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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I learned about simulated annealing, gradient descent, perceptron feedback methods in the 1990s, when those were still being called AI.

    I was the pm for multiple teams that used ML classifiers at a major Internet company to get serious work done, for a decade. Nobody called it AI.

    From where I’m sitting, the frenzied use of the term AI on a grand scale for fundraising coincided pretty much exactly with general purpose transformers applied to language models (and to a lesser extent diffusion models).

    I feel like calling all machine learning AI is confusing, because it confuses actually well-designed systems that do real stuff with an emperor-has-no-clothes bullshit mania.

    It feels like maybe you’re trying to extend the AI halo to non-llm, non-gpt algorithms because you think it will improve the esteem in which the latter type of system is held.

    I think the AI branding is a stain, I think there is going to be justified and ferocious backlash, and I would want to keep a perceptual moat between “AI” and whatever I’m building, even if at some point I do want to write code for an npu.

















  • In 2010 the entire office shut down, people were projecting games on sheets hung up in the cafeteria, two of my engineers were dutch so the whole team went to go watch one of the games to support them, and nobody even thought about trying to stop it.

    It was a multinational company and it gave everybody something to talk about and even the people who didn’t care about the games often went along for the drama.

    And that’s dead dead dead.

    My kid asked me yesterday “why does everything just keep getting shittier?”


  • I used to work at Google before it sucked and this was exactly the kind of thing the search team used to build info boxes for, just cause they knew people would want to know.

    Like, there was a time when that company genuinely wanted to be helpful and informative.

    I still have room in my heart to believe that people are still enthusiastic soccer fans, even if I’m not any more.

    But yeah could also just be monetization.