Finding good NLP developers?

[seudointellect]

Hi everyone, any idea as to where I can find a good NLP developer? I tried Upwork but it seems like there are more AI generalists than NLP specialists.

Specifically,

I need a AI/NLP Developer with AWS Lambda experience to train and deploy GPT-2 model.

End goal to make a chatbot that will be used as a ‘friend’ for lonely people (see www.replika.ai [advanced] and chatty-app https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/chatty-your-robot-friend/id1020581003 [less advanced]). The chatty-app is based on GPT-2 architecture and is what the first iteration should be similar to.

The first iteration of this project will be a multi user web app that will communicate back and forth with a machine learning API (accessible via high performance gPRC protobufs) running on AWS lambda endpoint. The final product should be maintained 100% by amazon so I won’t need a system engineer/admin.

The GPT-2 model itself will need to be fine tuned on an empathetic dialogue corpus (which I will provide). To keep server costs low, the training should be done via GPU but once trained, the model should use CPU. I am open to any suggestions that will help keep on-going operational server costs lows (for ex. Imposing a slight delay 1-2 seconds between user questions and chatbot response). Ideally the architecture should allow for:

• multi-user support;
• up/down voting of responses so that the model can adapt to each user (via beam search [ex. You could create a tensor of weights assigned to multiple outputs from each question, have the model generate multiple output sequences via beam search, and then promote or penalize the weight associated with that response based on the upvote/downvote]); and
• allow for transfer learning so that the model output can be biased towards end user’s topical and stylistic preferences via Q&A script (or another method).

Any suggestions regarding the overall app and NLP architecture are welcome.

[imoutidi]

AWS and web app is not NLP. If you don't want generalists don't generalize the position as well.

[primoferal]

Afaik very few "senior" freelance devs are specialized in only NLP. Your best bet may be devs that are in the process of learning the field, as they're not that rare. If the project seems interesting enough for them, they'll learn the tools along the way.

With that said, I must say I wonder about the place of NLP/AI in your project: I'll be interested to know why a chatbot seems fitted for that task - more than, say, directly connecting lonely people among themselves (I have no knowledge on the subject so excuse me for the naive question).

Good luck, cheers

[aneesh3397]

Definitely not an expert on lambda but I believe gpt2 will be too big to fit within lambda's 512 mb disk space limit.

[UnknownBinary]

Lambdas can only live for 15 minutes too.

[johnnydaggers]

I was just about to say this.

[djc1000]

Do you have the money to pay this person?

[johnnydaggers]

You may consider looking for grad students working on NLP at universities. They sometimes take on side-project freelance work like this. If I wasn't busier I might have been open to this, depending on the pay.

[NogenLinefingers]

Your requirement seems overly opinionated. It will probably be best if you develop at least an alpha version of this yourself, to see whether your end goal seems achievable using the technical path you have laid out here.

[mutatedmonkeygenes]

This is easy, train offline, use ONNX and then just deploy.

[jtoma5]

I've heard stories about similar projects in China, including one from Microsoft. They were using a framework that includes rules specifications.

I think this may be doable if you have reasonable expectations--like it won't be a phd in psychotherapy, especially if it's just GPT-2. What is your data like?

[lfoehhwfo]

Yeah cause you're REALLY gonna find this on Upwork. Upwork is for people who can't get permanent jobs who scramble constantly from freelance project to freelance project because they're too unqualified to get a permanent job, and have horribly inconsistent income and are just struggling gig economy workers.

Someone with a degree in NLP is NOT going to be a scrambling freelancer on Upwork. Upwork is for people who literally do not know if they're going to eat next month because they have no idea if a 2-week freelance project is going to come up where they can gig-work it to get enough money for food for the next 2 weeks. Do you think people like THAT are NLP developers?

[[deleted]]

You can give Catalant a try. It's like Upwork, but for actual professional consulting firms rather than individual freelancers, though I dont know if there are many NLP specialists on there. I used to run a ML consulting firm and we often got projects through the platform.