Frederic Laruelle

Daniel Wilson and Reza Rassool Thanks for the opportunity to join the conversation, and more importantly to contribute to the critical work of Kwaai Personal AI -- turning AI into a meaningful benefit versus a threat in people's lives. (My comments start about 30 min in, after Reza's introduction to Kwaai))

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I like this idea of "technical taste". It gets into where software engineering is as much creative art as it is science. Four great takeaways (IMHO) for software devs in this era in particular: 1. Aspiring engineers should cultivate a sense of curiosity, experiment with different tools and technologies, and embrace a mindset of continuous learning. 2. AI has the potential to streamline processes and enhance productivity for engineers, but it may also lead to disruptions in traditional software development workflows. 3. Developing technical taste and judgment is essential for making informed decisions about which technologies and approaches to pursue. 4. Collaboration and open-mindedness are key to leveraging the full potential of AI and staying ahead of technological advancements. I also really liked these two quotes from Sam Schillace: 1. "The right time to do something is when you have that feeling in the pit of your stomach that's like, 'oh, this is a great idea and it's going to suck to build because nothing's ready yet.'" 2. "Technical taste is like, 'how well have you consolidated that set of experiences and heuristics into judgment that you can apply accurately when you see new things?'" 3. "It may be the case that very small teams can do very large projects, or like we were talking about before, it may be the case we're just going to get really ambitious about what we try to do with the same size of teams, which is kind of where I would put my money." Great job on continuing to put out great episodes, Brett Berson and team First Round Capital! #ai #engineering #softwaredevelopment

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CS Leaders based out of the SF Bay Area: Join us in Menlo Park next Friday (6/13) for our inaugural "Application of AI in CS" monthly luncheon. Our featured guest, Ashvin Vaidyanathan (VP of Customer Success and Insights at LinkedIn), will kick us off with how the LinkedIn CS team is embracing AI to increase customer value and efficiency. We will follow that with a roundtable discussion on how AI can help with your current priorities, how are you leveraging AI today, are there any adoption hurdles that you are running in to? https://lu.ma/g9u8mu8q

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If you're connected with me, you know I scream about how necessary integrations are. Check out this piece where I explain more for insideBIGDATA!

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That's a good summary Manny Bernabe - Reflecting on an insightful article from O'Reilly about LLMs, I was struck by this point: "LLMs are also broadly accessible, allowing everyone, not just ML engineers and scientists, to build intelligence into their products. While the barrier to entry for building AI products has been lowered, creating those effective beyond a demo remains a deceptively difficult endeavor." This democratization reminds me of the printing press's impact on biblical texts, which expanded access but also introduced new interpretive challenges. As we navigate these advancements, it's crucial to balance accessibility with responsible use. At Ushur, we've been at the forefront of leveraging LLMs in our backend/knowledge work automation as well as carefully introducing them on the conversational side via our Chatbots and other modes. More will be coming out on that. Read more here: O'Reilly Article #AI #LLM #Technology #Innovation #History #Democratization #ResponsibleAI #Ushur

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My open-source sabbatical is ending in June (but before I will do a 45-day challenge) I would love to start early conversations about my next move (DMs are open.) Starting Monday, I will do a 45-day challenge to rebuild Fonoster from scratch. Some of my goals include: - Implement ASR and TTS from all major vendors - Double down on the Voice Autopilot - Improve observability and reporting - Migrate from Routr v1 to v2 - Bring SMS to the platform - Rebuild the frontend - Simplify DevOps As part of the challenge, I will post regularly and share milestones. Hit the 🔔 for updates. ~~~ ✍️ What new features would you like to see? ♻️ Reshare to your friends in the CPaaS industry

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Power that powers LLMs ! After a decade of flat power growth in the U.S, the rapid growth of AI and related industries is projected to significantly increase U.S. electricity demand by up to 20% by 2030, according to a Wells Fargo analysis. AI data centers alone may add 323 terawatt hours of electricity demand, seven times greater than New York City's current consumption of 48 terawatt. Data centers will account for 8% of total U.S. electricity consumption by the end of the decade. Interesting article: https://lnkd.in/gPjFiSt5

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New Mindset Needed for Large Language Models - https://buff.ly/3XbN4vp #AI #ML #LLMs #genAI

Technical report: Learn about fine tuning  Small cheaper to run models can do better than GPT-4 with a small amount of fine-tuning. "We find that 4-bit LoRA fine-tuned models outperform base models by 34 points and GPT-4 by 10 points on average" How to fine-tune? LoRa method is the most well known and can be done on any decent gaming PC for learning. Many YouTube tutorials can be found. Having your own fine-tunes gives your business something unique in the market, you build your dataset up over time, building that value. Paper: https://lnkd.in/gi6PqyYt

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A good read on building with LLMs https://applied-llms.org/

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💡 Why do we need so many evaluation tools for LLMs? As engineers, we build 'production-ready' LLM products using these metrics. But what happens next? How do we maintain control and ensure reliability? At Feedback Intelligence, we’ve crafted a cookbook to keep your LLMs reliable and aligned with user expectations. 🍲 📖 Give it a read and let’s chat!

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KV-cache quantization is super useful when you have a large batch-size and/or longer context-windows. This requires on-the-fly quantization. Happy to see HQQ used in this context: https://lnkd.in/eyxyPnhP

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🚀Bay Area Founders Club Substack Launch🚀 Greetings Community👋 Welcome to the Bay Area Founders Club newsletter on Substack! Subscribe to get weekly updates on entrepreneurial and investment happenings in the Bay Area, along with top-notch content delivered straight to your inbox every week. Join us to stay connected and informed! #BayAreaFoundersClub #Entrepreneurship #Investment #Startups #Innovation #Networking #Substack

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I spoke with Eric Ignasik and Michael Sols from The Software House about dealing with silos at work. 🎙️ We discussed how Technology Managers can help their engineers gain deep operational expertise and take full responsibility for product/feature delivery. The best practices I described in this interview come straight from Payhawk. It doesn’t mean they can simply be copied — but they might be inspiring to some. Happy reading 👋🏼 ➡️ hubs.ly/Q02xn9j-0 #softwaredevelopment #cto #softwaredelivery

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Having worked at Cruise and Waymo on self-driving taught me many things. I hope to bring some of these learnings to healthcare so it too can soon have the magical, "no-driver-at-the-wheel" moment. Here's a short conversation I had with Louie Cai, MD on this topic!

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My cofounder Saumil goes on the Stack Overflow Podcast to deep dive on AI Agents! He goes into detail how we leverage AI agents to power automated workflows to accomplish the most complex tasks. Including agents firing off tasks to other agents to tackle the details. Need an agent to verify your work? No problem. Give it a listen and let us know what you think!

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Chatbots spewing hate speech is a problem for engineers and security teams alike. Building safe and reliable AI systems is a problem that runs deep! Check out my latest blog to learn about how we got here and what you can do to deploy AI that you can trust. I’ve even drawn up some illustrations to keep you entertained on the way: 

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In order to get the most compute availability, Modal runs user functions in 25+ regions across the world. This is usually a great thing for customers of many applications (e.g. generative AI) where the compute time dominates and it's important to have the largest possible GPU capacity. However, a lot of Modal customers have been asking about more control over location. Some users want lower latency from a particular region. Others need it for compliance reasons (GDPR, for instance). Or they have large data sets in a storage system like S3 and they don't want to incur large egress fees. We recently launched a feature to control the location of containers running in Modal for these use cases! https://lnkd.in/gYnPx56e

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Falkonry (Suhas Mehta and Ashis Khan) and iba AG (Eric Snyder) will present how steel makers are pivoting to AI & Data driven decision support system at AISTech 2024 today (May 6, 2024) - please join us if you are interested. I co-authored this paper with Eric Snyder of iba AG.

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