robb chen-ware

@maddiehawkinson late to the party. doors still open @maddiehawkinson ?

AI founders and engineers in NYC: join our slack community for NYC AI builders. Currently 600 strong and a hub for info on AI events, jobs, infra, the latest research. Ping me for an invite!

chirp chirp 🐦

One hard problem with AI right now is retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with wide-ranging heterogeneous information.  A common architecture pattern in AI right now is that you connect up a large amount of data to an AI model, and when a user or machine sends in a query, you find the best matches from the underlying data set and then send that information to the AI model to answer the user's prompt.  This is a very efficient way to be able to have an AI access information that is frequently changing (like web data) or potentially wouldn't be appropriate to have in an underlying training set of the AI model (like private corporate data). This is a relatively fundamental and breakthrough architecture in AI, but there's a small catch.  The AI's answer is only as good as the underlying information that you serve it in the prompt.  And because the user isn't the one giving it the data, but instead a computer, you're at the mercy of how good that computer is at finding the right information to give the AI to answer the question.  Which means, of course, you're also at the mercy of how good, accurate, up-to-date, and authoritative your underlying information is that you're feeding the AI model in the prompt. Let's take a very basic example.  Say you ask an AI that's connected to the web, "who are the top movie studio heads right now?".  The issue is that there's not many authorative webpages on the internet that are the singular list of movie studio heads *right now* (or for any esoteric topic for that matter).  A human would do lots of browsing, compare answers between sites, check corporate webpages, and more just to decide an answer.  With AI, we're often at the mercy of a search engine going across the web and trying to find various articles and determining their accuracy and authoritativeness to try and eventually find enough information to produce an answer.  Chances are some of those articles are out of date within a year or even were wrong to begin with, but the AI has no reason to know that -- so it will still use that information in its underlying prompt, and lo and behold it can produce an inaccurate answer. The challenge also occurs on smaller data sets, as well.  Imagine an AI assistant that has access to all of your documents, emails, and calendar, and you ask a simple question like "what was last quarter's revenue?"  Not only does the AI have to figure out how to assess the information that is tied specifically to "last quarter", but also it has to wrangle the possibly conflicting information in your underlying data.  You may have an email that had early -but not verified- revenue results, that are different from draft documents that the finance team created, which are different yet again from the final documents with the results.  AI is still quite constrained in its "intelligence" to be able to triage these conflicting answers *today* to produce an accurate result, no matter how confident it sounds. There are some awesome efforts to try and solve this problem, and it's clear this will continue to become less and less of an issue.  With Box AI, to address this challenge, we just launched a new feature in beta called Box Hubs.  With Hubs, users pre-curate content that is the "authoritative" source of truth for particular topics and information -- say for instance, Sales materials, HR documents, or R&D files.  When you ask an AI question in a Hub, you are aiming that question at the most up-to-date and relevant information for that topic.   In our early testing and rolling out it dramatically reduces the issue of getting confusing data, and delivers more accurate answers. I'm excited to see many other breakthroughs in this space -- from better ways of organizing the web over time to AI agents that can fully browse the web and do more of the "research" that a human would when finding information.

Sensible thoughts on AI: open.substack.com/pub/aiascendan…

Are @WHOOP and @futurefitapp friends? Would love weights workouts in Future to push data to the Strength Trainer in Whoop to get better strain measurements.

@BartronPolygon @EthanSutin Would love to test!

Why wait for someone else to productize your life? With open models and readily available wearable hardware, you can accelerate your cognition right now, That's why @EthanSutin and I are launching a fully open source project to build an ambient smart assistant system that listens to and observes your life, endowing you with super human memory that's fully in your control. Please reach out to either of us if you're interested in pushing the boundaries of always-on AI. We're going to launch with off-the-shelf inexpensive hardware you can turn into a necklace, pin, or any wearable form factor you want. It also works with amazing hardware you may already have, such as the Apple Watch. Expect more next week, including a GitHub repo. We will be building in public.

oh snap, vision pro pre-orders announced... curious if anyone has used a dev unit

@alex18263759292 @jeremygiffon @awilkinson @bschippers can confirm above

@jeremygiffon @awilkinson 100%. Best heat in manhattan

Best sauna/cold plunge circuit in Manhattan?

@awilkinson @rezendi

Is there an app that can use Claude or GPT to summarize a podcast for me?

Trying to get MetaLab and our other digital agencies access to a Vision Pro developer unit. Anyone got a hook up?

Works by creating interactions among ChatGPT and algorithmic agents that take on different roles (including “scientist”, “reviewer”, “coder”, “lit reviewer”, etc). These agents are automatically guided through the canonical sequence of research stages; from data to paper.

@Bookshop_Org I’m not able to find the new Don Norman book via search but I see it linked via the MIT press site, just a heads up!

Looks super cool.

@DonDelilah @AliceFromQueens @mattyglesias If @mattyglesias retires to Maine to open a seafood place, Substantive Clam is not a bad name

While out running this morning, I encountered a man who was about to jump off a bridge near Rock Creek Park to take their own life Fortunately, I'm trained in suicide intervention and this person is much better now. But I want to share some of our conversation ⤵️

@bayes_baes My experience has been the opposite as a listener but if this isn’t pure trolling am open to hearing out the logic

spotify killed music discovery and it’s absolutely fucked

@rezendi Pref following an Aperol spritz

Observation from 38°C/100°F Rome: this heat is straining a lot of tourists' relationships. Overhead several separate English-language fights while roaming around today, and I wasn't even around in the height of the afternoon (I believe in cool siestas under these circumstances)…

@rezendi I think the Beatles flattened time a bit

The time dilation of pop culture: the hipster Zillennial who just served me wore a Led Zeppelin Celebration Day shirt. That song dates to 1970. The unthinkable, say, 1985 equivalent would have been a hip New Wave kid proclaiming sartorial cultural allegiance to Duke Ellington.

@Joshstrangehill @rickyreusser

For 25 years, I assumed (and loved it) that it was just a non-sequitor but then someone explained it's what people with long hair say when they have a towel over their wet hair (and ears) after a shower when they answer the phone. Makes 100% sense but also make me like joke less.

I'm proud to say I've loved this joke and possibly misinterpreted it for nearly 30 years now.