Tony Garvan

📢🎉 Some personal news–Friday was my last day leading the healthcare.gov engineering team. Today I start a new, foolishly ambitious adventure: backed by @southpkcommons, I'll be making a new, super-fast, super-awesome spreadsheet for businesses: sheet.rocks

@venikunche Millennial parents are really crushing it. The world is going to be blown away by how mature + well-adjusted gen alpha is. Great job!

TFW your are trying to build a god-like superintelligence but still can't nail the CSS

@fwiles I remember desperately waiting 3 days to download the demo for Wolfenstein, had to restart multiple times. It was like a 15 MB file I think lol.

2023 me: WTF why is it taking so long to load this game, oh it’s 30GBs! 15 minutes isn’t that bad. 1993 me: They come in GBs?

All successful companies have a niche, but vast majority of niches cannot support a successful company. So advising a company to "find a niche" is true, but worthless advice in aiding what is fundamentally an exploratory process.

@ibogost More examples: veggie mac + cheese w/ ham, homemade clam chowder, thai green curry, butter chicken, spaghetti w meat sauce, etc. TL;DR— learn to enjoy cooking, make big batches, buy single-portion microwaveable containers & freeze.

@ibogost Cook twice a week in big batches & freeze it in 2 cup tupperware containers. Food stays good for months so you'll have endless variety, low cost, easy, satisfying portable meals. Example dishes: chili w/ rice, butternut squash ravioli with sausage, sage orrichieti, etc.

There may still be big job losses / shock if demand doesn't match the output of the newly efficient white-collar workers, but IDK if people's demand for things was satible we'd probably all still be farmers.

My gut is this wave of AI will provide huge efficiency gains for jobs that are intellectually constrained, but we will still need & want a human in the loop for the foreseeable future. Also I think ppl tend to overestimate how many jobs are truly intellectually constrained.

GPT-4 might be a chemistry / coding genius, but it has less willpower than an amoeba. Realizing how often when I want to engage w/ people for work, I am not looking for their intellectual output but rather the force of their will.

@adityaag Yeah totally wild to be living through this. Also it's clear there was a "step function" in emergence somewhere between GPT-2 to GPT-3 scale LLMs. Will there another level of emergence / phase transition that will occur past human intelligence (e.g., at 5x or 10x human level?)

The most fascinating aspect of ChatGPT is that it's performance and capabilities are **emergent** properties. We do not yet understand (from first principles) WHY it should be able to have the kind of one-shot performance it does across multiple domains. My best description of LLMs is that they are a magic black box that we are now using in different domains but we fundamentally don't really know why they should work as well as they do (at least from first principles). I have studied Computer Science for 25 years. I built my first machine learning system 20 years ago. I have seen large scale statistical phenomena in my time but never to this extent. This is both incredible and somewhat humbling. I truly do feel like these emergent properties are exposing some kind of latent structure of intelligence that is going to take us a while to truly grok. Wild times.

@adityaag See you tonight!

In NYC you feel small no matter how big you are. Being here means being in the presence of the grand ambition of many generations of people who believe in capitalism and the American dream. Love this city.

"I know not with what technology GPT-5 will be built, but GPT-6 will be built with regexes." -Albert Einstein

@simonw We actually just shipped an AI powered scraping chrome plugin last week: chrome.google.com/webstore/detai… (haven't promoted it at all yet, but it works really well!)

I expect GPT-4 will have a LOT of applications in web scraping The increased 32,000 token limit will be large enough to send it the full DOM of most pages, serialized to HTML - then ask questions to extract data

@villi When incumbents lose, it will be to products that compete by cutting across their business model or org structure in novel ways.

Will LLMs enable incumbent app vendors to build bigger moats or empower startups to disrupt them? My bet as a VC is always that a small, focused, and passionate team beats the incumbent. But, it does make me wonder if there is something different this time.

@kmages Sorry to hear that Ken :( She was a great dog + a great friend.

@jamesclift This is very cool, congrats on the launch!

Next up: the trough of sorrow

Definitely the most universally positive feedback from strangers I've gotten on a product launch 👀

@emilyst There's a Paw Patrol joke in the new DC Superpets movie and the under 10 crowd was in stitches 😂

Bromance sparks flying w/ Abhilash during my XFinity outage this morning.

@fidmart85 Congrats Fidel!!

My happy place is "sunrise reflecting off cappuccino"