Today Google announced/released applications based on PaLM 2 , their new smol Language Model. While the trend had been larger models until a year ago, something reflected in our calling them LLMs, Large Language Models, since these have become useful we have actually seen a move to flip from research to engineering to get them to a stage they can go to billions of people without using every GPU on Earth....
How to think of Generative AI Generative AI is really complex. Like every hour there seems to be a new breakthrough, with supercomputers and matrix multiplications and more. Except it isn’t really, the code is actually quite condensed and the operators not too bad (the best course if you’d like is fast.ai for existing developers to whet their beaks). When considering the impact of this technology, how it applies to you and your world, there is a really easy comparator I have found....
Montenegro is nice This weekend I was at the AI x Crypto event at Zuzalu, a pop-up city in Montenegro. It is really very nice there, do swing by Tivat. It was great to meet the awesome folk trying hard to figure out this crazy time, I will speak more on the various things in upcoming posts (awesome to meet the amazing Vitalik Buterin in person (I’m a huge fan) & Grimes had some super interesting insights even if we completely disagreed on some things - stable diffusion moment for music incoming)....
Mental models Over the years we build up all sorts of mental models of how the world is. One of the ones I have been using recently is that it is relatively easy to speak face to face, notwithstanding shyness, social anxiety and more. Writing is harder, much harder, especially concise writing. Blaise Pascal in 1657 wrote: Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte....