The Human Side of AI: 5 Lessons from America’s Top AI Hubs

1 year ago

The heart of AI innovation isn’t found in code — it’s found in conversation. That’s the belief that sparked The AI Collective, which started in early 2023 in a small San Francisco apartment. Today, it has grown into the largest AI community in the United States, with chapters in each of top ten AI hubs: Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC. This year, I had the rare privilege of hosting in-person events in each of these cities, spending up to four days in each exploring their distinct cultures and vibrant AI communities. Unlike typical networking events, Collective gatherings are designed for meaningful connection. Members participate in intimate ten-person discussion groups, where we have lively and insightful conversations about AI’s most pressing topics. Through countless one-on-one and group conversations, I began to see patterns emerge — shared threads and distinct differences. Here are the five key le

Top 10 Most Provoking Reads of 2024

1 year ago

In a world addicted to the junk food of TikTok takes and bite-sized opinions, books stand apart as thoughtful distillations of humanity’s collective wisdom. They help us sharpen our perspectives, make sense of complexity, and uncover enduring value in a chaotic sea of fleeting distractions. Of the 70+ books I’ve read this year, these ten have stood out to me as uniquely thought-provoking — not because they aligned with my views, but because they challenged me to rethink them. Since I’m hopelessly indecisive when it comes to favorites, I haven’t ranked them. Instead, I’ve paired each with another title that adds nuance, contrast, or a fresh perspective to the conversation! This list is simply a fun way for me to share the ideas that resonated with me — and hopefully, they’ll resonate with you, too. I’ve had so many friends ask for book recommendations recently that it felt like the perfect time to pull these together. If you’d like to dive deeper, you can find my detailed notes for ea

The End of Venture Capital

1 year ago

Venture capital as we know it is doomed. If your inner monologue just exclaimed “wow, that’s a bold claim” — you’re right! However, after talking with hundreds of fellow founders, operators, and investors during our weekly AI Collective community events, I have yet to hear a compelling counter to this claim in light of its supporting arguments. To get a better sense of where I’m coming from, let me walk you through the seismic shifts I’m seeing playing out in Silicon Valley right now and what happens after the death of traditional venture capital as we know it.Venture Capital 1.0 Since the inception of software venture capital in the 1980s, investors have been taking the same fundamental gamble: invest in the 1% of companies with the potential to generate 100x+ returns by reaching a $100M+ run rate and $1B+ valuation, paving the way to an exit via initial public offering (IPO) or large scale M&A. Decades later, startups seeking venture funding face the same implicit requirement to tackle a $1

The Apple Way

2 years ago

Four lessons from working on the Apple Vision Pro team. The Apple Vision Pro will define a new paradigm in computing. As an AR/VR engineer working on VisionOS for the past two years and experiencing firsthand the breathtaking magic that is the VisionOS spatial computing platform, I can say this with the utmost confidence. How did we pull this off? What makes Apple so special? How has Apple secured its dominance as the most valuable company, most trusted and admired brand, and most notorious consumer product design house in the world? In my experience working on cross-functional projects with nearly every organization in Apple, there is a particular modus operandi — “the Apple way” — permeating the entire company. Below are four elements of this culture which I believe have been pivotal in elevating Apple to its zenith of innovation and value. Product Ownership The Vision Pro software team has no product managers. Instead, product is a collaborative task shared by the design, enginee

AGI Manifesto Part I: Promise

2 years ago

Source: Midjourney V5 What do Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Mark Zuckerberg all have in common? They are unanimously calling attention to the profound social, cultural, and even cosmic implications foreshadowed by the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI). The line between creator and creation is blurring — challenging the very notion of what it means to be human. More existentially, many claim we are living on the precipice of life’s most significant evolution in its 3.7-billion-year history¹. As anyone living in Cerebral Valley will tell you, AI is the new land of opportunity. While Google Research kicked off the gold rush in 2017, it was OpenAI that roused mass awareness when it released ChatGPT to the public last November². Announced merely four months later, its successor, GPT-4, surpasses human performance on a majority of standardized tests and is too powerful for full public release³. With this bl

The AI Collective: A Shared Curiosity

2 years ago

The AI Collective: A Shared Curiosity Is AI conscious? Can public policy keep pace with the rapid developments in AI? How will generative AI transform the creator economy? How can startups working with generative AI develop competitive moats? How do we invest in and capitalize on the generative AI boom? These were just a few of the thought provoking questions discussed at the SF GAI Summit. We are living in an exciting period of accelerating technical progress that is actively reshaping our economic and societal landscapes. We can all feel the tectonic plates shifting under our feet and are trying to predict the future’s tremors. This collective curiosity manifested at the summit as animated conversation between inquisitive minds swirled throughout the room, reminiscent of a modern Homebrew Club — fertile ground for the mushrooming of generative AI’s next great innovations, products, and companies. Discovering Generative AI I distinctly remember the spark of awe and curiosity tha

America’s AI Ultimatum: Forge Ahead or Fall Behind

2 years ago

This week, an open letter signed by over 2,000 AI luminaries called for an immediate six-month moratorium on training giant AI systems. We view the letter as a call to arms rather than a cease fire. As a matter of national interest, America must accelerate AI development to secure its lead in artificial intelligence and develop trustworthy AI systems. By Paul Asel and Chappy Asel Source: Midjourney V5 Sometimes little happens in a decade. Sometimes a decade happens in a month. ChatGPT has taken the world by storm heralding the prospects and perils of generative artificial intelligence to a mass audience for the first time. ChatGPT reached one million users in five days, fifteen times faster than any prior app, and now over 100 million have experienced the weird and wonderous musings of generative AI. The frenetic pace of development accelerated this month as OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT with the release of GPT-4 and ChatGPT Plugins. Google announced Bard, their PaLM API, and integration

Can ChatGPT Generate a Full iOS App?

3 years ago

We already know that ChatGPT has the coding interview skills to land itself a job at a top tech firm. However, job interviews are a notoriously poor predictor of on-the-job performance. So, how would ChatGPT fare performing the day-to-day tasks of a tech worker? Is the software engineering profession under an imminent existential threat? As a mobile app developer, I wanted to understand ChatGPT’s ability to design and program large-scale applications. Can it piece together an entire project and transform mobile app development into an interactive, “choose your own adventure” experience? Can ChatGPT democratize app development — placing this valuable skill in the hands of the average layperson with an original idea? Source: MidjourneyChatGPT Codes an App To evaluate ChatGPT’s app development skills, I decided to guide it through the development of a fully featured “Reddit client” iOS app. RedditGPT should have the ability to load a list of posts from a user-specified subreddit along w

From Nerd to Bodybuilder: Embracing Paradoxical Passions

3 years ago

How does a shy nerd boy from high school find himself flexing on stage in front of hundreds of spectators donning little more than a G-string? Spray tanned and shaved from head to toe, I strode in front of the blinding spotlights as my name bellowed out over the PA system. Preparing to perform my solo posing routine, I masked first time jitters with a composed facade after hearing judges could sense fear like sharks smell blood in the water. Performing at a bodybuilding competition almost naked in front of a mass of ogling strangers was the culmination of a five-year journey. Once terrified at the mere thought of presenting a powerpoint in front of a small class, it hit me: how did I get here? I have been enthralled by computers and programming for as long as I can remember. Spending entire weekends squirreled away in my room, I taught myself how to write iOS applications, tinkered with Arduinos and bread board circuits, built custom computers, and reverse engineered electronic toys.

Weightlifting App

A gamified iOS app to tracks and analyze user workouts complete with intelligent feedback, online leaderboards. Contains multiple heuristic algorithms to gamify user progress via achievements and milestones.

Homework App (Acquired)

An iOS app I built back in high school for organizing and keeping track of my homework assignments. Ended up becoming the #1 homework app on the App Store and got acquired by Haystack AI!

Liar's Dice

Liar's Dice is a dice game that combines luck and skill as one must weigh probabilities with the game theory involved in predicting the decisions of other intellegent actors. I developed a simple tool to assist in deriving probabilities for each hand to aid in decision-making. This is exposed both as a simple React webpage as well as an API accessible by posting a POST request /api/v1/liarsdice/play.

Web Experiments

Web Experiments backend is a monorepo for my AWS EB-hosted online portfolio website along with Node / Express / PHP / MySQL backends for various other personal projects including Weightlifting App and ESPN Fantasy Football stats.

Fantasy Basketball

This app accesses basketball player data from a variety of online sources including espn.com, rotoworld.com, nba.com, and more for the purpose of tracking and evaluating NBA player performance. This app has almost all of the features of the official ESPN fantasy app and also includes additinal player discoery / insight features such as advanced player news and metrics.

Weightlifting App ML

A series of programs written in Python using Weightling App data to train a Keras deep learning model for the purpose of workout type prediction based on the exercises performed.

Rotoworld ML

A series of programs written in Python using the Rotoworld mobile API to train a Keras deep learning model for the purpose of evaluating NBA players based on tokenized news articles.