It is clear open source models and harnesses are having a moment. There’s a few factors at work. 1/ It is now obvious that you can catch up to near-SOTA performance and do so with a clear training lineage. See Thinking Machines Inkling launch today. 2/ There are several well-funded, talented teams building open weight models now in the US and abroad. Along with the explosion of other near SOTA…
I was fortunate to be at the world premier of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey a few days ago. I was asked to hold reviews until the movie releases but allowed to post reactions so will try to tread that line. The topline: this will be the movie of the year, will leave a deep impact on any viewer and will go down as one of the great epic movies made. If Nolan doesn’t win Best Director for this, we…
I’m going to make a commitment to writing often here, perhaps as often as once a day. There are a few contributing factors here. First, I’m out of government and can speak more freely. Though at no time did anyone ever tell me to watch what I said, my default was to not opine on anything online. Second, I was deeply impacted by the passing of two people I knew well - Om Malik and S. Somasegar. One…
I’ve been discussing with some frontier lab researcher friends as to why frontier model capabilities are always so clustered together as opposed to any one model having an unassailable edge. The best metaphor for this in my mind is the “four minute mile”: no one broke it till Bannister in 1954 and then very quickly five more runners did it in the next two years. In the model world, this translates…
I have told this story about once a week for about a decade. This is from Daniel Ellsberg’s book “Secrets” recounting a conversation he had with Henry Kissinger and applicable to anyone who feels they are inside an ecosystem. I find this highly applicable to Silicon Valley companies. There are underlying lessons here on humility and the downsides of trying to make complex systems legible. “Henry,…
Every Christmas break for several years now, I’ve developed a ritual: getting lost in a world of Brandon Sanderson content. Without fail, each time I come away struck by how amazing a person Brandon seems to be. Brandon is best known for his vast collection of Cosmere novels and numerous standalone titles. While fantasy isn’t my typical genre—I usually prefer sci-fi or thrillers—I discovered his…
Most of the interesting conversations in tech now happen in private group chats: Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, small invite-only Discord groups. Being part of the right group chat can feel like having a peek at the kitchen of a restaurant but instead of food, messy ideas and gossip fly about in real time, get mixed, remixed, discarded, polished before they show up in a prepared fashion in public.…
The biggest determinant for success in a technology company is the speed at which it operates and learns – the “clock speed” to use a CPU analogy. The easiest external measure for this is how fast you ship product. However, I’ve come to realize that is often hard to measure or hard to accomplish. You can’t ship hardware every week or make research breakthroughs every day. I have come to realize…
When Aarthi and I started doing the show and interviewing people, I read up on all the great interviewers - past and current - to learn the art of interviewing a person. Of all the things I read, the anecdote that stayed the most with me came from an unlikely source. In John le Carré autobiographical work The Pigeon Tunnel , he describes being interviewed on French TV by Bernard Pivot . These…
I’m a big believer in cold emails. They’ve personally opened many doors for me and been the basis of many relationships. Here are a few things I’ve learned about powerful/wealthy/interesting people. They read their own email. Moreover, they’re good at responding to email. They’re very, very curious people. They have very little time. Anything with friction gets sorted into a “later” bucket. Which…
You’ve just gotten that fancy job you’ve always wanted.VP of Eng/CRO/CPO/Head of Partnerships/whatever. Congratulations! But what do you actually do? It often goes like this: it’s day one and you’re pumped. You have that fancy office/conf room! But as you go through meetings, your mood changes. You find that the organization is large and complex. Multiple teams and leads are vying for your…
Any large system picks a metric to goal itself on. Entire books and way-too-long Medium posts have been written on the importance of said metric - it influences everything from people’s incentives to how quickly you can optimize your business. In an organizational equivalent of Schrödinger’s cat, picking the metric itself can cause weird cultural distortion (see Goodhart’s Law). Since it is near…
Based on actual quotes and comments from VCs and folks in the industry. Hindsight is 20/20 but if you’re an entrepreneur getting a lot of nos, you’re in good company. Dropbox Storage is a low-margin, commodity business. They'll get killed by Live Mesh/GDrive/the platform providers. Users will leave them the moment the next startup offering more storage for less dollars comes along. Which storage…