Essays are my long-form writing about AI research and product building. They sometimes appear in my Newsletter.
If you are interested in my tinkering, see the Experiments section.
Checkout the Latest Essay
Publishing Tips for Free Radicals and Other Creatives
Many folks interested in AI research may not have the luxuries of working at a top research lab or a tier-1 academic lab. Perhaps you are in a grad school with an advisor who is not meeting with you often (famous professor problem), or you are a researcher in a small school or startup without much “community” for meaningful feedback, or you are a lone warrior with no pedigree to show other than good hacking skills, and a couple of GPUs in your rig. If you identify with this class, have a strong interest in participating in science discourse, and wonder how to write a paper for fun, I am writing this essay for you.
The Data Center is the New VC
The recent Inflection AI fundraising news confirmed a hypothesis I had a while: for modern AI startups, the “data center is the new VC firm”. Why just rent out your silicon when you can have a nice slice of the equity?
How to Understand the Post-LLM World
A mental model for builders and investors building with modern AI models.
What if Transformer is all we need?
Imagine a future where Transformers become all that we need. What would that future look like? If you are a builder, a product person, or an investor, you might want to pay attention to this.
Older Essays
What is AI Automation, and what it isn’t?
AI automation is not a dualistic experience. One of the dangers of the hype over-attributing capabilities of a system is, we lose sight of the fact that automation is a continuum as opposed to a discrete state. In addition to stoking irrational fears about automation, this kind of thinking also throws out of the window any exciting partial-automation possibilities (and products) that lie on the spectrum.
Reputation Risk and Personal Growth
I have been exploring DeFi, and what’s now broadly called Web3, for a while now. It’s difficult to describe my impressions fully, but as an AI researcher, I can see a 2010 deep learning-like tech wave happening all over again, but in entirely unrelated technologies.
Discipline is Overrated
I advise a few founders and one general product heuristic seems to surface over and over: Any aspect of your work or life requiring "discipline" is usually a sign of a tooling gap or an automation gap. Many of these gaps are product/startup opportunities...
Teach Don’t Document
With Machine Learning increasingly looking like a software engineering discipline, and a new library coming out every other week, developers have little patience to spend months mastering terse documentation before doing something useful. How then do you capture the mind share of the talent who will go on to evangelize your precious framework or library in their workplaces?
Lessons from Writing a Million Words
Where I share my “recent” writing experiment.
GPT-3’s Turk Gambit, AI Hype & Safety
Customers mislead into believing these hyped up capabilities could potentially endanger themselves and others due to misplaced trust. As AI models become easier to use (as GPT-3’s few-shot examples promise), folks building with AI models will increasingly not be AI experts who designed those models.
Unstoppable AI Flywheels and the Making of the New Goliaths
AI creates engines for relentless optimization at all levels. Read the article to figure out how and its consequences to what you’re doing.
The Twelve Truths of Machine Learning for the Real World
Last month I gave an informal talk to an intimate gathering of friends with this title that I am putting down in words. This post is mainly for people who are using machine learning to build something as opposed to people who are working on machine learning for its...
The Doers and The Clarion Callers
There is an unnecessary drama unfolding on Twitter on “the war” between connectionists and symbolists. This drama is absurd and perpetuated by people whose relevance exists only in the discussion of the “difference” and the “war.”
Porting Older Posts
I am in the process of porting older posts. Thanks for your patience!