Patronus AI has announced the launch of the industry’s first MLLM-as-a-Judge (multimodal language model as a judge) technology, designed to revolutionize the evaluation of AI systems that work with images and text. Etsy, the largest marketplace for vintage and handmade goods, is already implementing this innovative technology to verify the accuracy of product image captions.
In an exclusive interview with VentureBeat, Patronus AI co-founder Anand Kannapan shared details of the collaboration with Etsy: “We are incredibly excited to announce that Etsy has become one of our first clients. Their marketplace contains hundreds of millions of handmade and vintage items from around the world. Etsy’s AI team sought to use generative artificial intelligence to automatically create image captions, ensuring their correctness when scaling across their entire global user base.”
A key feature of the new Judge-Image technology is the use of Google’s Gemini model instead of OpenAI’s GPT-4V. This decision was made after a thorough comparative analysis of available alternatives. “We noticed that GPT-4V demonstrated a more pronounced tendency toward egocentricity, whereas Gemini showed itself to be less biased and demonstrated a fairer approach to evaluating various input and output pairs,” explained Kannapan. “This is confirmed by the even distribution of scores across different sources.”
The new technology aims to address a critically important problem in artificial intelligence – identifying and minimizing hallucinations and reliability issues in multimodal AI applications. For Etsy, whose business model is built on trust between sellers and buyers, the accuracy of product descriptions is a key success factor.
The launch of Judge-Image marks an important step in the development of verification technologies for AI-generated content. As more companies incorporate generative artificial intelligence into their business processes, the need for reliable evaluation and quality control tools becomes increasingly relevant. The successful implementation of the technology on the Etsy platform could become an exemplary case for other e-commerce companies and technology platforms.
