Hugging Face, AWS Partner to Help Devs ‘Jump Start’ AI Use
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AWS is partnering with Hugging Face, the machine learning company, to make it easier to use and train machine learning and artificial intelligence models, the companies announced this week. As part of that partnership, AWS will offer JumpStart templates that will allow web, frontend and other software developers to deploy models quickly while accessing them through an API, said Jeff Boudier, head of product and growth at Hugging Face.
“We want to make those models really easy and cheaper to use through our collaboration with AWS, where most of the business community today is doing machine learning,” Boudier told The New Stack. “That means new and better experiences on Amazon SageMaker to make it super easy to run any of our models, and also new solutions to train them and run them cheaper using the hardware accelerators that were built from the ground up for AI that AWS offers.”
Optimizing for AI
SageMaker is AWS’ cloud machine learning platform. Launched in 2017, it allows developers to create, train and deploy machine learning models, as well as to deploy those models on embedded systems and edge devices. JumpStart SageMaker is AWS’ machine learning hub that provides hundreds of built-in algorithms, pre-trained models and solution templates to help developers quickly get started with machine learning.
The Hugging Face deep learning containers, as AWS calls the collection, is “packed with optimized transformers, datasets and tokenizers libraries to enable you to fine-tune and deploy generative AI applications at scale in hours instead of weeks – with minimal code changes,” AWS reported in a blog post.
As part of the collaboration, Hugging Face also will gain access to 1,000 GPUs available for a supercomputer cluster running SageMaker. The New York-based company and its open source partners will use that cluster to train new models, Boudier said.
“[It’s] very important for the community, for our mission to democratize good machine learning, that there are good open source alternatives to the the latest AI models that are available; and to do that, we need to be able to train models ourselves,” he said. “That’s one of the exciting parts of this new partnership. We now have over 1,000 GPUs that are available to us to build with the community the next generation of open source models.”
Developer Consideration: Targeted Models, Cost and Deployment
More targeted models may be the key to broader adoption of machine learning, according to Boudier.
“Right now, there’s lots of hype looking at the capabilities, the very general capabilities that large language models offer,” he said. “But the way that we can sustainably build machine learning into apps is one where we’re much more trying to find the right tool for the job. That will then enable scaling in a cost-effective way.”
He also said that this doesn’t change the Hugging Face experience — developers can still play with models in their sandbox and deploy wherever they want.
“What it changes, though, is if you’re building in AWS, then you have much better solutions to take advantage of any of the Hugging Face models and to run them and scale them more efficiently,” he aid.
Hugging Face hopes to extend its reach beyond data scientists and machine learning engineers to more software developers, including frontend and web developers. It’s possible to leverage these models with an API, and JumpStart makes that process simpler for developers, Boudier said.
“One of the main focuses of our collaboration with the AWS engineering teams is to make things easier” Boudier said. “SageMaker is great for the data scientists who want to really control what they’re doing and build their own thing, but if you just want to get something that works out of the box, there is the JumpStart solution to get you started.”
The cost of operation is also important for software developers and the partnership with AWS will make it possible to drive down the cost of running the models at scale, Boudier added. That includes using Inference Endpoints, a Hugging Face solution that allows developers to deploy machine learning models on a fully managed infrastructure.
“Where the usage of those models has been something that is the domain of scientists and machine learning engineers, we’re able to make it accessible to software developers via these new experiences,” Boudier said.
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TCPA Guide to Mitigate Risk in Health Care
On March 16, we will provide an in-depth look at the TCPA, how it applies to health care communications, and what health care organizations can do to mitigate litigation risk.
‘Ciarán Hinds was amazing to work with’: Belfast star Roísín Gallagher on new RTE One series The Dry
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Roísín Gallagher as Shiv in The Dry
“WHEN I first read the script, I just went ‘Yes’,” exclaims Belfast-born actor Roísín Gallagher of what attracted her to The Dry, the Dublin-set comedy drama series which starts on RTE One on Wednesday evening.
She plays the lead role as Siobhan ‘Shiv’ Sheridan, a 30-something alcoholic artist who returns home to her dysfunctional family in Dublin after years of living it up in London.
“I just felt that it was real,” continues Roísín, a stage veteran whose recent on-screen roles include the movies Mandrake and Nowhere Special, Terry Loane’s award-winning short film Just Johnny, Grimes & McKee’s GAA-themed comedy pilot St Mungo’s and hit BBC crime drama The Fall.
“I felt really connected to Shiv and what she had to say and the way she had to say it – and the use of humour in the script, I felt really like I knew what that was and I’d heard it before and in a sense was experiencing some of the things that she was experiencing.
“As an actress it’s just a complete gift. And then to learn that [your part] is the lead, that was another ‘oh my goodness’ moment.”
Shiv is the ‘black sheep’ of the Sheridan family who has been living a party-fuelled lifestyle in England for 10 years. Her return home to Dublin for a family funeral coincides with a resolution to make a fresh, sober start – however, some of Shiv’s nearest and dearest treat her admission of alcoholism as just another attention-seeking act.
As Roísín explains, she relished the chance to finally take the lead role in The Dry’s ensemble cast of Irish talent alongside Belfast actor and Oscar nominee Ciarán Hinds as Shiv’s father, Tom – “He was amazing to work with and was actually surprised to discover I was from Belfast, so I must have got my Dublin accent right,” she chuckles – Moe Dunford (Vikings, Nightride) as Jack, Shiv’s old flame, Siobhán Cullen (Origin) as Shiv’s professionally successful younger sister Caroline and Adam Richardson (Vikings: Valhalla) as her younger brother, Ant.
Ciarán Hinds and Roísín Gallagher in The Dry
“It’s been a long process for me,” says the actor, who trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.
“I’ve been acting professionally for 14 years and this is my first significant television job. It’s taken a while for it to really sink in that I’m actually getting to do this job – I’m still not sure that it has.”
Produced by BritBox in partnership with RTE, the eight-part series is written by Bafta-nominated playwright and screenwriter Nancy Harris and directed by Paddy Breathnach (Rosie, I Went Down).
Despite her relative lack of TV experience, the Belfast-born actor says she had a brilliant time filming the series in Dublin during 2021 despite the Covid-safe restrictions which were in force on the set.
“I felt so safe with Paddy, our director,” Roísín tells me.
“It was a really welcoming environment, even though it was a very different process to what I’m used to [in theatre]. I came in kind of going, ‘Hiya, where’s my five-week rehearsal process?’
“So you have to really trust your choices and trust your instincts. You dig deep and have faith that you’re there for a reason – that was a little bit of daily work I had to do before going onto the set.”
Roísín is hopeful that her character’s conflicted personality will resonate with Irish viewers when the comedy drama begins on RTÉ One on Wednesday.
“I fell in love with her,” reveals the mother of two, who herself comes from a family of five children when asked about portraying the complex and conflicted Shiv.
“Sometimes I want to hug her and sometimes I kind of want to give her a bit of a kick up the a***. I’m hoping that the audience will feel that for her too.”
In preparation for portraying a character struggling with addiction, Roísín spent three months prior to filming figuring out “the things that Shiv’s probably faced before we even meet her”, as she explains.
“That was a challenge that I really relished. I listened to Russell Brand’s book [Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions] and quite a lot of podcasts about addiction to kind of get an idea.
“I also talked to some people who I knew were in the 12-step programme and what it meant for them and the kind of environment that that puts a person into – who they might meet, what they might experience and how they managed to deal with their family, friends and the people closest to them who maybe knew them as another person.”
Moe Dunford and Roísín Gallagher in The Dry
Having known Shiv since childhood, Jack (Moe Dunford) is one of the more sympathetic figures from the character’s past – though her fellow artist and former flame’s own fondness for spontaneous, booze-fuelled fun complicates her quest to move on from self-destructive behaviours.
“They have a sort of alchemy together,” explains Dunford, who previously worked with director Breathnach on the 2018 movie Rosie and found working on The Dry to be a much-needed distraction from real life during Covid.
“There’s a potential for a sort of Bonnie and Clyde relationship there if they want to ignite that spark. Jack was a really fun character to play – he’s a bit of a live wire at times, so it was nice to be free-ish again.
“I hadn’t met Roísín before but I adored working with her. She’s so grounded and brings so much truth to this character, who she was really protective of while also being a very open performer.
“I truly loved filming The Dry, it was amazing. Nancy Harris’s script are so rich and Paddy is a great director, he’s very intelligent and asks a lot of questions and he never reverts to stereotype.
“I couldn’t wait to jump in every day because with Jack and Roísín it was one of the few jobs [during the pandemic] where you were encouraged to connect and even to hug, if it was written in the script.
“Every day I’d go home with a smile on my face.”
As for the task of negotiating the tricky co-existence of comedy and serious ‘issues’ within the series, Dunford is quick to praise Nancy Harris’s writing for putting it all on the page for the actors.
“I think ‘The Dry’ is a genius title,” he tells me.
“How that correlates with the Irish relationship with family and with grief, with addiction and with shame – and also ‘the craic’ and the spontaneity we’re known for, I think she’s created this beautiful well-rounded work.
“In the Sheridan family ‘circus’, there are really no black and white areas. It’s all shades of grey, which Nancy has drawn so beautifully.”
“The key for drama for me is the comedy,” agrees Roísín.
“When you can have hilarity and heartbreak so close together on such a tight line, that’s really clever and it’s really impactful. That’s what gets me most excited as an audience member as well as a performer.”
Indeed, the Belfast actor sees The Dry as being part of an ongoing boom for dramatic comedy work created by women and featuring female perspectives.
“I am so grateful to be getting the benefit of that in my 30s in a way that some of our more mature actresses maybe didn’t when they were my age,” she comments, mentioning Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, Sharon Horgan’s Catastrophe, Aisling Bea’s This Way Up and Tara-Lynne O’Neill’s recent all-female stage production Rough Girls as recent sources of joy and inspiration.
“I’m very inspired by these women who are writing roles not just for women but just from women’s perspectives so that it’s not just the wife or the girlfriend or the daughter – they’re the ones who are telling the story. I think that’s really important.”
:: The Dry starts Wednesday March 1 at 9.35pm on RTÉ One with all eps streaming on RTÉ Player.
Is the cost of AI worth it for your business?
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Artificial Intelligence: what was once a pipe dream is now capturing the world’s attention as it begins to deliver on its more outlandish promises. More than that, AI is increasingly considered integral to the so-called fourth industrial revolution that is currently underway, as every aspect of our lives is transformed by the surge of advanced and seamlessly interconnected technologies.
Although the concept is as old as the computer itself, it is only in the last few years that AI has been thrust into the limelight, reaching a breakthrough moment with the hysteria surrounding the recent release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its image-generating cousin DALL.E, as well as other models of their ilk.
It’s no wonder so many are enthralled, given the jaw-dropping feats such systems have accomplished. Microsoft has been a huge driver in its success, investing billions in OpenAI. Now, it is starting to commercialize its potential by seemingly jamming its AI models into every one of its products and services conceivable, with varying degrees of success (look no further than the rollercoaster ride Bing has already taken the world on ).
Other big players like Google and Meta have built their own AI systems too, and it is of course very tempting for everyone else to follow their lead, and many have already - but there are numerous obstacles associated with adopting AI technologies.
For one, the practical applications are still in the relatively nascent stages. There are plenty of errors and mistakes that even advanced AI models can make, as many have found with ChatGPT . And although big tech is keen to roll out commercially to individuals and businesses, there are dangers in doing so prematurely, as Microsoft and Google - with its rival Bard chatbot - have found out to their reputational and financial cost .
In order to improve, spending will have to continue and even increase beyond the already huge outlay that it has taken to build and maintain these impressive machines. And although the titans of the industry may have the resources to dedicate to R&D, is AI worth the investment for SMBs and firms that are anything less than behemoths? And will costs come down soon or remain exorbitantly high for the foreseeable future?
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Development costs
Firstly, it’s worth getting things into perspective and looking at how much it costs to develop, implement and improve state-of-the-art AI. Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, are the showstoppers, and the most advanced, taking a huge amount of time, effort and money to launch and operate.
Research and consulting firm SemiAnalysis has also been crunching the numbers (opens in new tab) in trying to determine the compute costs of those looking to develop similar LLMs. MosiacML, for instance, currently offers the training of AI models of a purported similar quality to ChatGPT for less than $500,000.
Taking the running costs of a single Nvidia A100 GPU as an example - the current favorite used by the big cloud services, such as Azure, which hosts ChatGPT - SemiAnalysis worked out that the baseline compute cost to run just one of these for AI training purposes is $1.50 per hour, when used in systems with clusters of 256 of the GPUs. It arrived at this figure by surveying many startups and enterprises.
It also notes that some companies will have better deals than this with the big cloud companies, such as AWS and Azure, and that entering into three-year contracts will also improve costs - Azure’s price is $1.36 per hour to use a single A100, but SemiAnalysis points out that many will not want to enter into contracts this long given that the A100 is already three years old, and developments always move fast in the world of computing technology.
(Image credit: Photo by Headway on Unsplash)
In calculating the theoretical overall training cost of popular models using A100s, the aforementioned MosaicML with its GPT-30B model will cost $325,855. OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, of ChatGPT fame, costs $841,346 according to SemiAnalysis’ estimation. Google’s PaLM model - “the most advanced dense model that has been trained and publicly detailed” - tops the scales of the popular LLM training costs, at an eye-watering $6,750,000.
And as SemiAnalysis is keen to point out, these are only the training costs - the other costs to consider include: “people required, ML Ops tools, data gathering/preprocessing, failure restoration, one-shot/few-shot learning examples, inference, etc. Many of these components are incredibly costly.”
Various reports speculate that ChatGPT costs OpenAI around $100,000 a day (opens in new tab) just to run, again based on the prices Azure charges for running the A100s. But the biggest portion of an LLMs cost is devoted to that last one mentioned above - inference. This is the model’s ability to make predictions as to the best possible output based on a user’s input - essentially, it’s how it operates, and accounts for 90% of the overall compute costs. Currently, ChatGPT costs $36bn in inference costs according to SemiAnalysis figures (opens in new tab).
However, these costs are coming down as new hardware and techniques are developed. Chibeza Agley, co-founder and CEO at AI-powered learning platform OBRIZUM, believes that “people are finding clever ways to use existing hardware in a parallel way. For example, most Hugging Face endpoints are now powered by CPUs rather than the almost ubiquitous GPUs of two years ago.”
Agley also emphasizes the importance of parameter size, which determines how many variables an AI has, and therefore, in essence, how sophisticated its outputs can be:
“The single biggest factor in cost though is the size of models. If you have to run a calculation using 175Bn parameters, that’s always going to be more expensive than using 1Bn parameters. The exploding size of models (sometimes referred to as a model Moore’s law) is causing us problems here. I expect the next revolutions to be using a smaller number of parameters better, rather than just more parameters”.
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
Usage costs
So that’s how much it costs to build an LLM, but what about using one? ChatGPT can be used for free at the moment, but this will end soon and users will then have to pay for the privilege. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote a frank tweet (opens in new tab) in December stating that “we will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering” - as we have seen above.
Whether some kind of free version will continue to be available (opens in new tab) has not yet been confirmed, but a premium version dubbed ChatGPT Plus (opens in new tab) was announced at the beginning of February 2023, which will leverage a subscription-based model costing $20 per month to use. The advantages include unfettered access to the chatbot, even during peak times - which is something a lot of users currently run into issues with. It also promises faster response times, as well as preferential access to new features and improvements as they arrive.
ChatGPT Plus is already available to US customers, and roll out to regions worldwide is to be expected soon. In the same blog post, the company also stated that it is “actively exploring options for lower-cost plans, business plans, and data packs for more availability.” So it looks like it is keen to be of use to your firm, albeit at a price.
And if your business wants to integrate AI power within its own software, then there is also an API on offer from OpenAI, using the same models that have been and are currently used by ChatGPT. The most advanced of these, Davinci, is priced at $0.02 for every 1,000 tokens produced for the base model. A token is the data that makes up the words processed by the AI, and 1,000 of them roughly equates to 750 words. To put that into perspective, OpenAI says that “the collected works of Shakespeare are about 900,000 words or 1.2M tokens” - that’s only $24!
It is worth noting, however, that experimenting with the API in the platform’s Playground mode counts towards your token usage, and if you want to fine-tune Davinci with your own training data, it will cost you $0.0300 for a thousand tokens used in training - and this includes both the number of tokens in your dataset and your training epochs (which refers to the process of completing one full cycle of the training process), and $0.1200 per thousand tokens thereafter for its actual use.
(Image credit: DC Studio / Shutterstock)
Marketing potential
LLMs are of course a huge potential boon for those in marketing, where generating written content en masse and to tight deadlines is key. If your firm is prepared to pay for their use, then models like ChatGPT do appear to excel in this regard, being able convert short prompts on just about any given topic into a detailed and lengthy reply in appropriate tones and styles that you desire.
However, Edward Coram-James, CEO and founder of SEO company Go Up (opens in new tab), believes that there are some major problems with using LLMs like ChatGPT for this purpose, particularly regarding Google’s perspective on such content:
“Businesses looking to cut their marketing costs may want to hold fire on swapping out the humans at the helm of their written content. Google has made its stance on automatically generated content clear, and could penalize content produced by AI, potentially decimating a site’s search rankings and undoing years of hard work to build web traffic.”
“In fact, we could be well on track for the single largest mass-penalisation of websites in Google’s history. The businesses that have hastily employed ChatGPT could see their websites removed entirely from the search engine’s database, if Google chooses to prioritize high-quality, informative, human-written copy.”
“Google is smart, and will only get better at spotting the watermarks of AI-generated content — such as the repetitive stylistic patterns and derivative talking points being regurgitated by the current iteration of ChatGPT. So, companies should think twice before putting AI to work to produce their content.”
“As we know, AI gathers its information online, just as a human researcher typically would — but the way that it synthesizes a narrative from this data errs on the side of “extremely unoriginal”. This is largely down to the fact that ChatGPT seems to simply take the most common talking points on the web and regurgitate those same insights back to the user. So, feeding the ChatGPT algorithm your query will prompt a relevant but highly formulaic response — and certainly not one that Google will be looking to reward.”
He also adds another issue with using AI-writers: “AI-produced content is not fact-checked — and if misinformation proliferates through Google’s search rankings, the tech giant will be keen to make an example of any spammy websites and preserve its authority as the top-dog search engine.”
(Image credit: 123RF)
In-house systems
So what about in other industries - is investment in AI worth it? What are the costliest aspects?
“I would argue that the greatest cost is structural and architectural though; building scalable systems that can support AI is a very tricky business, which even big companies can get wrong,” Agley notes.
When it comes to firms developing their own in-house systems rather than using a pre-packaged alternative, Agley ran the numbers:
“The OpenAI endpoints are very competitively priced. I did a calculation of how much it would cost to have a server to serve a similar open-source model to GPT-3, and it was more per request to run it yourself than just to use the AWS offering, even if you were using it every second of every day 24/7.”
However, he did mention some pitfalls to using an off-the-shelf model, namely that “they are very general in their intelligence, and your ability to control the tasks you give them is restricted to writing freeform text templates”, and that “they are absolutely not explainable and as a startup, your competitive moat is pretty shallow if you only use these models.”
On the question of whether non-AI alternatives to solutions are cheaper, he gives a somewhat surprising answer:
“It’s almost always more expensive to use AI. My team are probably sick of hearing me say ‘if you can do it any other way, don’t use AI’. That said, there are times when you can’t write traditional software “rules”, you can only describe the problem in data and train a model to reproduce what a human would. If it’s a choice between being able to do something valuable, and not, it’s worth the cost!”
(Image credit: Ion Şipilov/Unsplash)
However, Gleb Gusev, CTO and Co-Founder of Artec 3D, a manufacturer of 3D scanners, had a different take:
“In many cases, using AI can be more cost-effective than other methods such as standard computing systems or manual human-generated work. Using standard computing systems for complex tasks such as image or speech recognition can be very time-consuming and computationally expensive. AI models can often perform these tasks more accurately and quickly, with less human intervention and at a lower cost.”
He added that “using AI can provide cost savings by increasing productivity and reducing errors. For example, an AI-powered assembly line can operate more efficiently and with fewer errors than a manual assembly line, reducing labor costs and increasing productivity.”
However, Gusev did provide the caveat that: “it is important to note that the cost-effectiveness of AI depends on the specific use case and the quality of the AI model. Developing and deploying effective AI models can require a significant investment of time, expertise, and computational resources. In some cases, the cost of developing and deploying an AI model may outweigh the potential cost savings.”
Will everyone be using AI soon?
While the major AI models used in LLMs are extremely expensive to develop and run, it seems as if many expect their prices to come down, at least to some extent. How much this will be passed on to the customer is not yet known, but given the competition between all the big tech companies to develop rival systems, it should help to bring consumer and B2B costs down.
The question is, though, is it really worth it? When it comes to marketing and written content, LLMs may not be the magic bullet that the industry may hope for. Since it is an industry where potential customers can smell inauthenticity a mile away, getting a computer to write your content in the only way it knows how - anodyne - then perhaps it isn’t the best answer. Not to mention the SEO problems it can cause too.
In other industries, though, it seems AI can be worth the investment, providing that other alternatives are explored first. Automating complex processes certainly has its obvious benefits, but firms will have to make sure that costs don’t spiral out of control. Using in-house systems is rarely worth the benefit, according to both Agely and Gusev, over off-the-shelf alternatives.
Both were also in agreement on the eventual need for most businesses to adopt AI to some degree at least. “As the technology and its application becomes more mature, we’ll see it featuring in all areas of business”, says Agely.
“It’s an inevitability that in some form businesses will need to embrace this new tech or run the risk of being left behind.”
411’s WWE Rivals Report: The Undertaker vs. Mankind
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-Back at it with episode two of the second season of this show. Let’s get to it!
-Joining Freddie Prinze at the table this week: Devon Dudley, Booker T, Natalya, and JBL. Another favorite rivalry of Freddie as he says it is hard to top how extreme this feud got.
-They start with Taker in 1995 before Mankind arrived in 96. JBL calls Taker the barometer and he has never seen anyone who had as much respect. Meanwhile, Mankind was in WCW as Cactus Jack and was destroying his body.
-Taker talks about how gentle and kind Mick is outside the ring and then becomes a maniac inside the ring. Foley mentions he used to ride with Mark in WCW and even stayed at Mark’s parents house.
-They discuss Survivor Series 1990 and the debut of The Undertaker. Baron Corbin says there is a genuine fear with Taker’s character when you watched as a kid. No kidding! I was 9 years old when he debuted and it freaked me out. Taker says he realized early that Mark had to be put on the back shelf so that The Undertaker is what everyone saw.
-Foley brings up that Taker had a run where he had to face guys that were bigger than him or taller than him. He was a character that conquered a monster and the idea was to find someone that may not be a monster as far as size, but could get crazy.
-Jim Ross says he had pitched to bring Mick in for years and finally Vince relented though he wasn’t a big fan. “I’ll bring him in, but I am covering up his face” -Vince. We get photos (Dec 12, 1995) of Mick having a mold of his face done to fit the mask. That was 3 ½ months before his debut the night after WrestleMania. Then we get the awesome Mankind vignettes. I loved the early Mankind character so much! “On the 8th day, God created Mankind. Why was he having such a bad day?” AMAZING! I quoted that one for years! Then we get Mick deep in Mankind mode during the vignette and someone gives him the sign to cut and in a snap, it’s Mick. Great stuff!
-April 1, 1996: Mankind debuts on RAW by attacking The Undertaker after he has a match with JBL. Since he is at the table, JBL says he knew something crazy was going to happen so he just bailed to the floor. Mick was an instant threat because he destroyed The Undertaker on his first night in the company. Taker says some will say it was a match made in Heaven, but was more like a match made in Hell.
-Commercials!
-Nattie and Booker talk about the pressure of debuting and having your first run being against The Undertaker. Mankind/Taker I happened at King of the Ring 96 and the chemistry was there from the start. Mankind wins the first match!
-They realized they had something and needed to have more than just a wrestling match. At SummerSlam 96 it’s The Boiler Room Brawl and Prichard admits what we all knew, the taped the Boiler Room portion the night before SummerSlam. CINEMATIC WRESTLING before it became all the craze during the Pandemic. Recording it the night before took away some of the risk and we get some cool footage of Vince giving direction and then telling Taker, “let’s do it. Good luck.” Hayes says that Mick and Mark said they were sorry before the match and then just tore into each other.
-Taker says it was in Cleveland and a real boiler room and was disgusting and dirty. Mick says everything that happened was real and even when he had cardboard boxes to fall, half of his body missed as he undershot it. Taker says he and Mick took a few years off each other’s career. Well, definitely on Foley’s side. More bonus footage as they are done with the match and are laying outside the door and Mick says, “sorry about a couple of those potatoes,” and Taker laughs. This is great!
-They were coming back the next night for the live crowd portion of the match and Taker had a cut on his arm. They wanted to stitch it, but Taker realized that wouldn’t jive and he needed it to be left open like it just happened. Terri told Taker that blood was pouring out of his elbow and he had to just let it go.
-The match continues as the brawl through the back and Mick just decided to grab the container of hot coffee and did what he had to do. Again, they said sorry to each other before the match. The winner is the one to grab the urn and we get the famous finish where Paul Bearer turns on The Undertaker. Look how old school as they had TVs set up around ringside for the crowd to watch like it was substitute teacher day rolling in a TV to kill time at the end of the day. Mankind gets the win and Taker gets carried away by Druids. For some reason I thought that was their way our writing Taker out of the WWF and I was expecting him to show up in WCW as part of the now storyline.
-Commercials!
-Freddie mentions the match was cinematic and asks Devon if he had ever seen anything like that. He doesn’t answer, but Piper and Goldust did have a Backlot Brawl 3 ½ months earlier and Dustin had a King of The Road Match against the Blacktop Bully in WCW. So Cinematic matches had been done.
-The feud continues and Taker cuts a promo in a cemetery and breaks character as he screws up his line, curses and then laughs. They next idea was a Buried Alive Match and Taker had reservations obviously.
-Freddie and the table laugh at Vince saying it was an unsanctioned match. I mean, the stipulation was basically you had to kill your opponent by burying them alive. It was another great brawl and the table compare the match to two horror characters fighting each other. Mick talks about being chokeslammed into the grave and then dirt starts getting dumped on him. Taker wins, but The Executioner (Terry Gordy) blasts Taker with a shovel. Now Mankind and Executioner have to completely bury Taker and Prichard mentions they miscalculated how long it would take to shove dirt back in the hole. That is why they sent other wrestlers out to help (HHH, Crush, and JBL). JBL: “Try filling in a grave with a shovel in 10 minutes on live television.” Mick was covering Taker like a cat burying his bowel movement.
-They get the job done and the crowd was freaked out. Mick says he remembers seeing a father in the crowd saying, “I can’t believe I am watching this.” We then get a bolt of lightning that hits the grave and Taker’s hand reaches up in front of the tombstone. The crowd popped!
-Commercials!
-We completely skip Taker/Mankind IV at Survivor Series, Taker/Mankind V at Revenge of Taker, and just jump to June of 1998 as they start the build to Hell in a Cell II. Prichard lets us know what a Hell in a Cell Match is and how they had large shoes to fill as Taker and Shawn had an all time classic in the first HIAC Match.
-Mick says the challenge for him was to do some kind of justice to what Shawn and Taker did. He tells the famous story of watching the first HIAC match with Terry Funk and Terry threw out the idea of starting the match on The Cell. Foley felt he could do that and pitched doing to it Taker every day and Taker kept telling him no. “Why do you want to kill yourself?” It’s still a no the day of the show, but Foley got to Vince and convinced it was okay and they double teamed Taker. “He is pretty sure he can take that bump.” Yep!
-I have to mention King of The Ring 98 took place in Pittsburgh and no I was not there. Although at this point 100,000 people will lie to you and say they were there. I do plan on doing a Retro Review of the show to celebrate the 25th anniversary in June. We have had documentaries just on this match, but let’s see if they add anything new. They mention Taker came into the match with a broken heel/foot and somehow toughed it out and climbed to the top. They brawl up there with a chair and then IT HAPPENS!
-MANKIND GOES FLYING OFF THE CELL. “AS GOD AS MY WITNESS HE IS BROKEN IN HALF.” Taker: “He ain’t getting up from this. Just move Mick. Move!” Most replayed moments in WWF history and it’s likely Hogan slamming Andre at 1 and Foley flying off The Cell at 2.
-Commercials!
-Back with Foley flying off the Cell as we get constant replays. Booker: “Mankind could have died that day.” That really isn’t hyperbole as one wrong landing and it’s curtains. JR: “I genuinely felt he was dead.” Then we get the visual of Taker on the Cell as they raise it so the stretcher can get to Foley. Jerry Lawler remembers Mick falling at his feet and seeing him smile when he opened his eyes. Taker was just happy to see him moving.
-Foley calls Taker a legend, but as he was laying in the table wreckage and heard the crowd chanting for Taker, “maybe you guys are cheering for the wrong guy.” No kidding! Foley gets wheeled up the ramp, but we aren’t done yet as Foley gets to his feet and we are off again. In an amazing feat, Foley climbs the Cell with a separated shoulder. The place explodes as they meet back on top of The Cell and Foley still gets goosebumps thinking about it. “I suffered a lot from that fall. At least the worst part of my night is over.”
-Then we get the second fall through the Cell and while less famous, this is the most brutal of the two. The ring sounded concrete as he just hit with a THUD! Everyone remember JR’s call of the first fall, but this one is the one that always stuck with me. JR: “Good God! Good God!” Lawler: “That’s it. He’s dead.” It’s Lawler’s call that always stuck with me as you believed it and I guarantee he believed it. JR: “Will somebody stop the damn match? Enough’s enough.”
-Taker seems emotional talking about the second fall and if Mick rotates a few more inches, he is either dead or paralyzed. Foley mentions it was the one time his feet didn’t leave the ground of a chokeslam and it saved him. That is crazy! Then poor Mick had the chair follow him down and smash him in the face. He takes out his fake teeth to show up the damage. He also had one tooth get lodged in his nose. Terry Funk thought Foley was dead and even took his pulse to make sure there was life. Mick does his Terry impression “He’s still breathing.” Being the pro he is, Funk takes a chokeslam to let Mick’s soul return to his body.
-Taker just wants Mick to stay down and mentions he came into the match with a broken ankle, but he obviously isn’t going to complain now as he was questioning his own manhood after seeing what Mick was doing. Mick is proud they didn’t cut the match short and they were dragging themselves to the finish line.
-Thumbtacks get introduced as Foley needed to finish and made it a point to get to the tacks. He admits it seemed like a good idea at the time, but hasn’t aged well.
-Commercials! Cena vs. Rock seems to be Rivals next week!
-Taker says he is trying to reason with a man who cheated death twice. “I have to get to the tacks.” Mick didn’t like the way the tacks went the first time in the match, so he had Taker put him in them again. Tombstone finally ends the match as Taker gets the win. I am pumped and out of breath just watching the highlights!
-Mick mentions he was told a stretcher was coming and he didn’t want it as he couldn’t be on a stretcher twice in one night. Yep, Mick is a different breed! Taker puts over Mick huge and says that match is next level stuff that most people don’t have inside of them.
-Freddie calls it a beautiful art of violence. Mick gets emotional and says he had a hard time dealing with the aftermath of The Cell. Nothing he did after made the fans forget and it angered him. He is asked about it every day and got tired of talking about it. It took Taker telling him that what they did will outlive both of them and that took a weight off Mick’s shoulders. Now he was free to celebrate it and talk about it. I was lucky enough to attend a show Mick did about 20 years ago when he came to my college (California University of Pennsylvania) and he made sure to let the fans knows that yes, it did hurt getting thrown off the Cell so that nobody would ask him. I brought a copy of all of his books and he personalized them to me, which I thought was cool. Then I wondered if he thought I was one of those people looking to sell and that’s why he added my name.
-Mick wonders where his life would have gone had he not crossed paths with Taker in 1996. He says he would not be in the WWE Hall of Fame and would not be who he is today. He is grateful their lives an entwined. Taker says they have a prominent piece of history together in WWE’s legacy. We seem them meet backstage during a show and Mick tells Taker, “My life would not be the same without you.”
-We close on a black and white photo of them hugging each other!
-This was great as expected. Sure, it is a bunch of stories we have heard hundreds of times, but it’s one of the greatest stories ever so I will keep listening. I did enjoy the after camera cut footage they included and getting a deeper dive on The Boiler Room Brawl and Buried Alive Match. Half of the show is about Hell in a Cell, but that was expected. Again, the 25th anniversary of that match is in four months so there will be more about the match this summer. So far this show is 2 for 2 this season and I am looking forward to next week. Thanks for reading!