Sara’s Weekly Update #24
Welcome to my newsletter! I write down my thoughts & opinions on the topics I read/watched last week. My topics of interest are broad, please feel free to skip to the issue you like.
AI
I couldn’t write this last week, I was traveling back from SFO & my flight got delayed. Anyway for the past two weeks, I couldn’t get to follow much of the news in detail, my thoughts were around the AI. One, I was attending the Ray Summit in SFO, it’s an MLOPS platform tool used by top tech companies at various levels to train or deploy AI models. And after attending talks from top tech companies, my mind is fully absorbed in it. Second, I was doing a POC at work to use LLM to try to answer questions on our internal docs. After seeing some of the preliminary results I am stunned at how good these things really are. They are going to be a massive productivity booster for the US economy & rest of the world. If you are interested in knowing more about why productivity matters for the economy, watch the great video - How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio.
To show you a quick glimpse I developed a small chatbot that understands all my previous 23 blogs & tries to answer questions about me & my opinions. Here are some snippets from that.
The answers are very good and definitely much easier to understand my opinions by asking questions rather than reading through all the past 23 blogs & trying to reflect on them to form an opinion. Think about how useful this can be in a typical enterprise where information is spread across various channels and how easy it will be for the employees to just ask the question & get a concise answer, rather than searching & reading through pages of documents or asking a college. This is going to be a productivity booster for sure.
By the way, you can play with my chatbot here - https://huggingface.co/spaces/sara4dev/rag-iblog-qa and tell me if you find anything interesting :-)
Meta AI Announcements
@metaai is going to be integrated into all meta apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. And billions of people are going to start interacting with it. AI boom is real.
Microsoft AI (Copilot) Announcements
Similar announcements from Microsoft a week ago, that AI copilot will be available on Windows.
Amazon steps up AI race with up to $4 billion deal to invest in Anthropic
The news represents perhaps Amazon's biggest answer yet to challenges from Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google, smaller cloud rivals that have marketed or developed powerful AI this year. The deal also shows ongoing maneuvering by the cloud companies to secure ties with AI startups reshaping their industry.
All the Big cloud providers are competing to get their AI story better. “Follow the money” mantra, shows that AI is going to have huge growth in the coming decade.
OpenAI could see its secondary-market valuation soar to $90B
OpenAI is in discussions to possibly sell shares in a move that would boost the company’s valuation from $29 billion to somewhere between $80 billion and $90 billion, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing people familiar with the talks.
In April, OpenAI picked up just over $300 million in funding from backers such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global at a valuation of $29 billion. That was separate to a big investment from Microsoft announced earlier this year, which closed in January. The size of Microsoft’s investment was believed to be around $10 billion.
In six months the valuation is more than doubled! There is an AI boom for sure, but still nervous to see this kind of sky-high valuation in a short period of time. Is it a repeat of Dot Com boom & bust stories? I hope it’s not.
Phew! There’s so much of an AI story that happened in just the last two weeks.