I co-hosted an AI engineering leaders dinner on Thursday with Grace Ge. Thank you to Beyang Liu from Sourcegraph, Devendra Chaplot from Mistral AI, Bryan Bischof from Hex, Marco Sanvido from Robust Intelligence, and Tim Shi from Cresta for joining us. Here are the a few key takeaways: 1️⃣ AI hardware has a long way to go, but folks in the community are generally excited about how it can influence our day-to-day. Right now, they're toys showing us glimpses into the next generation of consumer tech. I respect rabbit inc. / Humane for starting to make progress in this area, but I think there's a lot more to come 😁 2️⃣ We're at an interesting crossroads between engineering and research in the AI community. There's a lot of respect on *both* sides, but I find that these conversations often pendulum swing between specific research areas and very pragmatic scaling/tuning insights. This paper on Chinchilla by Rohan P. came up specifically as important new work: https://lnkd.in/gD6tmDRv 3️⃣ Everyone feels that AI can help them get out of the busy work, and help focus them on the high-leverage parts of their jobs. There does seem to be a tension, though: those solutions are still "not quite good enough" but the ones that make for cool demos look like problem-seeking solutions. The products mentioned were Granola and Agenda Hero. 4️⃣ Large categories of companies within AI are already being commoditized quickly. There was a lot of talk about which companies are taking the "smart bets" in some of these competitive categories, but it feels to me like these 5-7 year strategies will start paying dividends and creating category kings within the next year or so. Specific excitement around players like turbopuffer. 5️⃣ Data privacy remains a hot topic. It's not clear if the incentives line up to push in the privacy direction for most large companies, and I think a lot of R&D cost is being driven by what AI talent *wants to work on* rather than productionizing the whole ecosystem. Thanks again to Grace Ge for the wonderful venue and Sunil Dhaliwal + the Amplify Partners team for co-hosting with Orb!
Caren Cioffi
1mo
Hi, Kshitij Grover, awesome to meet you, and thanks for the Agenda Hero shout-out. I'm co-founder & excited to help people eliminate the manual, tedious data entry that comes with adding to your calendar. AI has changed how we're able to solve the problem for people around the world. Would love for you to give it a whirl: https://agendahero.com/magic
Rohan Pandey
1mo
Cool to hear my scaling laws research came up!
Marco Sanvido
1mo
Thank you again for the invitation! Nothing beats a great dinner with people smarter than me that share the same passion.
Henry Hund
1mo
Thank you for sharing these insights! It's fascinating to see the balance between research innovation and practical application in AI.
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