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I'm really curious about the history of spaCy. From my PoV: it grew a lot during the pandemic era, hiring a lot of employees. I remember something about raising
by bratao 1y ago
I'm really curious about the history of spaCy. From my PoV: it grew a lot during the pandemic era, hiring a lot of employees. I remember something about raising money for the first time. It was very competitive in NLP tasks. Now it seems that it has scaled back considerably, with a dramatic reduction in employees and a total slowdown of the project. The v4 version looks postponed. It isn't competitive in many tasks anymore (for tasks such as NER, I get better results by fine-tuning a BERT model), and the transformer integration is confusing.
- binarymax 1y agoI’ve had success with fine tuning their transformer model. The issue was that there was only one of them per language, compared to huggingface where you have a choice of many of quality variants that best align with your domain and data. The SpaCy API is just so nice. I love the ease of iterating over sentences, spans, and tokens and having the enrichment right there. Pipelines are super easy, and patterns are fantastic. It’s just a different use case than BERT.
- cantdutchthis 1y agoformer employee here, Matt wrote a blogpost with pretty much all of the details here: https://honnibal.dev/blog/back-to-our-roots https://honnibal.dev/blog/back-to-our-roots
- microtonal 1y ago:wave: Also: https://explosion.ai/blog/back-to-our-roots-company-update https://explosion.ai/blog/back-to-our-roots-company-update (Interesting tidbit: I got hired by Explosion after a HN comment on model distillation :))