Voice of the DBA

Tag: AI

  • Get Along

    I enjoy listening to Get Along by Kenny Chesney periodically, often smiling to myself. I was reminded of this song recently while talking about careers and the AI impact during VSLive San Diego.

    On one hand, most of the people I surveyed or chatted with were using AI to accomplish some tasks. However, very few are using it in a way that would eliminate their positions or do the majority of their work. On the third hand, lots of them worry about their organizations attempting to get by with more AI and less humans in the future.

    I think that last one is a natural point of view in the world today. I’m sure plenty of executives are hoping they can reduce their future labor costs with machine assistance. Quite a few are finding that the machine assistance isn’t that cheap, and humans are still needed. I don’t know where this will shake out in the future, but I guess that many of our organizations will shrink a bit and use less developers than they might have now. I also think there will still be plenty of developer jobs, but AI will be used judiciously to supplement the capabilities of workers.

    This means workers will need to know how to work with AI effectively and efficiently.

    Perhaps there will be new departments and new companies that spring up and create the need for more workers. I hope that’s the case, but I bet a lot of teams will lose some humans and replace them with AI. The cost of benefits continues to rise, and I don’t know that many companies will grow their businesses enough to keep all their humans and spend on AI. That’s adding lots of salary/token costs because of growth. Some organizations will have a lot of growth, but I suspect many companies will see that they have tasks that need humans and tasks that don’t.

    The common question from our discussions was “which humans will stick around?”

    Technical competency isn’t likely to be the deciding factor. You being a 10x engineer or the best coder might not keep you around. Spotting problem code and better guiding AIs will matter. The mentorship skills you use with junior staffers, and the patience, will become important. Some people are learning those skills now.

    The one thing most people agree on is that you should get along well with others. Those soft skills – the ability to communicate, being pleasant, making others feel not only comfortable but wanting to work with you – will matter most. If others don’t enjoy collaborating with you, especially your boss, I can see your position being precarious and potentially slotted for a layoff.

    This isn’t to say you can’t argue a point of view or debate an approach. The thing you should remember is that when you do present your view, it is seen as an engaging and spirited debate, not an antagonistic war. People want to work with others when they feel some bond with them. When they don’t, they might be indifferent or even dread interactions. Feeling dread, hesitation, or a reluctance to engage is a sign that someone isn’t a part of a team.

    Those who aren’t part of the team might be the easiest to replace with an agent in the future.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Finely Tuned Models

    I have no idea if this is true, but this post on X says that Thomson Reuters used information they’ve collected for decades to fine tune and train a model. They started with one of the qwen models and then spent $40 million to add their knowledge to the model. The post says this model is comparable to the Gpt5.5 and Sonnet 5 models. They have used 10% of their data, which spans over 100 years.

    I have many questions. But first, $40mm? How many tokens is USD$40mm? A quick calculation is trillions of tokens, and while I’m sure there is some payback if lots of their customers use the model for work, there’s also a compute cost every time they use the model. Perhaps they can fine-tune and train the model more efficiently over time, but I can’t see many individual companies spending this effort on training their own model.

    I also wonder what the time it took to train this. The story notes 2 years, but if I want to update this, then how much more effort. What’s the cost? This certainly reduces the dependence on the frontier models from Antropic/OpenAI/etc., but is this something that makes sense for other companies? If I choose to use the TR model, would it be cheaper than Sonnet 5? Maybe it uses less power, which is always good, but will T-R charge me less than Anthropic?

    I do think that fine-tuned models might make sense, especially if you can use a small language model and train it for a reasonable cost. Like $100,000, not millions. In that case, would it make sense to you? Would your company fund this themselves? Is this something that a trade group could do with support from multiple organizations? Or is the competition between companies so high that they can’t work together?

    I do think that AI has a lot of possibilities to assist humans, and focused models can be useful to solve specific problems, with a lot less cost than the best frontier models. I’m just not sure if the training effort is something that many are willing to put forth. It will be interesting to see how GenAI models evolve as the costs and resources needed by the frontier models continue to rise and smaller models become more capable.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Local Models Using GPUs with Ollama

    Can you use your GPUs when running a local model under Ollama? You can, and it really depends on how you run Ollama and what your hardware is.

    Ollama supports NVidia and AMD GPUs with some exceptions. You can read about their hardware support here. There are drivers required from the vendors, and configuration, but it can help with performance.

    Of course, GPUs aren’t cheap.

    I have an NVidia GeorForce RTX 2060, which is listed as being supported with a compute capability of 7.5. I need a driver version of 550+. I’m supported with driver version 560.94.

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    However, I need NVidia CUDA drivers installed for this to work. Those don’t really install on Windows, so I have to install them in the WSL subsystem, with the Linux install guide for this to work on my system. I don’t use Docker, I have Rancher for reasons …, so I haven’t done this so far.

    If you use Docker Desktop, there is native support for GPUs.

    On Macs, there is native support.

    If you are looking to run local models seriously, you’ll likely want either a dedicated machine, or you will go the Docker Desktop route as an individual. In an org, you might pick a dedicated server and allow multiple users to connect and get answers in a secure, controlled way.

  • Creating a Local Model Chatbot on Windows

    After my session at VSLive last week, I had a few questions from the audience. I’m adding some of these into blogs, and this was one:

    How do I run the docker compose to get a local chatbot?

    I didn’t include the dockerfile in a a repo, mostly because it’s simple, but just to make it easy, it’s in this zip: ollama-docker-compose.zip.

    To start this, I’ll assume you have Docker (or equivalent), but no images. Create a folder structure like this:

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    Put the docker-compose.yml in here. Then open this in a CLI and run: docker compose up

    You should see something like this. The images start pulling. This is slow, but once the download is there, it should be smoother.

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    Once the images are pulled, the containers should start and you should get some output in your CLI window. Something like this. Note the first part of the output is the container.

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    Once it’s up, it will first ask you for an admin account. Enter your credentials, as I’ve done. I didn’t use this email, but it doesn’t matter which one you does. It’s local!

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    You should then get the chatbot interface. Note, like me, the first time you run this, there’s no model, so use the post below to add your model and get started.

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    I have a few posts on this that might help. Note that these are from the past the the GUI has changed slightly, but the items are still in the GUI, just moved.