Writing on AI, startups, and where things are headed.
Today, I’m proud to announce the launch of TalkToSales (www.talktosales.com), which pioneers a new way people can interact with computers. When you watch science fiction movies like Star Trek, people are often shown talking to computers rather than typing to them. And when visuals like maps and diagrams are useful for the conversation, the sci-fi […]
Today, President Trump announced that the US Government would begin using taxpayer dollars to systematically buy up a variety of cryptocurrencies. Crypto prices shot up on the news. This is revealing, as crypto boosters have argued for years that cryptocurrency has legitimate economic value as a payment system outside of the government’s purview. Instead, those […]
Summary I’m looking for a cofounder for my next company. I want to work on AI-powered B2B workflow automation software, but I’m not committed to a specific direction yet. I’m currently working on a workflow automation product in the insurance space that just crossed $10K/mo in revenue. In the past, I’ve been the CEO of […]
Today, I’m announcing the public launch of the ReadToMe app, which turns paper books and other printed text into high-quality audio. I originally built the app as a present to my fiancée, who has a reading disability but loves books. Often, she listens to audiobooks while following along in the same book on paper, but […]
This year, I had to shut down my autonomous restaurant startup Mezli — despite a successful launch — after I was unable to raise the money we needed to scale up. This year, I’ve also re-entered the world of AI, which I’ve been away from since leaving Stanford in 2020. I’m now working on a new […]
This essay is part of a 3-part series: Hardware startups are sexy. Building flying cars, nuclear reactors, or electric cars is more tangible and in many ways more interesting than writing software. It’s also possible to tackle a wider range of important problems with hardware than with software alone, from global warming to food security. […]
This essay is part of a 3-part series: The AI revolution now taking place is poised to change the software industry in fundamental ways, and likely, to shrink the number of people employed in it. Historically, our industry has consisted of smart people painstakingly telling computers how to do specific tasks in the arcane languages […]
This essay is part of a 3-part series: For almost all of human history, the vast majority of people had to rely on their brains and brawn to survive, through hunting and gathering and then agriculture. Animal power provided some assistance, but things started to change much more fundamentally once people learned to harness non-biological […]
Recently, I wrote the post How to: Talk to GPT-3 Through Siri, describing how to significantly upgrade Siri using OpenAI’s recent davinci-003 model. The iOS shortcut in that post is already a big upgrade to Siri, but davinci-003 isn’t as capable as OpenAI’s latest models, which are also what is powering ChatGPT behind the scenes. […]
Note: it’s now possible to talk to a newer OpenAI model (gpt-3.5-turbo) through Siri – if you want to use the newer, and much cheaper, version, see my updated post here. The new version seems to do better on some questions but worse on others. Like many others, I’ve been incredibly impressed with OpenAI’s ChatGPT […]
This post sparked a great conversation on Hacker News! See the comments here.Another update: Scott Alexander just (12/8/22) wrote the best counterpoint to this that I’ve read – see it here “The four most expensive words in investing are: ‘This time it’s different.’” John Templeton I’m writing this essay not so much to convince anyone […]
COVID has exposed just how vulnerable to shocks the systems we depend on for physical goods are. Just about every good – from lumber to computer chips – has been subject to shortages, and each shortage has reverberated downstream through supply chains to cause shortages in many other goods, as with the millions of cars […]
Over the past century, the labor market in America has seen a dramatic shift from blue-collar to white-collar work. According to the Bureau of Census Data, white-collar work in the US grew from 17.6% of total employment in 1900 to 59.9% in 2003 [1]. The “white-collar” categorization was then discontinued for lack of specificity, but […]
This post sparked a great conversation on Hacker News! See the comments here. “Quantity has a quality of its own”–Attribution contested A significant factor in the power of states throughout history has been sheer numbers. Spain was able to control an overseas empire to a significantly greater degree than Portugal thanks in no small part […]
AI is creating tremendous change in the world, but it can be hard to tell where that’s truly happening and where there’s more hype than substance. This essay outlines how to tell one from the other.
Table of Contents Introduction Robustness and generalizability Efficiency Data efficiency Computational efficiency Directions and applications Graph neural networks Reinforcement learning and contextual bandits Natural language processing SysML Generative models Miscellanea Conclusion Introduction This year, I had a chance to attend NeurIPS, the most prominent conference in artificial intelligence…