Robert Chang

Nice - my AI startup school talk is now up! Chapters: 0:00 Imo fair to say that software is changing quite fundamentally again. LLMs are a new kind of computer, and you program them *in English*. Hence I think they are well deserving of a major version upgrade in terms of software. 6:06 LLMs have properties of utilities, of fabs, and of operating systems => New LLM OS, fabbed by labs, and distributed like utilities (for now). Many historical analogies apply - imo we are computing circa ~1960s. 14:39 LLM psychology: LLMs = "people spirits", stochastic simulations of people, where the simulator is an autoregressive Transformer. Since they are trained on human data, they have a kind of emergent psychology, and are simultaneously superhuman in some ways, but also fallible in many others. Given this, how do we productively work with them hand in hand? Switching gears to opportunities... 18:16 LLMs are "people spirits" => can build partially autonomous products. 29:05 LLMs are programmed in English => make software highly accessible! (yes, vibe coding) 33:36 LLMs are new primary consumer/manipulator of digital information (adding to GUIs/humans and APIs/programs) => Build for agents! Thank you again for the invite @ycombinator and congrats again on an awesome events! I'll post some links/references in the reply.

This is why having AI write code for you sucks. Literally just have the training wheels on forever. Great point by @dhh

⚡️ Excited to share that I am starting an AI+Education company called Eureka Labs. The announcement: --- We are Eureka Labs and we are building a new kind of school that is AI native. How can we approach an ideal experience for learning something new? For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman, who is there to guide you every step of the way. Unfortunately, subject matter experts who are deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world's languages are also very scarce and cannot personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand. However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable. The teacher still designs the course materials, but they are supported, leveraged and scaled with an AI Teaching Assistant who is optimized to help guide the students through them. This Teacher + AI symbiosis could run an entire curriculum of courses on a common platform. If we are successful, it will be easy for anyone to learn anything, expanding education in both reach (a large number of people learning something) and extent (any one person learning a large amount of subjects, beyond what may be possible today unassisted). Our first product will be the world's obviously best AI course, LLM101n. This is an undergraduate-level class that guides the student through training their own AI, very similar to a smaller version of the AI Teaching Assistant itself. The course materials will be available online, but we also plan to run both digital and physical cohorts of people going through it together. Today, we are heads down building LLM101n, but we look forward to a future where AI is a key technology for increasing human potential. What would you like to learn? --- @EurekaLabsAI is the culmination of my passion in both AI and education over ~2 decades. My interest in education took me from YouTube tutorials on Rubik's cubes to starting CS231n at Stanford, to my more recent Zero-to-Hero AI series. While my work in AI took me from academic research at Stanford to real-world products at Tesla and AGI research at OpenAI. All of my work combining the two so far has only been part-time, as side quests to my "real job", so I am quite excited to dive in and build something great, professionally and full-time. It's still early days but I wanted to announce the company so that I can build publicly instead of keeping a secret that isn't. Outbound links with a bit more info in the reply!

I have a new piece up. It's a bit of a rant, even for me, so buckle in. A lot of "thought leaders" have been making their mortgages lately off of bits on how AI is going to replace software engineers, particularly entry-level engineers. stackoverflow.blog/2024/06/10/gen…