The economic trade-offs of large language models: A case study

Contacting customer service via chat is a common practice. Because employing customer service agents is expensive, many companies are turning to NLP that assists human agents by auto-generating responses that can be used directly or with modifications. Large Language Models (LLMs) are a natural fit for this use case; however, their efficacy must be balanced with the cost of training and serving them. This paper assesses the practical cost and impact of LLMs for the enterprise as a function of the usefulness of the responses that they generate. We present a cost framework for evaluating an NLP model's utility for this use case and apply it to a single brand as a case study in the context of an existing agent assistance product. We compare three strategies for specializing an LLM - prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and knowledge distillation - using feedback from the brand's customer service agents. We find that the usability of a model's responses can make up for a large difference in inference cost for our case study brand, and we extrapolate our findings to the broader enterprise space.Comment: Paper to be published at the Association for Computational Linguistics in the Industry Track 202

Fiberized Sagnac Interferometer for Ultrasound Measurement

Laser-based ultrasonics (LBU), i.e. the generation of ultrasound by laser illumination and the measurement of ultrasonic signals by laser interferometric techniques, has many advantages for applications to nondestructive evaluation (NDE). These include non-contact generation and detection, remote placement of equipment using fiber-optics, easy scanning, absolute displacement calibration, both broad band-and narrow band signal generation, wide frequency band measurements, and applicability to curved surfaces. Both laser generation of ultrasound and the subsequent detection of the ultrasonic waves using a laser interferometry are areas of active research [1-6].</p

Characterization of Laser Ultrasonic Sources Using a Sagnac Interferometer

Knowledge of optimal conditions for laser generation of ultrasonic waves, as well as of the spatial and temporal parameters of the generated ultrasonic beams, is required for effective application of laser-based ultrasonic (LBU) techniques to NDE [1]. The work presented here employs a fiberized Sagnac interferometer to characterize a fiber-array based LBU system. The combined system can remotely generate and detect ultrasonic signals with energy concentrated within a selected narrow frequency band.</p

Frequency-Shifted Low-Noise Sagnac Sensor for Ultrasonic Measurements

Laser generation of ultrasound and the subsequent detection of the ultrasonic waves using laser interferometry are areas of active research [1–6]. In earlier papers, the present authors have discussed an LBU system which employs a diffraction grating for illumination of a line-array to generate narrow-band surface waves and Lamb waves [4], and a fiberized heterodyne dual-probe laser interferometer to measure signals [3]. This paper reports progress towards the development of a robust low cost fiberized Sagnac laser interferometer suitable for field applications. Bowers first reported [7] the use of a Sagnac-type interferometer for surface acoustic wave detection, and the present authors have previously reported [8 QNDE 95] a variant of that scheme. In this paper, we present an alternative lower noise system that uses low cost, long coherence He-Ne lasers that have better intensity noise characteristics than typically used laser diodes. A scheme for elimination of a parasitic interference utilizing a frequency shifting technique has been developed. The primary advantage of the Sagnac interferometer is that it is exactly path matched and as such requires no heterodyning or static path compensation for sensor stabilization. The Sagnac interferometer described below is suitable for the measurement of ultrasonic surface waves arising from laser- or PZT-generated sources or from acoustic emissions. The laser-based ultrasonics (LBU) system can be used to detect and characterize discrete defects such as cracks.</p