Episode 9 - Have You Ever Questioned the Nature of Your Reality?
Release Date: 04/03/2023
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...
info_outline
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]...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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 ...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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 mention audio generation technology which leads to a larger conversation about how we can tell if audio, text, images, and other media is a Deepfake. They end with questions about media gatekeepers, social polarization, and how do we know what's real?
Links:
- Vim is Jeff's favorite text editor and 10 reasons you should learn it.
- Andrej Karpthy's YouTube video on building a transformer from scratch.
- Simon Willison on AI empowering him to build more software side projects.
- Open Letter for 6-month moratorium on generative AI development.
- Italian regulators use GDPR rules to ban use of ChatGPT in Italy.
- Daring Fireball "It's Game Over For Deep Fakes" which links toJohn H. Meyer's impressive Steve Jobs chatbot video.
- Google/DeepMind Wavenet and related 2016 paper.
- Deepfake of Pope Francis in trendy white puffer coat.
- Deepfake of Donald Trump on his way to jail. At time of recording (3/30/2023), Trump has been indicted but not yet been arrested or arraigned, so these images are faked.
- Good article that covers earlier fake/misleading photographs. Includes: (1) Alexander Gardner's famous 1863 Gettysburg photo of a dead Confederate soldier and (2) Robert Capa's 1936 photo of a Spanish Republican soldier mid-fall in apparent battle from the Spanish Civil war.
Send questions/comments to [email protected] and find us on the web at www.stepfunction.org