Funcom’s Dreamfall, one of my favorite games of all time, has something to say about where this could go!
Readit Newsj_shi commented on Scientists Are Researching a Device That Can Induce Lucid Dreams on Demand vice.com/en/article/m7bxd... · Posted by u/isaacfrond
j_shi commented on Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML wsj.com/articles/databric... · Posted by u/jmsflknr
Actually seems Databricks got a great deal for Mosaic. Real qustion is why Mosaic took it v. hold out or do another round
Rough math plugging in public #s and comments here:
- All stock deal at Aug 2021 val of 38B (1B ARR)
- Assume rev doubled to 2B (which may even be aggressive)
- SAAS multiples are down 6x since Aug 2021
- 38B x 2 / 6 = $12.7B
- 12.7B / 38B * 1.3B = 434M = effective price
- Assume 100M to pref stock
--> Comes out to 334M, with a chunk of that (1/3? 1/4?) potentially subject to earn out
Realized there's probably pref on Databricks too, which would further lower the value of its common. On the other hand, there could have been a markdown from the 38B since August '21
j_shi commented on Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML wsj.com/articles/databric... · Posted by u/jmsflknr
Actually seems Databricks got a great deal for Mosaic. Real qustion is why Mosaic took it v. hold out or do another round
Rough math plugging in public #s and comments here:
- All stock deal at Aug 2021 val of 38B (1B ARR)
- Assume rev doubled to 2B (which may even be aggressive)
- SAAS multiples are down 6x since Aug 2021
- 38B x 2 / 6 = $12.7B
- 12.7B / 38B * 1.3B = 434M = effective price
- Assume 100M to pref stock
--> Comes out to 334M, with a chunk of that (1/3? 1/4?) potentially subject to earn out
When my kids ask me why they should learn to write since they can just use AI, I'll remind them of outages like this. I understand that we rely on calculators and don't memorize as much arithmetic as we used to. But we never had to worry about a coordinated 'calculator outage', where access to calculation was unavailable.
It makes sense to use these tools, but we need to remember that we revert back to our human ability level when they are offline. We should still invest in our own human skills, and not assume that these tools will always be available. There will be minor outages like these, and in the case of cyber attacks, war or other major disruptions, they could be offline for longer periods of time.
Disagree there are sacred timeless skills we ought to protect; tech has and will continue to reduce our need to spend mental bandwidth on skills
Similar offline risk goes for all tech: navigation, generating energy, finding food & water.
And as others have noted, like other personal tools, ai will become more portable and efficient (see progress on self hosted, minimal, efficiently trained models like Vicuna that are 92% parity with OpenAI fancy model)
> willing to pay a lot to avoid feeding data to MSFT/GOOG/META.
Right now, you can't pay a lot and get a local LLM with similar performance to GPT-4.
Anything you can run on-site isn't really even close in terms of performance.
The ability to finetune to your workplaces terminology and document set is certainly a benefit, but for many usecases that doesn't outweigh the performance difference.
Open source with own fine tuning closing in fast:
https://lmsys.org/blog/2023-03-30-vicuna/
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...
Self-hosted + self-trained LLMs are probably the future for enterprise.
While consumers are happy to get their data mined to avoid paying, businesses are the opposite: willing to pay a lot to avoid feeding data to MSFT/GOOG/META.
They may give assurances on data protection (even here GitHub copilot TOS has sketchy language around saving down derived data), but can’t get around fundamental problem that their products need user interactions to work well.
So it seems with BigTechLLM there’s inherent tension between product competitiveness and data privacy, which makes them incompatible with enterprise.
Biz ideas along these lines: - Help enterprises set up, train, maintain own customized LLMs - Security, compliance, monitoring tools - Help AI startups get compliant with enterprise security - Fine tuning service
j_shi commented on Ask HN: Do we need a Google Customers Union? Could it work? · Posted by u/CaptainJustin
>Google's customers
For the search engine (e.g. not GSuite), Google's customers are actually the advertisers and not the users. This is not meant to be a cynical take but just stating financial reality. The advertisers are the ones paying billions into Google's revenue to maintain the expensive data centers and host petabytes of disk space for Youtube videos. Because money flows from advertisers to Google, the advertisers are the ones that caused Adpocalypse[1].
The websurfers querying the search engine are users or consumers and not the paying customers. Not sure how a users' union would have much leverage since they don't pay. If they're unhappy, they can use another search engine (e.g. Bing) or influence indirectly (e.g. boycott advertisers which causes Adpocalypse.)
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+advertisers+adpocaly...
Bingo and similar deal with Facebook. The best way to get leverage and power with FBGOOG is for advertisers to cooperate instead of compete. We are trying to do this with ecomm advertisers right now (by getting advertisers to coordinate instead of bid against each other) but goes beyond any particular ad vertical
j_shi commented on Cook: ‘China Hasn’t Pressured Us’ daringfireball.net/linked... · Posted by u/goranmoomin
You mean his American wife whose parents were refugees from Vietnam? Source: light googling