m_ke

Or just dump pydantic and use msgspec instead: https://jcristharif.com/msgspec/

I have no idea, I tried calling the number on the bill but it gave me a dialer with 8 options of "if you're calling about a bill from X which is now part of Y, please dial N". When I selected 8, which was "all other" I got a canned message telling me to call between 9-5 on a week day.

I'm definitely not paying it

Wow great timing, I just got a $22,000 bill 2 hours ago for a surgery that UHC approved 2 months ago (in a written letter from them) because they refused to pay.

No, some of them will build midjourney with no pressure to sell like instagram did

As the cost of going from 0 to 1 goes to 0 the incentives flip. You'll have way more small companies that raise little or no money from VCs and have no incentives to juice head count to pump the valuation.

I have a lot of friends who started similar companies recently, who are making millions in revenue with 2-8 people and deliberately plan to never grow head count past around 10 people.

We'll have way more teams like midjourney, early whatsapp / instagram and 37signals.

I'm saying there will be 10-100x more small dev shops competing with the big cos. Pizza sized teams that own the whole product and can just ship stuff without the dog and pony show that's common at larger orgs.

Yes for sure, but from what I've seen at large companies the bottlenecks are already usually caused by intra team conflicts, legal hurdles and "processes" that take something that would have taken a dev with ownership 1-2 days to do and turns it into months long slogs and rituals.

Having worked at early stage startups and mid sized companies there's already a 10-20x productivity gap between them due to this (even on brand new projects at large companies vs startups, where it's not an issue of legacy code).

As an example I just witnessed a large co hire a consulting company to help them "ideate" on a RAG app that barely worked and required 3 rewrites and ~18 months to make it to POC stage, even though a front end dev had a better working POC that he hacked together in a day and a half.

I've heard way worse horror stories from friends at Google / Meta / Apple.

What will happen when tiny startups of 3-8 people get 5-20x more productive and can ship new stuff daily?

This is only semi related but I wonder what will happen to these huge hierarchical orgs when the pace of software development improves by 10-20x thanks to LLMs.

How will these risk averse slow moving teams with a ton of process keep up with 100x more tiny teams of engineers who can ship whole features in days instead of months.

Zuck has majority voting shares, so can't be fired.

Sam already proved that nobody at OpenAI can get him out, and the new board makes that even harder.

Same for Elon.

No matter what happens, all 3 will be billionaires for the rest of their lives.

Yeah he could easily get Hinton (who hates nothing more than Sam Altman) to endorse a new proper open AI lab, similar to what was described in the OpenAI Charter.

Karpathy, Alec Radford, and a ton of their old students are practically free agents right now who could probably be convinced to join.

There's probably even a chance of someone like Wojciech Zaremba leaving OpenAI to join them.

EU would build them CERN style compute clusters to train healthcare, education, climate, etc models.

I'm sure there's plenty of people at HuggingFace, Eluther, old Stability AI group who'd also love to get involved.

I'm talking about this: https://www.threads.net/@zuck/post/DFNf73PJxOQ

> "...we'll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts".

What do you think will happen when these models are good enough to do 90% of engineering work? He's already putting a squeeze on his employees now (https://africa.businessinsider.com/news/meta-ceo-mark-zucker...)

> "I think whoever gets there first is going to have a long-term, durable advantage towards building one of the most important products in history," Zuckerberg said, according to the recording.

> Zuckerberg also reiterated his belief that this would be the year Meta started seeing AI agents take on work, including writing software. Asked whether this would lead to job cuts, Zuckerberg said it was "hard to know" and that while it may lead to some roles becoming redundant, it could lead to hiring more engineers who can harness artificial intelligence to be more productive.

Sir, this is a Wendy's

I can't imagine what it's like at Meta right now, with the CEO publicly stating that they're firing the bottom 5% of performers and then a week later stating that the LLMs that his researchers / engineers are working on will soon be able to replace them.

Zuck needs Yann LeCun and other senior researchers at Meta a lot more than they need him. If they were to quit there would be a line out the door to hand them as much money as they want to start a competing open research lab. I bet a ton of top researchers from other labs would be happy to join too, since from what I've heard from friends they're all miserable from dealing with incompetent management.

On current trajectory one of Sam Altman / Zuck / Elon will end up having full control over the frontier models that are trained on their huge new clusters. All 3 of them are unaccountable to anyone.

By grade I mean a score of how many of the tasks were completed successfully.

K/N or as a percentage.

The only reliable final test will be a black box test suite that takes your model, executes it in a sealed environment and gives you a grade back, potentially with a performance break down by subject.

No telling companies what the questions look like, what the output format is, what topics are covered, so that there’s no room to make up synthetic data to interpolate from.

We’ll definitely get above human level performance for a lot of tasks soon. It just won’t be general and reliable enough to do open ended tasks the way competent humans do.

So we’ll have models that can fill out and validate a tax return, and give you reasonable financial advice, but we won’t have an off the shelf general LLM from OpenAI that can replace an accountant at any random business anytime soon.

Unfortunately it was shut down after I sold the company to MyFitnessPal.

I was a shitty business person who thought it made sense to try and build a free consumer product on a bootstrapped budget. We had some traction on the B2B side that paid the bills but COVID took a dent in it and it would have taken a long time to build back the revenue stream selling to healthcare companies (tip for others, it can take 6-18months to close healthcare deals and another 6-18months to integrate)

We had a few offers to sell the company and took the one that seemed to make the most sense.

If there’s anything I can do to help out my email is michalwols at the Google email provider domain

Except we’re probably decades away from reliable open ended agents that can be trusted to perform any task.

There’s a reason why waymo started out in SF and Phoenix, getting to enough 9s to be hands off is really hard and current ML based systems don’t extrapolate well to new environments.

It’s amazing how confident all of the recent 20 year olds with “AI” companies are.

I’ve got to meet a bunch of founders of chatGPT wrapper companies from recent YC batches and other startups that raised a ton of money from top firms and the way they prognosticate compared to all the people I know who built real successful ML products in the past is insane.

Most of them have “AI expert” in their LinkedIn bios but have not trained a single model, their companies amount to a nodejs app with a few chained prompts and 0 data nor evals to speak of.

One of these guys just confidently opened up a conversation with me with something along the lines of “once we reach ASI, our accounting agent company will be one of the largest businesses in the world”, as in their ChatGPT wrapper will be useful when OpenAI releases a model that’s smarter than all humans.

EDIT: this is not meant to be a knock on Luka, who from what I can see seems like a brilliant guy who will probably have an amazing career.

Same goes for the recent young “AI” startup founders, most of whom are also really talented. Cheers to them for doing the right thing by going after the big new opportunities in the market enabled by LLMs.

Just maybe take it easy on the grand proclamations and crypto bro style hype.

At Bitesnap we were surprised at how much interest there was from researchers to use our app for diet tracking. It turns out giving people a piece of paper to write “grilled cheese sandwich for lunch” is not a scalable and reliable way to collect research quality data.

We even worked with USDA on putting together a food logging dataset: https://agdatacommons.nal.usda.gov/articles/dataset/SNAPMe_A...

Wokeness is also a way the media can smack down candidates like Corbin and Sanders, labeling them sexist or an antisemite for focusing on class instead of identity politics.

Wokeness is what happens when you have socially liberal and fiscally conservative investors / executives try to please their democratic leaning employees without having to pay more taxes. It costs them nothing, so you get corporations and the media to embrace race and gender progressivism with a full clamp down on any true progressive causes like universal health care, free education and etc.

The same VCs crying about wokeness are also crying about a collapse of the manufacturing base in the US, when they're the ones responsible for offshoring all of it and not investing in any business that deal with physical goods because software are so much larger.

As an example, yes Starbucks can have LGBT mugs but hell no to unions.

Surya is a great open source toolkit for table parsing, layout analysis and OCR: https://github.com/VikParuchuri/surya

He had major layoffs at tesla too https://electrek.co/2024/12/30/tesla-replaced-laid-off-us-wo...

EDIT: in general, my point is that he practically triggered mass layoffs at large companies by being so vocal about doing it at twitter. A ton of investors were celebrating it after and pushing companies to do the same.

The market for software engineers crashed after https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

Also see the layoff charts tab on this site https://layoffs.fyi/

The richest man in the world, who just fired 90% of his employees and plans on cutting the Department of Education saying Americans are too stupid so we need to remove the caps on indentured labor is the most amusing thing I've seen in a really long time.

Immigration is America's greatest asset, followed closely by the vast oceans that shield our capital from any threats. H1B should be replaced by an auction system that lets in the top paid employees and converts to a green card after one year with the company.

Andy is a treasure, if only we had more professors like him

VLA - Vision Language Action models

https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09246

It turns out you can take a vision language foundational model that has a broad understanding of visual and textual knowledge and fine tune it to output robot actions given a sequence of images and previous actions.

This approach beats all previous methods by a wide margin and transfers across tasks.

I only learned about it recently and it really showed me a cancerous side of tech that I did not know existed.

So I’d say it’s great for giving people an anonymous channel to be their true selves and shining a light on opinions / attitudes that I was blind to.

I only learned about it recently and it really showed me a cancerous side of tech that I did not know existed.

So I’d say it’s great for giving people an anonymous channel to be their true selves and shining a light on opinions / attitudes that I was blind to.

As polish immigrant who moved to NYC as a kid and grew up here there's no place I love more than NYC but you're wrong about Warsaw. I've been to most major cities in the US and Europe and the standard of living in Warsaw is better than 95% of them.