Llama2-70B-Chat is available via MosaicML Inference. To get started, sign up here and check out our inference product page. Figure 1: Human raters prefer Llama2-70B-Chat to ChatGPT and PaLM-Bison. Adapted from the Llama2 technical paper . See the paper for additional data on model-based evaluation using GPT-4. Llama2-70B-Chat was fine-tuned for dialog use cases, carefully optimized for safety and helpfulness leveraging over 1 million human annotations. On July 18th, Meta published Llama2-70B-Chat : a 70B parameter language model pre-trained on 2 trillion tokens of text with a context length of 4096 that outperforms all open source models on many benchmarks , and is comparable in quality to closed proprietary models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google PaLM-Bison....

A buzzy startup offering financial infrastructure to crypto companies has found itself bankrupt primarily because it can’t gain access to a physical crypto wallet with $38.9 million in it. The company also did not write down recovery phrases, locking itself out of the wallet forever in something it has called “The Wallet Event” to a bankruptcy judge. Prime Trust pitches itself as a crypto fintech company designed to help other startups offer crypto retirement plans, know-your-customer interfaces, ensure liquidity, and a host of other services....

Stephen Cecchetti is the Rosen Family chair in international finance at Brandeis International Business School. Kim Schoenholtz is clinical professor emeritus at NYU’s Stern School of Business. In the aftermath of the collapse of FTX, authorities should resist the urge to create a parallel legal and regulatory framework for the crypto industry. It is far better to do nothing, and just let crypto burn. Actively intervening would convey undeserved legitimacy upon a system that does little to support real economic activity....

When I interviewed for my job at Amazon, I made sure to ask one of the interviewers, “How often do you deploy to production?” At the time, I was working on a product that rolled out a major release once or twice a year, but sometimes I needed to release a small fix in between big releases. For each fix that I released, I spent hours carefully rolling it out. Then I frantically checked logs and metrics to see if I had broken anything after the deployment and needed to roll it back....

Continuous improvement and software automation Over 10 years ago, we undertook a project at Amazon to understand how quickly our teams were turning ideas into high-quality production systems. This led us to measure our software throughput so that we could improve the speed of our execution. We discovered that it was taking, on average, 16 days from code check-in to production. At Amazon, teams started with an idea, and then typically took a day and a half to write code to bring the idea to life....

An AWS engineer recently wrote about how Amazon deployment pipelines look and what practices they follow to deploy continuously to a production environment. A pipeline validates changes in multiple pre-production environments running unit and integration tests, and use stages to stagger deployments to production. Developers don’t actively examine deployments as the pipeline monitors key metrics and can rollback if needed. Also, developers model their pipelines as code that can inherit common configurations....

The electric telegraph was a BIG deal. Its impact on the flow of information in the 19th and 20th century was akin to the internet in the 21st. And like the web, telegraphy brought rapid changes in society along with very familiar anxieties and criticisms. (Book Rec: ‘The Victorian Internet’ by Tom Standage) The Ivory Tower Telegraph Doomers In the 1880s telegraphy was common place; the annihilation of time and space - between towns, cities and even continents wasn’t so strange....

We’ve been talking about intellectual property in one way or another for at least the last five hundred years, and each new wave of technology or creativity leads to new kinds of arguments. We invented performance rights for composers and we decided that photography - ‘mechanical reproduction’ - could be protected as art, and in the 20th century we had to decide what to think about everything from recorded music to VHS to sampling....

Dave Rupert recently made a bit of a stir with his post “If Web Components are so great, why am I not using them?” . I’ve been working with web components for a few years now, so I thought I’d weigh in on this. At the risk of giving the most senior-engineer-y “It depends” answer ever: I think web components have strengths and weaknesses, and you have to understand the tradeoffs before deciding when to use them....

As a product owner and development leader, I often hear that “we have to pay our technical debt” in order to proceed with our product plan. As the metaphor goes, when you choose to take shortcuts now, you incur a debt that you’ll eventually have to repay with interest. The implication when a developer raises it is that those interest payments are too high and are preventing us from moving forward as effectively as we should....