Eric W

A 1975 Big Wheel commercial.

imagine hating on me and i’m just over here like…

Name a famous captain

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Full body pictures only 🌵

What's a cool name for a Winged Vampire Lord? 🩸

Phone confessions: I had a long talk with an executive at a large AI company about the realities they face. He was one of the folks that booked cohort 1 of my 17 minutes with me, it was for non corporate folks, but he was honest with me and paid 17 times (no accident, thank you) more than the minimum. He wanted to remain anonymous but I told him I knew who he was but will ignore it. I had my plan beforehand and built an approach, honesty my only poach. My 17 minutes of monologue (really non stop talking) was centered around on this patent and the story of how a massive well funded company had the future that would take it out being built literally in THE BASEMENT by a hacker in 1975. What was it? Steven Sasson developed the FIRST portable, battery operated, self-contained digital camera at Kodak. It weighed 8 pounds used a new Fairchild CCD image sensor having only 100 × 100 pixels (0.01 megapixels). The images were digitally recorded onto a cassette tape, a process that took twenty-three seconds per image. It only took images in black and white. As he set out on his design project, he envisioned a camera without mechanical moving parts (although his device did have moving parts, such as the tape drive). Well this genius in the basement (or garages or kitchen tables) are never encouraged in ANY corporate environment especially “go to market” startups. The arrogance level and loose money with a desire to say “yes sir” to the they-must-be-smarter-than-anyone-because-they-are-running-an-AI-company folk, makes anyone with they REAL outlier ideas kicked down be the crab pot (not ironic) colleagues and bosses. This Kodak moment is playing out at all major AI companies today and it will be the undoing of US AI. The only company that is facing this is XAI and Elon, he just about burned down the entire process. The other companies just got magnitudes worse over the last 6 weeks. Some context directly a through my ~80 GitHub (all anonymous for reasons) I got to know 100s of actual builders at these companies and interact sometimes hourly with them. Some know me through here and have the guts to say it (reasons) and most know “me” from my repos. I get to see beautiful talent being wasted. So today I told this executive that everything they are spending time and money on will be a waste in 3 years and they need to pivot to a new technology now and most importantly they have a garage team already doing it but they shut them up, like I said, all HR based companies do. Ain’t no innovations will come with this mindset. He got emotional as I give him the X-ray of what he knew was the reality. It is just no one in the inside could say it and I just did. The second point was open source and China. They have no plan and there is yelling. At the company whenever it is proposed by just about all the builders there. I told him that because I knew and he freaked out because he was one of them. So the call was a good one for an early Saturday morning. It is my hope he follows through on the plans I helped with. And the possibility of officially advising the company. But I would not bet on it. Egos will be very high until the accountants take over. Why did I do this and why am I telling you? He knew I would write this and encouraged me. The problem of this arrogance is systemic and dangerous to not just the AI industry but to the entire US economy. As money from the Middle East goes dry for AI the shock wave 1 has hit. The next 5 shock waves will be far bigger and impossible to hide. If innovation and garage thinking like China has in AI right now does not rise, we are in layers of trouble. In the basements of ALL of these AI companies are silent geniuses that hold the future of the company. They are ignored like Steven Sasson was in 1975. The current hardware approach, software approach and model training as well as the model technology is broken. This is out Kodak moment for AI. Now back to the garage for me. Suits notified.