Episode 19 - Spaghetti Delivery by AI Agents
Stepfunction Podcast
Jeff and Seymour kick off 2024 with a discussion of the three phases of generative AI. Phase 1: The in November, 2022. Phase 2: The rise and fall of during early- to mid-2023. Phase 3: The current emergence of that can automatically chain together multiple steps that drastically change the kinds of products that can be built and the software development work behind them. Links: 's article Links from Google's 2018 launch of Google Duplex: by Google Research 2019 retropsective from Send questions/comments to [email protected] and find us on the web at...
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Episode 18 - OpenAI Over Board
Stepfunction Podcast
We re-examine the swirl of events at OpenAI in November, starting with the . Then the tumultuous firing and re-hiring of CEO Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman, and related Board ups and downs. Links: . Board as of Nov 1, 2023: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley, Adam D'Angelo Board as of Dec 1, 2023: Adam D'Angelo, Larry Summers, Bret Taylor May 2023 - Reid Hoffman left OpenAI Board and announces investment in . History of impeachments at . Casey Newton's recent summarizing events at OpenAI. Send questions/comments to [email protected]...
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Episode 17 - Ten years from Her (2013) to Humane
Stepfunction Podcast
Jeff and Seymour discuss interplay among sci-fi movies, speculative fiction, and 'real world AI' through the lens of 2013 movie . Also some conversation about the upcoming . Links: Biden's Executive Order and related on impact of Tom Cruise's recent . : "We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us." Deep learning revolution began getting significant attention in 2012 when won that year's . when he describes his early 2000s experience instant messaging with a chatbot similar to . Original voice behind Her's Samantha AI was ; her role was completely...
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Episode 16 - Midjourney vs Google SGE vs OpenAI DALL-E 3
Stepfunction Podcast
Seymour and Jeff discuss the recently announced updates from OpenAI, especially regarding image generation in GPT-4 and DALL-E 3. Our ranking of image generation AI's from best to worst: (1) Midjourney, (2) Google Search Generative Experience (SGE), and finally (3) DALL-E. Jeff closes by talking about the recent LLM workshop he conducted for junior high and middle school students. Links: OpenAI announces for ChatGPT. DALL-E 3 . aka is still better than DALL-E. is still the best. Regarding earlier deep learning methods of translating sketches into finished drawings, Jeff was...
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Episode 15 - The "Who Is Jeff Hwang?" Test
Stepfunction Podcast
We discuss the in San Francisco, Anthropic AI and Claude, and how to test LLMs with "Who Is Jeff Hwang?". Links: from The Verge. on Metaverse, Quest VR hardware, and AI. at AI Conf in SF, September 2023. Amazon in Anthropic with up to $4B. are alums of OpenAI. Better answers for "Who is Jeff Hwang" from , , from Google, and Microsoft . : Simple explanation of fine-tuning and prompting LLMs (start at 2:45) : Explanation of Retrieal Augmented Generation (RAG) on PEFT (Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning) Send questions/comments to [email protected] and find us on the web at...
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Episode 14 - End of Microsoft PC, beginning of Microsoft CP (Co-Pilot) Era
Stepfunction Podcast
(Episode originally recorded September 21, 2023) Jeff and Seymour discuss the Microsoft September 2023 Surface hardware event which was mostly about AI, Llama-2 and open-source LLMs, and Elad Gil's 4 Waves of AI adoption. Links: from Microsoft September 21st event from . Info about from MS and about from Meta/Facebook and Microsoft and - Sep, 2023. of Benchmark talking about . (May, 2023) on no strategic moats and where we discussed it. Competing machine learning software libraries / frameworks: from Google from Meta/FB Comparative popularity of as of 2023 per ...
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Episode 13 - Thoughts on MosaicML, Neeva, and InflectionAI. Plus Apple Vision Pro.
Stepfunction Podcast
(Episode originally recorded June 30, 2023) We're back! Summertime is slow; Stepfunction episodes will appear more regularly again in the fall. Topics: Jeff and Seymour discuss the in early June. in June and comparison with earlier in late May. in more optimistic times. Major which is behind the . Article has quotes from Inflection AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Seymour reports back from a brief autonomous vehicle ride experience with . Send questions/comments to [email protected] and find us on the...
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Episode 12 - Leaked Google Strategy Memo, Open Source, AI Value Chains
Stepfunction Podcast
Jeff and Seymour briefly discuss which happened last week including the release of . Most of the episode is spent on the strategic and ecosystem implications of an and the impact of open source. They also discuss AI Supply Chains in the context of a of from April. Finally, they draw analogies from earlier eras of tech history including the rise of the PC industry and IBM/Oracle's relationship with Linux in the late 20th century. Links: pushes back on Google strategy memo Andrej Karpathy's Andrej's of current LLM landscape which is similar to Jeff and Seymour's four part...
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Episode 11 - Google vs. Apple vs. Meta AI: Who has the right approach?
Stepfunction Podcast
Jeff and Seymour look briefly at earnings and layoffs from 2023 Q1 for the Big 5 Tech giants which leads to further pessimism about Google BARD. This sparks a larger conversation about how best to organize internal research groups. Which extreme works best–Google or Apple? Links: The Information published a on April 27th about Apple's struggles with Siri (paywall) Brian Khoon Lee's on the of and with a broader perspective of academic incentives from his perspective as a recent Google Brain employee and were the most famous corporate research labs in the second half of the 20th...
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Episode 10 - BARD Just Blorps It Out
Stepfunction Podcast
Jeff and Seymour mention a framework of 3 personas: (1) end-users; (2) technical builders like EPD teams, i.e., Engineering-Product-Design; and (3) business leaders. Topics discussed: End-user experience: what it's like to use the free and paid versions of ChatGPT, compared with other LLM user experiences like Google's Bard, Microsoft's Bing Chat, and niche LLM's like story from 4/16 about Google and Samsung relationship Background on Traffic Acquisition Cost (TAC) payments from Google to Apple with Sundar Pichair from 4/16 Evolving view on competitive landscape, future of...
info_outlineJeff and Seymour debate the significance of the generative AI revolution relative to the invention of the WIMP interface, the web, and even the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions. Prometheus refers to the humans learning how to control fire; is gen AI bigger than that?! Articles referenced:
- Bill Gates "The Age of AI Has Begun"
- Thomas Friedman "Our New Promethean Moment" (NY Times)
- Rodney Brooks on GPT and related LLM technology
Send questions/comments to [email protected] and find us on the web at www.stepfunction.org