The author shares AlphaSense's experience, a company that decided to build its own GenAI models to maintain control over IP, privacy, cost, quality, and performance. The decision to buy or build GenAI models is crucial and requires executives to closely examine their use cases, evaluate available options, be strategic about their resources, and choose the path that best suits their organization for the long term.
Key takeaways:
- Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming the business landscape, and companies are faced with the decision to either buy the technology from an existing provider or build it in-house.
- Buying an off-the-shelf GenAI model offers advantages such as time to market, cost efficiency, ease of use, proven performance and support with continuous updates. However, they may not be fully customized to a company’s specific tasks and can introduce long-term business risks.
- Building a GenAI model in-house guarantees custom functionalities and features, interoperability with existing platforms, and control over intellectual property. However, it is a massive investment in terms of cost, time, and risk of failure.
- AlphaSense, a market intelligence and search platform, decided to build their own GenAI models based on commercially flexible open-source models to achieve the highest standard of performance and privacy, and manage cost, scalability and customization in-house.