you're like, okay, now I think this is really impressive. And then, like, do evals, right? And then validate that.…

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