Week 22 of 2024- W222024
Technology is nothing
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my current or any previous employer. This blog may also contain links to other websites or resources. I am not responsible for the content on those external sites or any changes that may occur after the publication of my posts.
End Disclaimer
“Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them.” - Steve Jobs
GenAI and LLMs are technological tools. It’s pretty easy to stay above and zone out the massive genAI hype fray. Throughout my trading career and then in managing machine learning and data science teams, I’ve looked for and employed those tools that would save me the most time and make me the most money. I’ve looked to hire people smarter than me that want to build cool things and then let them have at it. No subjective, emotionally charged overlay of how much or how little the current crop of shiny new AI is delivering on their weighty transformative promise. Just- “what can it do for me now?” LLMs are so much better than anything else out there right now at doing “certain” things. I use them for those things and they work (right now, not in some hopeful future) great.
Deal with the alligator closest to the boat. Put on your hype-cancelling headphones and keep building.
AIML
If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your C.E.O.
Inside Anthropic, the AI Company Betting That Safety Can Be a Winning Strategy
The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam - h/t KB
FineWeb: decanting the web for the finest text data at scale
Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation
This article is OpenAI training data
Reproducing GPT-2 (124M) in llm.c in 90 minutes for $20- Karpathy
Training Compute of Frontier AI Models Grows by 4-5x per Year
What is science? Tech heavyweights brawl over definition
How A.I. Made Mark Zuckerberg Popular Again in Silicon Valley
AI/LLM VC pitches:
Disrupting deceptive uses of AI by covert influence operations
AutoQuant: automatically quantize your LLMs in Colab
With spatial intelligence, AI will understand the real world- Fei-Fei Li
Painting
Amrita Sher-Gil, Sumair, Oil on Canvas, 56.5cm x 91.6cm
Overlooked No More: Amrita Sher-Gil, a Pioneer of Indian Art
Crypto
Cyber
Ransomware Group Claims Responsibility for Christie’s Hack
Cybercriminals pose as "helpful" Stack Overflow users to push malware
Markets
The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes
Starlink’s disruption of the space industry
Anduril Is Building Out the Pentagon’s Dream of Deadly Drone Swarms
Zero-down mortgages are making a comeback
Palmer Luckey Wants to Be Silicon Valley's War King | The Circuit
Misc
What would you do with a robotic third thumb?
Why Do People Hate Nickelback So Much? A Statistical Analysis
‘Bloodbath’: hyped Bee contenders see hopes dashed on spelling’s saddest day
At These Restaurants, Feeding the Staff Comes First
How Actors Remember Their Lines
Books
Building God, Rohit Krishnan
3 books I’ve read and 6 books I want to read