A Shift in Focus
A Shift in Focus
More AI, more random, less focused
I wrote this post as a catchup for my substack newsletter. Reposting it here.
Hello dear reader! It’s been a while - nearly a year to be precise, since the last substack post. I’ve been writing more regularly on my blog but didn’t crosspost here because the content was simply not worthy of the lofty ambitions of this blog. This bar was a mistake - instead of worrying about writing content that meets some arbitrary expectations, I’m going to do away with those expectations completely. If you still find my content interesting - I’m glad to have you here.
This substack is becoming a lot less focused on leadership and managerial things. I’m widening the aperture to include some life updates, but more important, my thoughts and musings on AI, with a bent toward generative AI.
Quick catchup
A lot has happened in my life in the last year:
I joined Digit in March 2020, right as the pandemic started. I will remain forever grateful to Ethan Bloch for bringing me on this ride. It was incredible. Startups are amazing, highs and lows like nothing else.
Digit was acquired by Oportun in December 2021. We spent some time integrating Digit into Oportun, building out Oportun’s app offering that ties Savings, Banking, and Lending in one place. I served as the interim CTO for 6 months, and eventually left in February 2023.
Since February, after taking some time to do personal stuff, I’ve been diving deep into the world of Generative AI.
Generative AI
OpenAI’s release of GPT-3 in 2022, followed by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 has taken the world by storm. I firmly believe these large language models (LLMs) constitute a new platform shift and have materially moved humans closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
I’m following a three-pronged approach to understanding GenAI:
Bottoms up education by reading the foundational papers, and following courses such as fast.ai, cs231n, and Andrej Karpathy’s excellent neural network zero-to-hero series.
Building demos using APIs and publishing them for others. I’ve primarily been using OpenAI’s API, and have dabbled some with other models hosted on replicate.com and 🤗 model hub. Projects are all published on my projects page.
Writing memos about the business impact and opportunities that are being created with this shift.
I am fully in the AI hype bubble. Between reading lots of interesting writers like Ethan Mollick and Simon Willison, writing a bunch of code, and talking to interesting people, my work life is quite full.
Future expectations
This blog and newsletter are going to expand to include AI things. To keep a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio, I won’t repost summaries of things you read on Twitter.
I hope you enjoy the content - if there are things that you’re particularly interested about that you’d like me to write, please drop me a line.