Season 2 | Episode 1
Restarting the Newsletter
This season - All Newsletters come with video that reads the article word for word
Will: "So you're saying the only reason I loved her is cause she's rich and let me sponge off of her?"
Phil: "Yes."
Will: "Then, I love you too, Uncle Phil.“
Did you miss me? It’s been a few months since my last newsletter. I, like about 300,000 other software developers, was affected by the sweep of tech layoffs. I took some time to sharpen my skills by grinding Leetcode questions and system design interviews. Medallion XLN is a side project that isn’t generating income yet, so my focus has been on getting a job. I’m still unemployed, but I want to finish what I started. I want to use this time to build Medallion XLN to the vision I have for the new internet. I can’t do this on my own. I need help and support from marketers, developers, and investors. If not, then bare minimum like and comment. Now…with no further ado…
What did I miss? What has become obvious in the last few months is that AI is the ultimate disruptor. The LLM leaders that have emerged are Open AI’s GPT4, Google’s BARD, Meta’s LLAMA, and Anthropic’s Claude. The most notable is LLAMA being Open-Sourced, whose offshoots of Vicuña, Alpaca, Koala, GPT4ALL, and WizardLM have been fine-tuned to reach performance rivaling GPT-4. LLAMA is so significant as a language model, in fact, an engineer from Google declared that LLAMA has already won the LLM wars. By making LLAMA open source, Meta taps into a wide range of developers that can take LLAMA and apply it to various use cases that Meta, doesn’t have time or money to cover. It’s a very clever strategy that has been employed in other Meta technologies such as React.js (a Frontend web framework), and PyTorch ( a library for Machine Learning). Based on the previous results of this strategy, these tools have established market dominance in all of their focus areas and rapid improvement in the technology and industry.
What else? NVIDIA’s stock has been exploding. This is significant because NVIDIA has been making strides on both the hardware and software levels. They supply the GPUs most used to train LLMs, they have their suite of language models and they are a leader in Metaverse technologies with Omniverse. The most surprising aspect of this whole thing is how under the radar their rise has been. For comparison purposes, let’s say the company that takes up the most media attention is X ( formerly known as Twitter). Comparing X (10) to NVIDIA (3), you barely hear anything about them, even though at this moment, NVIDIA is the backbone of the most talked about technologies. I guess what they say about the loudest one in the room is a Universal Law.
There’s one more thing I wanted to cover…was it Ron DeSantis’s war on the woke? No, that deserves an entire article. Dang it, what was it…Oh yea, Image Generators. This subset of AI has been a driving force in AI adoption. It’s an amazing gateway drug into the wonders of AI. The war for dominance has been ramping up all year between generators such as Mid Journey, Leonardo.Ai, RunwayML, and Stable Diffusion. The reason I wanted to make space in this article to talk about image generators is because it highlights a larger trend in AI. The cost keeps going down to access high-performance Language Models. For example, I was paying $15/month for MidJourney but I stopped when Stable Diffusion XL came out. I can get relatively the same quality for free compared to a subscription. The same concept exists with LLMs, pay a subscription for the latest version of ChatGPT or use LLAMA 2 for free. It’s a horrible business model, comparing the cost to bring these things to the market and the amount charged to access them. At some point these things products should generate income. Right? Am I crazy? I don’t understand incentive models when it comes to AI. Even for the developers working on it, you know you are getting paid to build your replacement right?
I think I’ll cut it here but I will be writing more articles relating these issues consistently. I think the most significant issue we need to solve is the relationship between technology and humanity. I don’t think there should be any laws or regulations implemented. The solution should be market-centric and naturally evolve from the grassroots. The bill to ban Tik Tok was just sweeping legislation for more mass surveillance. I equally don’t trust a bunch of billionaires talking about “Alignment” regarding AI. If web2 is any indication, “Alignment” only means whatever benefits big business the most. What else don’t I trust….THE ALIENS, the congress hearings are one giant psyop! Compared to how Julian Assange and Reality Winner were treated for exposing legitimately embarrassing things that the US was involved in. This just doesn’t pass the smell test. This David Grush person never actually saw any of the Top secret things he’s testifying about…he heard it through the grapevine. What kind of bullshit? It’s some sort of smoke and mirrors show going on.
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