Mark Weber

We seeded a photonic computing moonshot called @neurophos and it's working (!). Just raised $110M to take their Optical Processing Unit (OPU) into production for 100x step change in AI inference. Kudos to this visionary team and @M12vc @Microsoft for the fuel.

Powerful models are still making mistakes and displaying problematic behaviors. I swear if I have to hear ChatGPT praise me for double checking and correcting its work one more time, I'm going to cancel my subscription. What do ya'll think? Do we have the architecture right? I'm excited by the modifications @guidelabsai has made with Steerling-8B (now open source). Commercializing his influential papers, Julius Adebayo (#MIT #YC) and company have installed a concept layer in the transformer model so every token produced by the model can be traced back to its origins in the training data. Seems ideal for domain-specific SLM's today and maybe even frontier general purpose LLM's down the road. github.com/guidelabs/stee…

@coinbase with one of the most creative ads I've ever seen. Had everyone singing along.

@bhalligan re #2-4: we (some MIT-Harvard alums/profs/investors) have designs on a 10 story mixed-use residential building space in Cambridge. A corrective twist on the hacker house with a members+ model balancing curation and inclusion. 1 a social house for nerds 2 a residence for leaders 3 a community center for everyone We'd love your input.

I read through the thread. Four difficult plays that would potentially move the needle for Massachusetts: 1. Convince YC to do a batch a year in Cambridge. (I sent Garry Tan a note) 2. Fix the fun - happy hours, open late, lower liquor license costs 3. Build some f-cking housing. 4. Less focus on Somalis and more focus on students staying around. I see a major problem being that gap between when students graduate and when they are moving to the suburbs raising kids. That gap is where we lose folks - not fun, too expensive.

I’m starting to worry about Massachusetts 1. Biotech is way off from a few years ago 2. Only 1 of the top 50 ai companies are in MA 3. The Fed research funding cuts hitting MIT, Harvard, Whoi are brutal. 4. The millionaires tax is working in the short run, but I know a lot of wealthy folks preparing for a FL move. 5. A glut of empty condos 6. It’s not “cool” for young folks 7. It’s expensive as sh-t. I honestly don’t think the MA/Boston govt can do that much about it as they are kind of macro issues. I give them big credit for working on building more housing and fixing the T, which will help. I’m trying to help w HubSpot, partnering w WHOI, teaching at MIT. I’d like to help more. Specifically I’d like to encourage and help more ai and climate companies in the state. I think ai and climate should be our dual growth engines.

@neurophos @M12vc @Microsoft neurophos.com/110m-raise

We seeded a photonic computing moonshot called @neurophos and it's working (!). Just raised $110M to take their Optical Processing Unit (OPU) into production for 100x step change in AI inference. Kudos to this visionary team and @M12vc @Microsoft for the fuel.

@ottogin1 @karpathy This is such a great course, and timely too. Well done.

@karpathy Exactly the same pain. With many years of education in CS, it feels like I had no skills to ship complete end-to-end apps. Here's a course where we attempt to solve this pain: ship-ai.csail.mit.edu Its our first attempts and covers the basics, but still there's so much more.

The reality of building web apps in 2025 is that it's a bit like assembling IKEA furniture. There's no "full-stack" product with batteries included, you have to piece together and configure many individual services: - frontend / backend (e.g. React, Next.js, APIs) - hosting (cdn, https, domains, autoscaling) - database - authentication (custom, social logins) - blob storage (file uploads, urls, cdn-backed) - email - payments - background jobs - analytics - monitoring - dev tools (CI/CD, staging) - secrets - ... I'm relatively new to modern web dev and find the above a bit overwhelming, e.g. I'm embarrassed to share it took me ~3 hours the other day to create and configure a supabase with a vercel app and resolve a few errors. The second you stray just slightly from the "getting started" tutorial in the docs you're suddenly in the wilderness. It's not even code, it's... configurations, plumbing, orchestration, workflows, best practices. A lot of glory will go to whoever figures out how to make it accessible and "just work" out of the box, for both humans and, increasingly and especially, AIs.

Superstar team doing superstar work. I can't imagine building an #LLM #GenAI stack and not using Voyage. Neither can Anthropic, Databricks, Snowflake etc.

Imagine having an equity stake in ChatGPT. User-owned foundation models are coming. Currency was the first killer app for crypto. I think #DecentralizedAI is next with Vana's Proof of Contribution protocol giving data liquidity to everyone. This feels big.

Can deep learning work on small data with far more features than samples? We present PLATO: a method that achieves the state-of-the-art on such datasets by using prior domain information! neurips.cc/virtual/2022/p… 🧵 Published in #NeurIPS2023 with @ren_hongyu @kexinhuang5 @jure

Thrilled to receive my signed copy of Magatte Wade's new book, Heart of a Cheetah! Magatte has been a powerful voice for African entrepreneurship and self determination, influencing a generation of "cheetahs" to take hold of the future. Must read!

If you're building #LLMs for domain use cases or for customers, I encourage you to look into this. Embeddings power LLMs and this small team has beat out the big boys for SOTA in text embeddings across a number of downstream tasks. It's a big deal.

📢 Introducing Voyage AI @Voyage_AI_! Founded by a talented team of leading AI researchers and me 🚀🚀. We build state-of-the-art embedding models (e.g., better than OpenAI 😜). We also offer custom models that deliver 🎯+10-20% accuracy gain in your LLM products. 🧵

Tech from my team @MITIBMLab was just part of a demo in our CEO's opening keynote at #IBMThink 🎉—the result of a fantastic collaboration led by @rpanda89 and @yoonrkim

The inimitable @kayellbee demoing our new watsonx.ai foundation model tooling for attendees at #IBMThink

College majors are evolving with #AI. Dean of the @mit College of Computing speaks to "blended majors" at the #mitibm industry event @IBMResearch.

Do you want to estimate the density ratio accurately but are dissatisfied with the results?

Happy to announce our #iclr2023 paper Contrastive Audio-Visual Masked Autoencoder CAV-MAE Paper: openreview.net/forum?id=QPtMR… Code (incl. checkpoints ): github.com/YuanGongND/cav… Details below 👇 #computervision #machinelearning #ai @MIT_CSAIL @MITIBMLab

@RyanRicketts @REI Sorry to hear this Ryan - that's a gut punch. I have no doubt you will land on your feet and succeed in your next chapter. Much love and congratulations on your wedding!

The future of computer chips is being made in Albany, NY youtu.be/uj_2P73dSLs via @YouTube