Peter Li

where’s OpenAI ‘s sama? oh look. he’s in elon’s shadow. makes sense. he’s shorter. Lol. the island of cannibals that is silicon valley has a new co-chair as mayor of sf. unelected. uninfluential in washington. has weasled his way into a transition team for sf. I wonder is watching elon w trump he found his trump locally in sf. sama is a mirror. he was for pg. he was also for many others. including elon. I guess this is a way to perhaps shore up political points locally in sf. to protect himself as best as he can. washington is a country wide, global game. kinda reminds me of another rebranding. im just jenny from the block. https://lnkd.in/e_jNXXRD if ai companies are to flourish OpenAI Google Microsoft Amazon Apple will require that startups are not somehow impeded. this is a game of davids and goliaths. where the slingshot appears innocuous. that is llms, transformers, access to privileged data. this out of no-where announcement demonstrates that this is a defense tactic by sama. he speaks fondly of sf and has done nothing until now. so his disingenuous nature finds yet another loop hole to worm into. we would be more supportive of his efforts except he’s created an industry for himself through a con game approach. why is he ceo of OpenAI when he’s there 6-7 hours a week. forgive me. isn’t a ceo supposed to be singularly focussed. his game is getting funding that invests in companies that he’s already invested in and as it’s a non for profit there are no conflicts of interest applied. wow. he uses other peoples money to invest in what he’s already invested in. sounds like y combinator showed him how to play the sv players. the next trick will be to do something no one has ever done. take a multi-billy non for profit and flip to for profit. as a non for profit there is no reporting required. there are tax incentives. a moral narrative to spin. then. oooops. how do we monetize this. we believe he will not succeed. to do so would cannibalize capitalism as it’s structured. it also would create a new pathway for universities which are by definition research centres. creating this precedent would alter their business. given that elon has beef with sama. and elon has never been more on top of his game. well. we find local political maneuvering is a way of squirming. OpenAI investors chiefly Microsoft are about to be thrown under the bus. unwittingly. recall it’s the talent at OpenAI that makes it special. the a team has left. the b team is in place. 2025 will not be good for OpenAI elon will have his revenge. 44 millys invested. for what. for sama to throw his weight around. he’s a lightweight. just look at him. lol. source: https://lnkd.in/e9WtQ48k < . >

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I'm honored to be mentioned by Werner Vogels in his latest blog post, where he explores the importance of tinkering and the potential of Rust for building efficient and sustainable systems. The post highlights how experimentation and leveraging new technologies can drive innovation in software development. If you're interested in the future of building systems, this is a must-read! 🦀

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What exactly does a feature store do, and how does it integrate into a production application? I think this is one of the most common questions we get at Chalk. Here's an excellent article by Melanie Chen that does a really detailed and deep dive into a common use case for a feature store: powering a machine learning system to detect fraud. Check it out!

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Doordash just published one of the best blog posts I've read in a long while on how they use AI and LLMs in software engineering! 🚀 At this point, we all are well aware of AI advancements, and LLMs like ChatGPT, LLama, etc. While they have been immensely useful to me till now in writing emails, and writing unit tests, this blog post by Doordash highlighted how they use LLMs in their systems to better classify products, to identify duplicates and improve user experience. For example, one of the problems highlighted in the blog post is how do you identify two different product names are the same product, for example, “Corona Extra Mexican Lager (12 oz x 12 ct)” sold by Safeway is the same product as “Corona Extra Mexican Lager Beer Bottles, 12 pk, 12 fl oz” sold by BevMo. They leveraged a mix of software systems and AI models to identify and understand their products. https://lnkd.in/gtjM4NgB Kudos to Steven Xu and Chaitanya (Sree) Vadrevu for writing such an interesting post! 💬 Want to delve deeper into such intriguing tech discussions? Follow me on LinkedIn for more insightful updates, or check out my Medium blogs - https://lnkd.in/gBmNjZTG for in-depth technical dives! Let's keep the conversation going! 🔍✨

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A few thoughts on LLMs after participating in Builders' Day at the Anthropic HQ in San Francisco: - The talent density at Anthropic is the highest I've ever experienced. If they IPO'd, I'd invest heavily. I believe they're leading both in interpretability research, basic reasoning capabilities, and code generation... by a lot. - Models will keep improving at a fast pace, pushing the intelligence-cost efficiency curve lower and lower (more intelligence for less, i.e., the new Haiku-3.5). - Many fields will benefit greatly from superior access to intelligence. Dario specifically mentioned biology and law, among others. From my side, it's really cool to see law being mentioned as one of the key fields since it's what I've been working on for the last couple of months. - Got some important technical guidance on building advanced RAG applications (e.g., will infinite context length make them obsolete?) for huge amounts of text (thousands or even millions of PDFs). It was the best feeling having your intuition 'confirmed' by their leading researchers. There's always some degree of uncertainty, even for them. - Looking back, everything seems obvious now. But coding abilities emerged as a surprising development - something Dario highlighted in his keynote. I think the genius we've seen in the last 6 months goes well beyond what internet scraping could achieve. Going back home now with fresh ideas. Let's keep building.

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💡 Working Smarter is a new podcast from Dropbox about how AI is changing the way we work and get stuff done—not in the future, but today. 🤖 On our first episode, hear robotics expert Kate Darling talk about how to think about our relationship with our machines. Click to listen below!

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what city should you build your startup in? I was in SF for a few days last week and I've been reflecting on this age old debate what I've noticed about this question, is that people always talk their bags. - if you live in LA, you'll talk about quality of life - if you live in NYC, you'll talk about how cosmopolitan NYC is - if you live in SF, you'll talk about how SF is coming back - if you live in St. Louis or some other random city, you'll talk about how great remote work is having lived in 3 major hubs - SF, LA, and now NYC - I've come up with a simple heuristic for making this decision: there's a spectrum: SF -> NYC -> .... -> middle of nowhere the more advantages you have, the further right you can (not "should") move. advantages include: - strong network (of investors, hires, customers, etc) - experience in startups - experience building great software - strong work ethic - credibility in startups (e.g. multi-time founder, worked at a top tech co) - traction with your company the reality is, because SF has so much density of people who have invested in and built the most influential tech companies in the world (even still after the pandemic) and because there's basically nothing to do there except work, it is the best place to passively accumulate these advantages. this means, for most unproven, non-conventional founders (esp. who are new), SF is the best place to be. and even for folks with every advantage, it's still crucial to visit SF and build relationships with people who live there. I remember hearing a stat that YC companies based in SF were 2-3x more likely to succeed than ones that weren't. so why am I living in NYC instead of SF? family at the end of the day, stacking advantages is irrelevant if you don't have your basics accounted for. NYC is the closest tech hub to a lot of family that lives in Pittsburgh. as I've gotten older, being close to them has become more important to me. additionally, meeting a partner to start my own family is just easier in NYC than SF, which is something I'd like to do soon. I've noticed that my effectiveness as a leader is just exponentially higher when I'm in a loving relationship. having spent 8+ years in SF (on top of graduating from Berkeley and growing up in the Bay Area), I've also accumulated a lot of the advantages listed above. that coupled with staying active on twitter/linkedin and visits to SF nearly every other month, give me many of the benefits of the city without having to live there. there are many exceptions that do not follow this heuristic, but startup success is a probability game and the more things you can do to increase that probability, the better. fwiw SF is also one of the most beautiful cities in the world, this is a pic I took while on a walk during the pandemic

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It’s been cool to see the impact we’re starting to have on eng teams connected to Atlas: we think about ~10% lift in output. And engineers really like it. ❤️ How? 1. Atlas connects to all the tools where engineers work (eg. Jira, GitHub, Linear, Slack, Google Docs, Atlassian Confluence etc). 2. Every day at 3am, it generates a summary using the connected data on what each person got done the previous day, coming plans, any problems or blockers they have, and anything they need to know based on their role or priorities - see an example from our eng team below. 3. Like a daily standup, this creates a drumbeat of accountability and visibility. It makes sure work - and the right work - is being moved forward every single day. 4. Unlike a daily standup, it needs no prep time from engineers (this is v expensive time) and it leads to much more fruitful convos. Instead of just regurgitating what got done and everyone tuning out, standups are spent actually addressing the blockers, or things Atlas has surfaced that would’ve been missed. 5. And it’s creating a super positive feedback loop. A lot of engineers have told me that it's not only motivating, it also feels good that the work they are doing on a thankless ticket, or the time they are spending doing a code review, is actually being called out and recognized by Atlas in their daily updates. We’re onboarding a lot of engineering teams atm (and a bunch of other non-eng teams as well). Ping me if you want to get your team onboard.

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Vanilla recently crossed a major milestone—10K end-clients on the platform, spanning from $1 million to over $1 billion in net worth—which brought to mind one of the phrases I learned at Amazon. "There's no compression algorithm for experience." It speaks to the irreplaceable value of hands-on experience and deep expertise. It's a philosophy that drives our work at Vanilla — our platform was created by advisors, for advisors, based on decades of real-world insight and a deep understanding of the estate planning experience. Combined with our team's deep experience building and scaling enterprise software for some of the most demanding customers and industries in the world, uniquely positions Vanilla to serve customers of all sizes from individual RIAs to the largest wirehouses and wealth management firms. We've built a platform that goes beyond document creation, supporting the entire estate planning journey. And it will continue to evolve as we rapidly innovate and iterate for customers based on their feedback and unique requirements. Modern estate planning requires more than legal documents and tax strategies. It's about understanding the nuanced desires of families and navigating complex emotions and relationships to help clients craft legacies that truly reflect their values. Our goal is to amplify the experience and expertise that advisors bring by providing the tools and context to navigate these client conversations with confidence. By doing so, we're setting a new standard for estate planning software - one that truly respects and enhances the advisor's role in shaping lasting legacies. #estateadvisory

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Excited to share a preview of the AI Prescreening Assistant I’ve been developing! This tool prescreens candidates via calls and has incredible potential in Customer Support, Sales, and Marketing. Current Architecture: Twilio for calls Speech-to-Text models for speech to text conversion. Text-to-Speech models for text to speech conversion. LLM's for response generation. With OpenAI Releasing Real-time API, this entire process will shift to a seamless Speech-to-Speech model, revolutionizing real-time conversations! DM if you want be beta Tester of Prescreening Assistant. :) #AI #Twilio #VoiceAI #OpenAI #Innovation #Prescreening

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We’re hiring at Palantir! Apply now: https://lnkd.in/gbvYh4fr It’s difficult to overestimate how transformative the first few months at Palantir are for a new Forward-Deployed Engineer. As an FDE, you’re responsible for it all—from going onsite and scoping out your customer’s toughest challenges to building out the workflows that will drive them to overcome these challenges. Because of Palantir’s flat and mission-driven culture, these responsibilities really do fall on you. The growth I've experienced at Palantir from wearing so many hats and having radical ownership over my team's workflows is both unique and unparalleled. I’ve had the privilege of working with the sharpest people and most fascinating products, all while solving highly complex and impactful issues. What does it take to become an operating system for the modern enterprise? How much impact can you have on some of the world’s most important institutions, all while solving their most interesting problems? How do you zero-to-one solutions that tackle a business’s or government’s most mission-critical workflows? If any of this is of interest to you, let’s chat about becoming a Palantir FDE.

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Exciting news for anyone interested in building their own Large Language Model (LLM) from the ground up! 📘 If you're ready to dive into the process and deepen your understanding of the technologies behind LLMs, I highly recommend checking out this book: "Build Your Own Large Language Model from Scratch". This book is perfect for those who already have a foundation in programming, especially in Python. It guides you step-by-step through the intricate concepts, from preprocessing to model training, that are essential in creating an LLM. For me, it was both an enlightening read and a hands-on experience that boosted my understanding of this cutting-edge field. If you're ready to take your skills to the next level and create your own LLM, don’t miss out on this resource!

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Distinguished Engineers (E9) at Meta make $4m/year. That's 16x the Bay Area median ($255k) Let's break it down [output = input x leverage] We all have 24 hours in a day, so there is a cap on [input] But hey, let's say they manage to have 2x-3x more focused time, so their [input] is 2x-3x There is still 5.3x-8x to go And that's [leverage] Here is the [leverage] they have: 1️⃣ Writing Every piece of text they write is clear to everyone, and they write a lot, for a lot of people 2️⃣ They create something from nothing And that something has clear value to the business 3️⃣ They influence other Engineers around them They are often described as having a "Midas Touch" in terms of their ability to uplift and develop other Engineers around them The best indicator is that the Engineers in their teams get promoted faster 4️⃣ They are well known and have an impact beyond Meta, promoting the brand 5️⃣ They have industry-leading experience in some areas There are rumoured to be <50 E9s at Meta

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Sometimes when things go terrible wrong, something GOOD happens from it. I think that’s exactly what happened today when storyboarding for the 1st time with Amirhosseign. It seems the harder we tried to collaborate on Google Meet the Audio got worse. Eventually I threw the towel in and asked Amirhosseign to work independently. My usual Storyboard session takes place over a shared Screen on Google Meet where the Storyboard Artist storyboards in real time so that we can collaborate together on flushing out the story. But the internet gods were just not willing to allow our collaboration over a shared screen today, so I typed out over a DM LinkedIn communication to Amirhosseign; do the best you can working independently. So Amirhosseign read the script and began to work his magic. I just looked in on the Storyboards he uploaded to his Storyboard Folder and I said to my self: “Wow, I really like his storyboards” We now have a handful of Storyboard Artists collaborating on the same scene. It’s so interesting to me to see how each Artist interprets the scene and brings their own special touch breathing life into the many different students (characters) in the 5th grade English class. Thank you Amirhosseign for the awesome Storyboards you turned in today. Great job! Author: ELS Storyboard Artist: Amirhosseign ________________________________________________ Havilland https://lnkd.in/e5hwf6Ru Eric’s World Building Explanation https://lnkd.in/enNjfw7v For Onboarding HAVILLAND Writers https://lnkd.in/e67Ut35j ________________________________________________ We are looking for all types of help for completing myRide’s prototypes and the Havilland Storyline movie trailer. Join us to learn more about myRide and the Havilland Storyline, I have set aside every weekend to explore a collaboration. Join us!! 8 AM EST (Saturday or Sunday) All you have to do is show up on the Google Meet! 😊 Google Meet https://lnkd.in/dNHttvj

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Just wrapped up Shreyas Doshi’s week-long Product Sense course. I highly recommend taking it if you’re in the business of making software products successful. I learned how to think deeply and apply principles that actually drive product success. As an engineer myself, any engineer who works on user facing products would learn a ton from this course. https://lnkd.in/eV2DpDpC

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