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
Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight, For the greatest tragedy of them all, Is never to feel the burning light.
-Attributed to Oscar Wilde
"I know it's over", Icarus says
To the sun
-Coldplay, Fun
AIML
Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art, Ted Chiang for the New Yorker-
Ted Chiang is so, so good. This is perhaps the best explanation of why human art will always be human art and also on the difference between skill and intelligence(see Chollet twitter below).
“When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.”
“Not all writing needs to be creative, or heartfelt, or even particularly good; sometimes it simply needs to exist. “
The World’s Call Center Capital Is Gripped by AI Fever — and Fear-
Call centers are the Philippines’ “biggest source of private sector jobs and the biggest sectoral contributor to gross domestic product. “.
“The Philippines, unfortunately, is ill-equipped to protect our workers from getting swept away by the AI wave.”
“If you don't upskill, obviously, AI will replace you,” said National Economic and Development Authority Secretary Arsenio Balisacan. “That's the challenge for us.”
How does cosine similarity work?- want to build a “gpt for your own data” or a recommendation system for you and your friends? Of course you do! How would you know how to judge what data or recommendations are helpful or relevant? Cosine similarity measures the cosine of the angle between two vectors in a multi-dimensional space. Gulp! This article explains that way better than I just did. Great, helpful article on comparing vectors.
Report: OpenAI Considers $2,000 Monthly Subscription Prices for New LLMs-
Bloomberg is more than this a month and that’s basically table stakes for working in trading. You have to have it…if your company pays for it.
Reflection-Llama-3.1-70B- This has yet to be vetted for the below statement, but this is fine tuned with a new type of methodology. Below comment from Hacker News explains it nicely:
“is (currently) the world's top open-source LLM, trained with a new technique called Reflection-Tuning that teaches a LLM to detect mistakes in its reasoning and correct course.”
Companies Mentioning AI on their Earnings Calls:
Painting
Stormy Landscape, Penry Williams, 1802-1855
Skills Vs. Intelligence by Francois Chollet
Markets
Founder Mode, by Paul Graham- I run my own little company within my bigger company which is owned by a huge company.
I needed to read this and be reminded of something I think about often.
There are a lot of professional fakers operating in the world and they will try and destroy your team/startup/company.
Emphasis mine:
“C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world”
“Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was the big mystery to me. And after mulling it over for a bit I figured out the answer: what they were being told was how to run a company you hadn't founded — how to run a company if you're merely a professional manager. But this m.o. is so much less effective that to founders it feels broken. There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is. “
“Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.”
How AI Disrupts Tech Investing- There will be companies with 1-3 people that make a lot of money- It’s good to be a Creator and Solopreneur
“1. Many Businesses Will Be Disrupted
2. Successful Startups Will Need Less Capital
3. VC-Funded Startups Might Have a Lower Success Rate”
Knowledge work rarely involves deliberate practice- Do you engage in deliberate practice your job? Probably not. And that’s why no one will remember your name.
“Athletes and musicians pursue virtuosity in fundamental skills much more rigorously than knowledge workers do. “
Printing Money- Visualizations of how fast money moves based on hourly rates
How to Learn from Andrej Karpathy:
Misc
Mapping 20k ships that sank in WWII-
The next would-be assassin may be a drone pilot. US law enforcement doesn't look ready.-
“Assassination by drone is hardly new, at least for militaries and spy agencies. The US, Britain, Israel and other nations have done it for more than two decades, using larger drones such as the $30 million MQ-Reaper, armed with laser-guided missiles filled with explosives or even sharp metal blades that shred the target. But the danger now is that an insurgent or extremist can weaponize a $300 drone and strike a person within a half dozen miles with little warning.”
Inside the Tense Decision Between NASA and Boeing to Send Starliner Home Alone-
“The tension came down to whether or not NASA had confidence in Starliner’s thruster performance, and how much officials could predict their performance once Starliner would undock from the ISS and begin a series of de-orbit burns, he added.”
Tour of Alex Honnold's Home Climbing Gym- How much does this home climbing gym cost?
Podcasts for a Road Trip
Chameleon: Hollywood Con Queen
Books
4 books I’ve read and 5 books I want to read