Categories
innovation technology

GPT 3 Demo and Explanation

Last week GPT3 was released by OpenAI and it’s nothing short of groundbreaking. It’s the largest leap in artificial intelligence we’ve seen in a long time and the implications of these advances will be felt for a really long time.

GPT 3 can write poetry, translate text, chat convincingly, and answer abstract questions. It’s being used to code, design, and much more.

I’m going to give you the basics and background of GPT3 and show you some of the amazing creations that have started to circle the Internet in just the first week of the technology being available to a limited set of developers.

Let’s start with a few examples of what’s possible.

Demonstration of GPT-3 designing user interface components:

The designer is able to describe the interface that they want and the GPT3 plug-in to Figma is able to generate the UI.

GPT3 creating a simple react application:

Here the developer describes the React application that they want and the AI writes a function with the hooks and events needed to function correctly.
A couple of examples of GPT3 creating paragraphs of text based on initial cues of what is needed.
In this example GPT3 is able to complete an Excel table of data.
This example demonstrates a web plug-in to find answers within a Wikipedia article.
Example of using GPT3 as an answer engine for arbitrary questions.

Background

GTP3 comes from a company called OpenAI. OpenAI was founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman (former president of Y-combinator the startup accelerator). OpenAI was founded with over a Billion invested to collaborate and create human-level AI for the benefit of the human race.

OpenAI has been developing it’s technology for a number of years. One of the early papers published was on Generative Pre-Training. The idea behind generative pre-training is that while most AI’s are trained on labeled data, there’s a ton of data that isn’t labeled. If you can evaluate the words and use them to train and tune the AI it can start to create predictions of future text on the unlabeled data. You repeat the process until predictions start to converge.

The original GPT stands for Generative Pre Training and the original GPT used 7000 books as the basis of training. The new GPT3 is trained on a lot more… In fact it’s trained on 410 billion tokens from crawling the Internet. 67 Billion from books. 3 Billion from Wikipedia and much more. In total it’s 175 Billion parameters and 570GB of filtered text (over 45 Terrabytes of unfiltered text)

Over an ExaFLOP day of compute needed to train the full data set.

The amount of computing power that was used to pre-train the model is astounding. It’s over an exaflop day of computer power. One second of exaflop computer power would allow you to run a calculation per second for over 37 Trillion years.

The GPT3 technology is currently in limited Beta and early access developers are just starting to produce demonstrations of the technology. As the limited Beta expands you can expect to see a lot more interesting and deep applications of the technology. I believe it’ll shape the future of the Internet and how we use software and technology.

Links:

Categories
innovation startups

Ideas Are Worthless

You may thinkyou have the best, most amazing idea but I’m sorry to tell you that your idea is worthless…. But it’s Ok, most ideas are worthless.

Now before I get too deep, I’ve seen hundreds of pitches with a wide range of ideas and I’ve signed stacks and stacks of NDA’s to keep someone’s ideas secrets. Want to know the best secret idea I’ve ever heard?

There are none. We’re you listening at the beginning? Ideas are worthless and I’ve never been blown away by an amazing idea. Never! I’ve heard interesting ideas and clever ideas but most of the time amazing ideas are not the exciting part.

If you just think about the ideas behind the world’s most successful companies, the ideas aren’t that exciting.

  • A phone that doesn’t have any buttons
  • A car that uses electricity instead of a motor
  • A new search engine

These ideas by themselves have no value and even if you were able to rewind the clock 20 years, the ideas themselves weren’t worth anything without the entrepenours to drive them.

Nokia had phones without buttons before Apple. There were plenty of electric golf-carts before Tesla, and Google was late to the game as far as search engines go.

It’s the execution that creates value and these companies executed exceptionaly well.

While ideas are worthless, working on your idea is the thing that starts to create value. Some examples of value creation:

  • A list of potential customers willing to try or buy a finished product
  • Sales or purchase orders for a product or service
  • A prototype of the future product
  • Testimonials from people who have tried the prototype/product
  • Partners willing to stock or sell the product/service
  • Patents on the product/technology. (more on patents here)

You don’t have to be an engineer or designer to make progress on an idea, but you need to take action.

The other reason that ideas are worthless is that the idea instantly changes as soon as you start working on it. Once you put a pencil to paper your idea starts to spawn new ideas. Once you have a customer using the product you start to get feedback on the idea and what needs to change about it. Once you try to sell a product you learn all the reasons people don’t want it. It’s this learning/feedback cycle that creates real value because it’s based on real applications, not just theoretical ones.

The execution of the idea is the essence of the idea. Want to make something amazing, take action to make it real.

Why are ideas worthless
Categories
innovation startups

Angel investors vs Venture Capitalists

Angel vs. Venture Capitalists.

Startups looking to raise money may not be too picky in terms of where they get it, but finding the right fit for your company is often more than just financing and may reflect some of the differences between angel investors and venture capitalists.

First let’s start off with where Angel Investors and Venture Capital Investors get their money.

  • Angel Investors are typically individuals – They typically don’t have other decision makers in their investments and they are usually investing their own money. This gives them flexibility in terms of deal terms and it also means that they often don’t have external requirements on how they get their money back.
  • Venture Capital investors are typically not individuals, but rather companies or firms. They are most typically investing other people’s money in a Fund. VC’s will raise this money from people referred to as Limited Partners or LPs. LP’s are typically writing million-dollar checks and expecting VC’s to invest that money and get a return.

Both Angels and Venture Capitalists look for companies that can grow and be successful but each may look at companies at different stages and be interested in making different types of investments. Because VC’s are investing other people’s money they have general expectations on how long it may take to get their money back and will structure most returns and investments to have liquidity.

Angel investments are typically investing in early stage companies and are most often writing checks between 5-50 thousand with some angel investors going even higher. It’s most typical for angels to invest in the early stages of growth.

Angels and VC’s may take different amounts of interest in the operations of the company too. While Angels will often be available and interested in helping companies VC’s are likely to insist on a board seat. As companies continue to raise funding founders should be aware of balance in the board of directors.

Generally the board and the founder are aligned however if the founder and board disagree it’s possible for the board to fire the CEO so just make sure you consider the long-term direction of your business as you take on investors and board members.

Ultimately both VC’s and Angels want companies to succeed and depending on the stage of your business angels or VC’s may be a better fit for growing your business. Lastly remember that you don’t have to take investment and there are plenty of successful companies that have never raised funding and did it all on their own. There’s no right or wrong so consider the pros and cons of the different paths as you go on your startup journey.

Categories
design innovation

WWDC 2020

Each year Apple holds it’s WWDC conference giving developers a peek at what’s coming in tech for the next year. This week Apple unveiling iOS 14, the next version of Mac, watch OS, and more.

DubDub is a fantastic event for enthusiasts and entrepnours because it gives us a peek at upcoming trends that we can expect to see over the coming year. There are three trends that I think are particularly interesting…

The first trend is the proliferation of apps.

  • iOS introduced widgets – they allow more information without opening apps
  • Organization – if you have many pages of apps you can quickly find them.
  • App Clips – an easy and lightweight way to install quick use apps like when you need to pay for a parking spot or cafe but don’t need to keep the app around.
  • Many improvements to Siri making it able to answer more informational questions and perform more tasks. Siri also doesn’t take up the entire screen, making it easier to invoke anytime without loosing context.

All of these features recognize that there are too many apps and bouncing in and out of apps isn’t great. Widgets bring you the information you want without opening an app, the organization makes it easier to find apps, and app clips allow you easy access to app powers without the download and clutter.

The second trend I spotted was around transportation.

  • Apple introduced features in its map product for bike routes making it easy to see elevation and get bike-friendly directions.
  • It introduced EV charging routes to give better directions for electric cars that need to charge-up while en-route.
  • They also introduced digital keys for the upcoming BMW with other cars in the works.

All of these features point to a macro trend around the evolution of transportation away from traditional cars. From bikes to the application of App-Clips for scooter rentals to sharing keys, Apple is painting a future where how we get around is changed.

They also hinted at Augmented Reality with technologies like spatial audio and more detailed perspective maps.

The third trend is really around the evolution of the computer.

Apple announced that they are producing their own computer “Systems on a Chip” or SOCs. This means that the chip that runs your iPhone, iPad and Mac will finally be made on the same architecture and that means that Apps from your iPad will now be able to run on your Mac.

  • The Apple UI got updated in a number of areas from Siri, Icons and Notifications. There’s been a lot of consolidation and the look and feel of the platforms is starting to align.
  • The Apple UI for the Mac is starting to look touch-friendly and that’s hinting at a future where Mac’s have touch screens.
  • Earlier this year Apple’s new iPad proclaimed that the new computer is your iPad and with the mature Mac operating system making the shift, this could become very true.
  • Additional focus on virtualization and compatibility technology imply that more cross iPad/Mac/Phone work is in-play and we’re likely to see iPad apps on the Mac and perhaps the inverse too.

What else?
There were a lot of features in iMessage for replies and animoji making iMessage almost like a twitter/slack client. The iPad introduced many features for pencil based interactions and there are a lot of subtle UI tweaks and improvements and I’m sure a ton under the covers.

Why DubDub?

Companies that want to get ahead should look to see if they can lean into some of the future trends. Being an early adopter of a new technology can give startups a distinct advantage.

So iOS 14 looks like a nice update, it doesn’t feel major but there are lots of little improvements throughout. App Clips are particularly interesting and I think it will aid in on-the-spot discovery.

Widgets are cute but I’ve never found widgets particularly useful. I think it’s a nice progression and a good departure from the grid we’ve had for the last decade. It’s also nice that this functionality isn’t buried in the today view.

Lastly, I do think that the migration of Mac to a common architecture will be a key change for the next decade of Apple. We can expect more shared features and more touch capabilities on the Mac. I think we’ll also see more powerful apps move to the iPad as a result. Xcode, FinalCut, Office, Photoshop and more are likely to become full-featured apps providing a consistent experience across touch, pen and computer.