tompetry

Is the $200 price tag there to simply steer you to the $20 plan rather than the free plan?

Now this is what I call taste.

Cool concept. Anybody know of a project with realtime spontaneous interactions like this that fits a defined use case?

I've thought about this topic a lot before. The concept of a founder vs manager "mode" doesn't resonate with me, but the message boils down to this: founders have more freedom to approve high risk/high reward initiatives, while shielding everybody else on downside. It's "their company" and their job can stomach some turmoil in the name of winning.

Managers don't have this safety net; failures will be evaluated more critically and they probably aren't the types to win at all costs. So they are more focused on avoiding fatal mistakes that will lose them their jobs, but don't end up achieving as much on average.

In a sports analogy, founders play to win and managers play not to lose.

But it's a spectrum not black and white. Every founder has to delegate and every founder has to bring on great people to do the work and let them breathe. I think its about freely enabling bold projects while minimizing the fear and anxiety at all levels, and figuring out the decision making and execution structure that works the best.

> By some estimates, more than 80 percent of AI projects fail — twice the rate of failure for information technology projects that do not involve AI.

So 40% of projects with more proven/experienced technologies fail? That's super high. Replace "AI" with any other project "type" in the root causes and sounds about right. So this feels more of a commentary on corporate "waste" in general than AI.

This was awesome

The founder in this scenario was offered $400,000 of liquidity at Series A and $750,000 at Series B and encouraged to do so by their board of investors to de-risk their own life.

This is from the article. I would tend to agree with you.

The single data point here is Adam Neuman, so I have a hard time taking this seriously.

I have raised 6 equity rounds as a founder of 2 companies. Never took a dime off the table, was never offered it, never asked for it. We actually did have early employees ask about it, and we encouraged them to not sell.

Why would you, especially at early stage valuations? You're either bad at math, or you know you're about to fail. And who is buying these secondary shares? I don't know a VC or angel who would "de-risk" an early founder like this; it's not aligned with their model. It also complicates QSBS status if I recall correctly.

I've worked quite a bit with STT and TTS over the past ~7 years, and this is the most impressive and even startling demo I've seen.

But I would like to see how this is integrated into applications by third party developers where the AI is doing a specific job. Is it still as impressive?

The biggest challenge I've had with building any autonomous "agents" with generic LLM's is they are overly gullible and accommodating, requiring the need to revert back to legacy chatbot logic trees etc. to stay on task and perform a job. Also STT is rife with speaker interjections, leading to significant user frustrations and they just want to talk to a person. Hard to see if this is really solved yet.

While I'm not convinced it is VC vs. bootstrapped that should differentiates frameworks, you should read this book, it is simply the closest thing to a step by step user guide to finding PMF as I've seen, and it worked for me: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/09...

Fair question. People have kept pictures, paintings, art, belongings, etc of their family members for countless generations. AI will surely be used to create new ways to remember loved ones. I think that is a big difference than "keeping around grandma as an AI version of herself", and pretending they are still alive, which I agree feels unhealthy.

I have the same concerns generally. But one non-evil popped into my head...

My dad passed away a few months ago. Going through his things, I found all of his old papers and writings; they have great meaning to me. It would be so cool to have them as audio files, my dad as the narrator. And for shits, try it with a British accent.

This may not abate the concerns, but I'm sure good things will come too.

If he's earning just 5% a year on that $16B net worth, that's about ~$2.2m per day. Yet he used this info to gain $500k?

Not so sure about that. It reads to me like there is a personal scandal on the horizon that has come to the board's attention, and the board feels their hands are tied. Hard for me to believe its business decision related; Sam is elite in this regard, and is not really incentivized to violate their charter.

Bummer in any situation... the progress in this domain is truly exciting, and OpenAI was executing so well. This will slow things down considerably.

I have seen noticably worse results with Bard, especially with long prompts. Claude (by Anthropic) has been my backup to ChatGPT.

Sounds like he wasn't happy with his last PM haha. Interesting convo starter article though, as the PM role seems to also draw a wide range of opinions. In my view, the PM duties are critical, but the PM function is what a company makes it, as there are multiple ways to divvy up work and get things shipped.

To me, great products are a result of having a leader in the company who brings strong vision, customer focus, prioritizing the needle movers, and assembles the right technical talent to turn concepts into reality. This leader "gets it", and they make the tough decisions.

So while simply having a PM doesn't ensure these things, it doesn't necessarily prevent them either. Once you scale, the PM function brings much needed order to chaos. But if a company is relying purely on IC PM's to bring the vision, focus, needle movers, leadership, the company is flying blind as it's a signal that the founders / execs / board are absent. And that's a bigger problem than not loving your PM.

Honest question: is it better for society if they are for profit? Will the for-profit incentive and control over development and deployment lead to better products that create more value for society? What is the best example to indicate a non-profit model would lead to better end user value?

With the (controversial) incentive for Apple to move away from PWA's and toward native apps, this has to be welcome news and useful for developers and consumers alike. Their fine balance between being anti-competitive and providing just enough tools to keep users from switching to Android continues.

Their previously leaked internal debates about openness and iMessage for Android in particular is fascinating. Would love to see it on this topic.

What if they did a better job of segregating music vs. podcasts in the same app? So you can search and "save your place" separately between podcast and music? That's my biggest gripe - I can't just pickup separately between the two, I have to search again, find my spot etc. It makes it tempting to just use a different app for podcasts.

In 2004-2005 one of the most interesting features of Facebook was to see which students were in which classes (lectures), and even which smaller labs or sections of that class. So you could enroll and change your entire schedule if there were openings based on data made available within Facebook... it felt pretty creepy even back then.

It was obvious as it was happening. this made me laugh: https://twitter.com/jaltma/status/1089589379406848000

I am very surprised more people watched the dubbed version of Squid Game over the subtitles. I saw a friend watching the dubbed version and to me it didn't "preserve the original performances" as you say. Surprised subtitles are a barrier, I enjoy them personally, but I guess they have the data to know.

I have tested out services that translate your "own voice" to another language and it was pretty cool, although I couldn't tell if the translation was quality. Automated translation isn't a solved problem, and this seems more of an issue than the tone of voice.

"Just walk out"? Figured this was going to be a site dedicated to some sort of protest about Amazon. I think a re-brand is in order.

That aside, would retailers adopt this from Amazon, of all tech companies?

Bingo

It's a very interesting thing they are doing though, one must admit. It really highlights to me the fact that pricing long-term leases is really hard. Companies (the tenants) are living, breathing things that change and evolve. Their staffing and office needs are constantly changing. Not to mention changes in remote working, be it 100% remote companies, or satellites within larger companies. This makes matching supply and demand difficult, and it's a problem for owners of commercial real estate that isn't going away. Lost revenue due to vacancy is uncomfortable for them to stomach - they will pay a premium for known cash flows.

You are right in that there is risk to what WeWork is doing, but if it's a hard enough problem, the premium paid by owners may be big enough to provide an acceptable margin of error. Secondly, perhaps there is a valid hedging mechanism? Third, does their large network and brand give them a competitive advantage at top of the funnel such that they can charge a higher risk-premium (spread) to owners?

We shall see.

It's possible he does borrow against his various equity holdings and you just wouldn't know. This sale is small fraction of his net worth, and cash would likely be a good portion of the collateral.

This is a super cool project. Spot checking WA state (where I was born and still live), the results are accurate and interesting! There are some comments about wanting to resolve duplicates (though duplicates are intentional), would be neat to include a "Born in this city" setting. I believe if the person was born in X city, they would show up in the "List of people from X" page - so not many changes needed.

Bravo!

Uber facilitated 10 billion rides in 2018. I think you are severely underestimating the ease at which another service, benefitting from self-driving capabilities or not, will erode such a massive network. Value of company will be correlated with value of the network, so I can certainly see how it is indeed worth something... and actually quite a lot.

The brain and "mind" is insanely complex. There is so much we still don't understand, so of course there is so much we cannot replicate. But is it possible? If there is an incredible breakthrough in understanding, then yes of course. Personally I see little value in people saying it can or can't be done (of course it can!), it's just a matter of if and when. We shall see...

There is always an "Uber is dead" sentiment floating around when losses come out, but I don't buy it. The long term on-demand transportation opportunity is absolutely massive. Uber has tried to win the land grab and "outlast" everybody with obviously unsustainable subsidies, and maybe that didn't exactly work out. But if the economics don't work for Uber, they won't work for anybody else at scale either. Consumers are benefitting as the industry is subsidized, but it won't last. As with most mature industries, there will eventually be 2-3 players that stay alive, and eventually become profitable. Uber, Lyft, Waymo, Tesla? I don't know, it will be interesting to see. But just because the economics are bad today doesn't mean they always will be. I wouldn't count them out.