Tell us what the model has to do.
What it should do, roughly how much data there is, and whether it has to sit on your own hardware. Two paragraphs will do for a first message. You get an answer in two working days.
Four things,
if you have them.
None of these is required. Most first messages we receive are vaguer than this, and they still get a useful reply.
- Time
- 2–8 weeks
- Where
- Your site or ours
- Corpus
- Stays where it is
- Deliverable
- Model + machine
- You keep
- Everything
- Lock-in
- None, ever
What the model should do
The job it should do better than the way you handle it now. A house style, a classification, an extraction, an internal shorthand. One real input from your files, plus the output you would want back, says more than a page of description.
Roughly what you have
How much of it there is, what format it sits in, how sensitive it is. A few thousand examples, or a hundred thousand. Whether it is labelled already, or labelling is part of the job.
What it has to satisfy
ITAR, HIPAA, CUI, an NDA, an IRB, or a rule inside your firm that rules out cloud. This decides the shape of the whole project. If there is one, put it in the first email.
When it has to be working
A date, a board meeting, a grant renewal, or nothing at all. Say which. We reply either way.
The short version.
Five fields, about four minutes. We read all of them and reply either way, including when the answer is no.
It arrived.
We read every message and reply either way. A busy week can add a few days. Nothing has been lost.