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Stepfunction PodcastEpisode 19 - Spaghetti Delivery by AI AgentsJeff and Seymour kick off 2024 with a discussion of the three phases of generative AI. Phase 1: The launch of ChatGPT in November, 2022. Phase 2: The rise and fall of AI wrapper companies during early- to mid-2023. Phase 3: The current emergence of AI Agents 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: The Information's article "OpenAI Shifts AI Battleground to Software That Operates Devices, Automates Tasks" Links from Google's 2018 launch of Google Duplex: Blog pos...2024-02-2024 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 18 - OpenAI Over BoardWe re-examine the swirl of events at OpenAI in November, starting with the Nov 6th Dev Day in San Francisco. Then the tumultuous firing and re-hiring of CEO Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman, and related Board ups and downs. Links: History of OpenAI Board. 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 InflectionAI. History of impeachments at US Supreme Court. Casey Newton's recent Platformer newsletters summarizing events at OpenAI. 2023-12-0527 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 17 - Ten years from Her (2013) to HumaneJeff and Seymour discuss interplay among sci-fi movies, speculative fiction, and 'real world AI' through the lens of Spike Jonze's 2013 movie Her. Also some conversation about the upcoming Humane Ai Pin. Links: Biden's Executive Order and related AP article quoting White House Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed on impact of Tom Cruise's recent Mission Impossible movie. Quote: "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 AlexNet won that year's ImageNet competition. 2013 interview with Spike Jonze when he describes his early 2000s e...2023-11-0628 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 16 - Midjourney vs Google SGE vs OpenAI DALL-E 3Seymour 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 new voice chat and image features for ChatGPT. DALL-E 3 update. Google Converse aka Google SGE is still better than DALL-E. Midjourney is still the best. Regarding earlier deep learning methods of translating sketches into finished drawings, Je...2023-10-2223 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 15 - The "Who Is Jeff Hwang?" TestWe discuss the September 2023 AI Conf in San Francisco, Anthropic AI and Claude, and how to test LLMs with "Who Is Jeff Hwang?". Links: 2023 Google Pixel Launch Event news from The Verge. 2023 Facebook Connect on Metaverse, Quest VR hardware, and AI. Schedule of speakers and talks at AI Conf in SF, September 2023. Amazon invests $1.25B in Anthropic with option to invest up to $4B. Founders of Anthropic are alums of OpenAI. Better answers for "Who is Jeff Hwang" from www.phind.com, www.pi.ai, Bard from Google, and Microsoft Bing Chat. IBM Video 1: Simple explanation of fine-tuning...2023-10-1028 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 14 - End of Microsoft PC, beginning of Microsoft CP (Co-Pilot) Era(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: Round-up of news from Microsoft September 21st event from The Verge. Info about Panos Panay's departure from MS and some rumors (paywalled Business Insider article) Info about Llama-2 from Meta/Facebook and Microsoft and update from InfoWorld - Sep, 2023. Bill Gurley of Benchmark talking about Llama-2 on CNBC. Leaked memo from Google (May, 2023) on no strategic moats and Stepfunction Episode 12 where we discussed it. Competing ma...2023-10-0627 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 13 - Thoughts on MosaicML, Neeva, and InflectionAI. Plus Apple Vision Pro.(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 launch of the Apple Vision Pro in early June. Databricks bought MosaicML in June and comparison with earlier Snowflake acquisition of Neeva in late May. Profile of the Neeva search engine in more optimistic times. Major funding round for InflectionAI which is behind the Pi chatbot. 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 vehic...2023-07-1227 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 12 - Leaked Google Strategy Memo, Open Source, AI Value ChainsJeff and Seymour briefly discuss Google I/O which happened last week including the release of PaLM 2. Most of the episode is spent on the strategic and ecosystem implications of an internal Google strategy memo and the impact of open source. They also discuss AI Supply Chains in the context of a series of MIT blog posts 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: Jordan Burgess pushes back on Google strategy memo Andrej Karpathy's p...2023-05-1533 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 11 - Google vs. Apple vs. Meta AI: Who has the right approach?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 detailed article on April 27th about Apple's struggles with Siri (paywall) Brian Khoon Lee's essay on the merger of Google Brain and DeepMind with a broader perspective of academic incentives from his perspective as a recent Google Brain employee Xerox Parc and Bell Labs were the most famous corporate re...2023-04-3026 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 10 - BARD Just Blorps It OutJeff 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 Phind.com NY Times story from 4/16 about Google and Samsung relationship Background 2021 article on Traffic Acquisition Cost (TAC) payments from Google to Apple CBS / 60 Minutes interview with Sundar Pichair from 4/16 Evolving view on competitive landscape, future of search, assistants, and assistive computing. Google might be in bi...2023-04-1926 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 9 - Have You Ever Questioned the Nature of Your Reality?Jeff 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...2023-04-0324 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 8 - Moore's Law, Exponential Improvements, AI Chips, Emergent BehaviorThe news that Gordon Moore passed away broke last Friday just as we were recording the previous episode. Today, Jeff and Seymour discuss Moore's legacy, the past and future of Moore's Law, and how advancements in microchips have been the foundation of deep learning for more than a decade. Links: NY Times obituary for Gordon Moore and a remembrance by Walden Kirsch at Intel. Apple's latest iPhone has an A16 Bionic system-on-a-chip with 16 billion transistors, compared to 1993's then ground-breaking Intel Pentium which had 3 million transistors. Articles on Moore's Law and Dennard Scaling Excellent piece by The Computer...2023-03-2829 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 7 - Bigger than Prometheus?Jeff 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 stepfunctionpod@gmail.com and find us on the web at www.stepfunction.org 2023-03-2523 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 6 - Where Will Generative AI Startups Win and Lose?Jeff and Seymour start with another major week of news, including GPT-4, Microsoft and Google adding generative AI to their office suites, and LLaMA breaking out into the wild and onto Raspbery Pi and smartphones. Simon Willison's 3-day history of LLaMA developments this past weekend. Potentially bigger news than the dramatic collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Two relevant articles from Elad Gil: Startups vs Incumbents and Why weren't there any big startup winners from the last 10 years of deep learning? Coca-Cola commercial set in an art museum using Stable Diffusion PCs disrupting mainframes in the 1980s in the...2023-03-1726 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 5 - Lightbulbs or Lava Lamps? DALL-E in The New YorkerJeff and Seymour dig further into image generators like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion. What is the role of the visual artist as generative AI tools continue to evolve? How might it replicate the relationship between a great writer and a trusted magazine editor? Additional links: Adam Gopnik's piece on DALL-E 2 in a recent issue of The New Yorker The Girl with The Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer and related movie and novel The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci Prediction Machines by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb at the University of Toronto. Quote about introduction of...2023-03-1221 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 4 - Typeface and Cezanne's Card PlayersJeff and Seymour discuss the launch of a new marketing company using generative AI called Typeface. This leads to a conversation about copyright consent, compensation, and credit. We discuss how the history of photography, Napster, and Paul Cézanne's The Card Players might help us understand the future of image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. Questions and comments? Talk to us.2023-03-0423 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 3 - Elevators Up, Stairways DownJeff and Seymour use stories and analogies to explain the two main approaches to AI: Bottom-Up and Top-Down. The recent wave of AI success is mostly based on the bottom up path which includes machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning. Related links: The case of the construction worker with a nail in his boot Murray Shanahan's excellent December 2022 paper Talking About Large Language Models Meta / Facebook AI research's September 2020 blog post on Retrieval Augmented Generation and Segmentation DeepMind / Google AI's December 2021 paper on using a Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer (aka Retro) and a database of 2-trillion tokens for improved LL...2023-02-2820 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 2 - Who Opened The Floodgates?Jeff and Seymour discuss the unexpected impact of ChatGPT and how Bing Chat may not be ready for prime time. Did OpenAI unintentionally open Pandora's Box because they were worried someone else would beat them to it? Plus some reassurances that Sydney is definitely not sentient or emotional. Kevin Roose's article in The New York Times and transcript of his long chat session with Bing / Sydney. Podcast episode detailing the behind the scenes at OpenAI in the weeks leading up to the launch of ChatGPT in November, 2022 as discussed by Roose and Casey Newton on their show Hard...2023-02-2322 minStepfunction PodcastEpisode 1 - What is ChatGPT?Jeff and Seymour kick off the podcast with an exploration of ChatGPT. What is it and how might it impact our careers and lives? They use ChatGPT and large language models (LLMs) as an entry point to the larger topic of generative AI. Questions and comments? Talk to us.2023-02-1525 min