The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 1,065 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Over 25% of new code at Google is AI-generated
“Sundar Pashai said, you know, more than a quarter of all code written at Google is now generated by AI before it's reviewed and accepted by engineers”
Bernhardsson: Modal discarded Kubernetes and Docker to build a custom stack
“So we built our own, we threw out Kubernetes out the window. We threw out Docker out the window. We built our own File system in order to optimize for how container images are distributed. We built our own scheduler in order to maintain this pool of workers an…”
Bernhardsson: AI inference spend will dominate model training spend long-term
“It's obvious that like in the long run, like inference spend will dominate just for like the obvious reason that like, that's where you make the money, right? Like, you know, when you're training a big model, that's like, you know, you, you're spending a lot o…”
MotherDuck executes queries in milliseconds compared to BigQuery's 400-millisecond overhead
“You know, we can do queries in sort of single digit milliseconds. And you know, in BigQuery, we were very, very happy when we got kind of the overhead down to like, 400 milliseconds.”
Socher: Web traffic from AI agents will surpass humans within years
“I think in the next few years, we're going to see more AI agents surfing the web. Then people surfing the web”
Hitchcock: SurrealDB will be the first database with multi-model time travel
“We will be the first database that enables you to time travel in your data in the different types of models that you can work with in SurrealDB.”
Pomel: Datadog's Toto model beats other models on observability and weather benchmarks
“This model from day one was state of the art, like, it's it beats all the other models, of course, on the, on observability data, we have special benchmarks from that, but also for other things like weather data which was very surprising to us.”
Freedman: pgvectorscale is 28 times faster than Pinecone for high recall
“Compared to one of the leading vector-only databases, Pinecone, a PG vector scale is 28 times faster for a high recall scenario.”
Freedman: pgvectorscale on AWS is 75% cheaper than Pinecone
“The monthly costs of running such a PG vector scale deployment on AWS is 75% less expensive than PyIncome.”
The enterprise GPU shortage has eased at the company level
“Today, actually, I'm seeing the GPU shortage go away at the level, at the company level, meaning companies are able to procure enough compute enough is a strong word, but they're able to procure compute at some level to work with, to fine tune and run heavy in…”
Re-engineering LLM decoders can guarantee absolute schema accuracy for structured outputs
“So that's something else we offer through our inference service to actually make it a hundred percent by re-engineering the decoder of any LLM.”
Kahn: AI targeting in urban warfare will misidentify targets and kill civilians
“And I think when you start putting them in crowded urban environments and ask them to, You know, only kill the bad guys and spare the civilians that we're going to see mistakes being made, you know, where the systems misidentify targets.”
Ethereum's $400M Q1 net income makes it the most profitable software business
“In Q one, if you were to look at Ethereum as a business and we can have this debate about whether it is or not, but if you were to look at it as a business, it produced four hundred million roughly in free cashflow or net income, which makes it the most profit…”
Duderstadt: No top benchmark AI embedding models release their datasets
“And as far as we're aware, none of the other, you know, top models on any of these benchmarks have gone out and released their data sets.”
Nussbaum: Nomic Embed is first open long-context embedder beating OpenAI Ada
“So we're launching Gnomec Embed is the first open source reproducible long context text embedder that beats OpenAI ADA as well.”
Kant: Most developers will adopt AI pair programmers within two years
“Well, the first thing that I think is at this point, almost uncontested, but frankly, when I was building source, most people didn't think would happen is the fact that the majority, if not all developers in the next couple of years in the world will adopt som…”
Kant: Non-engineers will build software via AI prompts within three years
“We don't think we're more than three years out to that point where a non-engineer, someone with no coding, you know, software development background is able to come and give one of those high level vague things of what they want built, right? Cause that's what…”
Zhou: Lamini is the only platform running LLMs on AMD GPUs
“We are the only folks who can actually run your language models on top of AMD AMD GPUs.”
Lamini's AMD support unlocks 20,000 GPUs, enough to train GPT-4
“So that unlocks, what that means is that unlocks about 20,000 GPUs readily available today for enterprises to be able to use, and to get a sense of what that means you can train GBD-IV.”
Srinivas: Open-source AI models do not match closed-source model capabilities
“That needs the open source models or fine tuned versions of them to match the closed source, the closed ones. And That's not the case today.”
Socher: Salesforce research team invented prompt engineering in 2018
“As part of the research team, we actually invented, ah, prompt engineering in 2018”
Biewald: Most enterprises have not deployed LLMs into production yet
“I think that LLMs in particular, we talk to a lot of the people and we don't see a ton of people getting them into production yet. And I think it's funny, like VCs are always surprised, like when we tell them that I think that I don't know. I'm bullish on LMS,…”
Ratner: $200 of ChatGPT calls can clone closed models into open ones
“If you take a couple hundred bucks of API calls to, say, ChatGPT, and you graph that onto a model that is substantially smaller, say a seven billion parameter model like LLAMA, or now increasingly fully open for commercial use ones, like Red Pajama is one that…”
Ratner: Distillation creates specialized models 100,000x smaller with higher accuracy
“It shows that you can take these massive kind of generalist foundation models, And not only can you tune them using that kind of programmatic labeling to be more accurate on a given task that you need to be really accurate on, but you can then distill down ver…”
Ratner: Private data models will exceed closed models in specialized tasks
“Closed source models, like a GPT-IV, five, six, seven, whatever comes, are going to be very hard to match in terms of generalist capability for, say, consumer use cases that are reflected in the web data they're trained on and the flywheels that get powered by…”
Turck: Google invented the Transformer but is playing catch-up
“So in GPT, which stands for generative pre-trained transformers, the T is a transformer architecture that was actually Developed at Google, and the irony is that Google is playing catch-up to Microsoft and OpenAI right now because OpenAI accelerated the develo…”
Turck: Academia has completely lost the AI research battle to industry
“Academia as of now has just completely lost the battle. In AI research and development, the darker dots, and this is a long time scale at the bottom, show that in the early years of the current wave, a lot of the research came out of academia, but today it's p…”
Eifrem: Only 5 modern NoSQL database companies have crossed $100M ARR
“There's five database companies that have crossed a hundred million, right, of the, kind of the, let's call it the NoSQL crowd, or like modern operational database companies. It's, You know, Mongo, and then it's us and Redis. We're on that kind of Mongo path. …”
Eifrem: Neo4j is frequently 1,000 times faster for connected data queries
“We've optimized every layer in the stack of the database architecture completely around connected data. We're not built on top of a different database or anything. It's a native architecture. And that means that if you want to query along how things are connec…”
MongoDB replaced six C-level executives in the three years post-IPO
“It's a, it's not a secret, but since we've gone public three and a half years ago, we've had six C-level changes, right?”
Stewart: Cockroach Labs adopted BSL, open-sourcing code after three years
“One of the big things we did is we did change our open source license. So it's still source available. It's still free, but we moved from Apache to a license called the business source license. Which is just like Apache, you can use the software, you can redis…”
Pesenti in 2020: 10x annual AI compute scaling is economically unsustainable
“So we're still pushing hard, but it's not going to be 10 X per year. It's just not sustainable.”
Pesenti in 2020: Multi-million-dollar AI training runs are unsustainable for Facebook
“Where it becomes millions is when you do training runs. So some of the training runs in the most advanced system that it comes from our company or other companies out there are starting to be extremely expensive. Yeah. Like you can look at one run in the scale…”
Elsamadisi: Redshift, Snowflake, and BigQuery perform identically on long tables
“The speed improvement on Redshift and versus Snowflake versus BigQuery becomes interchangeable. Because what they handle is for those edge cases, we have like a bunch of, like Snowflake is really good at a bunch of small tables everywhere trying to load a memo…”
Volpi: AWS launched DocumentDB to bypass MongoDB's SSPL license
“Mongo took an interesting similar approach. They have something called SSPL. In that case, it says you can take it, but any software that you build around it to run it, you have to open source it. So Amazon will have to open source its entire software base use…”
Volpi: Google and Azure partner with OSS creators to counter AWS
“And then the other thing that you do As a business is you partner with Google and Azure who, because they're pretty far behind Amazon, they're more than happy to have the original item and to pay you something for the privilege of running your version.”
Volpi: Employees write 95% of code in open source startups
“Nowadays, most of these open source companies, you know, 95% of the code is written by employees, and the five percent are like patches or connectors or something like that that the community is building.”
A trained CTRL-Labs band will not work at all on another person
“This is a very personal model that is custom to just you. When you put on the band after you've trained it, if you put it on somebody else, it doesn't work at all. It is, and it's not like design. That's just the way neural interfaces are required to work. The…”
CTRL-Labs reconstructs motor neuron activity before physical muscle movement occurs
“We figured out how to actually reconstruct the activity of the motor neurons that drove that electrical activity in the muscles themselves. This is activity that actually happens long before The muscles actually move, you know, long in the computational sense …”
Reardon: CTRL-Labs captures single neuron signals without penetrating the skull
“This is a, Pretty significant breakthrough that we're able to get to single neurons without basically penetrating into your skull.”
Marcus: Teslas crashed into multiple emergency vehicles due to vision flaws
“It turns out that Teslas have a problem with stopped vehicles, mostly emergency vehicles, on the side of the road. So they have run into, in the last year, three fire trucks, a tow truck a police car, and so forth.”
Uretsky: Kelsey Hightower rated DigitalOcean's Kubernetes UX superior to Google's
“Kelsey Hightower, one of the core contributors to Kubernetes and over at Google, our friendly company, actually surveyed a bunch of different providers delivering Kubernetes services and said that DigitalOcean provides the best developer experience And is the …”
Gourley: Information propagation in networks is central to Russian military strategy
“And it's important to know the context of where information came from, because as information is seeded into the networks, it starts to propagate, and this becomes key attack vectors that are actually unfolding, and if you listen to some of the major Russian g…”
DeepMind's reinforcement learning fails on minor visual changes while Vicarious succeeds
“So if you use, ah, if you compare, ah, Vicarious, ah, system with, ah, DeepMind system, ah, for example, if you change the brightness of the screen DeepMind system will stop playing, ah, because it will, ah, get confused, ah, and if you offset the paddle we ou…”
Dixon: Musicians will make money selling digital virtual goods
“And so I think you're going to see musicians who now make money by selling digital virtual goods as an example, which is not a model today, and that's like a very interesting new model as an example.”
Spotify listening data can accurately predict user personality traits
“We actually had some sort of collaborations with academic institutions, and, you know, we can actually pretty accurately predict people's personality just based on the data, right?”
IBM Watson's $60M MD Anderson oncology project was a complete failure
“Now several years later, and sixty million dollars down the drain, that initiative failed. It actually failed.”
Uber dropped Google Maps for Foursquare to power venue search
“If you use Uber and you say, like, I, you know, please pick me up at the, you know, Regency Cinema in Tribeca and take me to the Starbucks on 27th street, rather than typing addresses, That's all powered by Foursquare's global data set and they moved off Googl…”