PicoBlog

Hey Everyone, With new AI funds on the way like we are seeing from a16z, a proposed $6 Billion fund for AI, the proliferation of LLMs is going to accelerate in the 2020s. Suddenly, GPT4 has four apparent competitors (not including out of China): Gemini 1.5 Mistral Large Claude 3 Opus Inflection-2.5 Inflection’s launch really felt under the radar and poor timing on their part. Inflection announced last week on Thursday that Pi has been using a new model, version 2.

I don’t eat much fruit. I used to, but I don’t anymore, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know why, but I’d also be lying if I said I wanted to divulge. I’m going to go sideways from this point, though, to tell you that I still buy apples whenever I go to a supermarket. Dad’s Mum, Mollie, who died when I was about eleven, had a garden with an apple tree and a plum tree.

On Monday, May 1st, WebGPU officially launched in Chrome. WebGPU is a new browser API for running computations, most notably graphics & AI/ML workloads, against the device’s GPU. It is probably the most significant change in browser-based GPU workloads since WebGL launched in 2011, so let’s explore what it is, why it matters, and what it might enable. A Brief History of GPU Computation in the Browser For most of the past decade, WebGL has been the core library used to do GPU-based computations in the browser.

Quick break from estimation, because I felt like writing something different, so today we’re going to talk about LitRPG, do some philosophy to it, and armchair psychologise its readers. LitRPG is a genre of, usually quite trashy, fantasy fiction (or very occasionally sci-fi). The basic defining feature of it is that the protagonist (and often other characters) experiences the world through a game like interface as if they were playing an RPG.

Today’s issue of Dust On The VCR is another subscriber request! This film was chosen by Melissa Reagan, a lovely Texas cinephile that I met through The Deucecast Movie Show, which somehow has listeners in Texas. Melissa is also an executive chef, which I find to be really impressive, and you’ll be even more impressed if you listen to her great new podcast, The Food For Thoughtcast, which helped me understand that I know nothing about cooking.

Publisher’s note: It’s once again time for Earlywood (and perhaps a bit of clarity). Earlywood is a free excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996. Sometimes, it’s from a magazine article. Or a book. Or (in this case) a blog post from 2012. Each entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. We h… ncG1vNJzZmibmKe2tMDOqZ%2BeqqOYtbit0bNlrK2SqMGir8pnmqilX6V8uLTArWSiq12ewW7DyK2fZqyYmsCmedKtrKmhlGK%2BtrvTnqo%3D

If you're feeling lost and aimless in today's world and you can't figure out what really matters then you're not alone. The usual diagnosis for this loss of meaning in life is Nihilism. But Nihilism is merely a symptom of a bigger problem. Nihilism makes it seem like the universe is broken and the only solutions are personal — whether that's Existentialism or Stoicism, Buddhist meditation or Jungian archetypes. But the truth is simultaneously more terrifying and more of a relief.

It’s a little strange to admit, but I find a lot of shows just by letting my Fire Stick go to sleep for a bit. When you do that, your television gets to enjoy a screensaver-like montage of varied shows and movies. I assume this is some line on some spreadsheet of ad offerings somewhere, some box the new After movie has ticked, along with Red, White, and Royal Blue, The Winter King, and now Billy the Kid.

Hey Everyone, Can Open-source LLM innovation impact how the Machine Economy will unfold? I wrote a LinkedIn post you can check out here. As we watch AI devices as well. A lot of interesting AI device demos this year: Share Clearly this is more than just about an AI device here. We are talking about a more decentralized AI in the making. What is Open Interpreter? Open Interpreter lets language models run code.