Management

Overheard : AI needs cloud

On The Verge‘s Decoder podcast, Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, explained why AI’s potential is intrinsically tied to the cloud. The scale and complexity of modern AI models demand infrastructure that only major cloud providers can deliver

You’re not going to be able to get a lot of the value that’s promised from AI from a server running in your basement, it’s just not possible. The technology won’t be there, the hardware won’t be there, the models won’t live there, et cetera. And so, in many ways, I think it’s a tailwind to that cloud migration because we see with customers, forget proof of concepts … You can run a proof of concept anywhere. I think the world has proven over the last couple of years you can run lots and lots and lots of proof of concepts, but as soon as you start to think about production, and integrating into your production data, you need that data in the cloud so the models can interact with it and you can have it as part of your system.

January 13, 2025 by business Management OverHeard Technology 0

Overheard : India 1-2-3

Great discussion between Jim O’Shaughnessy and Sajith Pai on the India as a market in the Infinite Loops Podcast. Sajith did a great job describing India as a combination of three markets and not a monolithic market of 1.5 billion people.

India is not a 1.5-billion-person market that many Westerners believe. Instead, it’s three distinct “countries” hiding in plain sight. There’s India One: 120 million affluent, English-speaking urbanites (think the population of Germany) who love their iPhones and Starbucks. Then comes India Two: 300 million aspiring middle-class citizens who inhabit the digital economy but not yet the consumption economy. Finally, there’s India Three: a massive population with a similar demographic profile to Sub-Saharan Africa, that’s still waiting for its invitation to join India’s bright future.

Highly recommend checking out the podcast and this report (on Indus Valley – a play on words comparing the market in India to the tech market in Silicon valley) that Sajith and team put together.

November 22, 2024 by business Management OverHeard 0

On AI Agentic Workflows

Amazing conversation with Bret Taylor on agentic workflows leveraging AI in the enterprises. The whole conversation is worth listening to multiple times, but this specific segment where Bret speaks about the difference between traditional software engineering and AI driven solutions was thought provoking on how much change management organizations have to go through to adopt to these new solutions.

Now if you have parts of your system that are built on large language models, those parts are really different than most of the software that we’ve built on in the past. Number one is they’re relatively slow compared — to generate a page view on a website takes nanoseconds at this point, might be slightly exaggerating, down to milliseconds, even with the fastest models, it’s quite slow in the way tokens are emitted.

Number two is it can be relatively expensive. And again, it really varies based on the number of parameters in the model. But again, the marginal cost of that page view is almost zero at this point. You don’t think about it. Your cost as a software platform is almost exclusively in your head count. With AI, you can see the margin pressure that a lot of companies face, particularly of their training models or even doing inference with high-parameter-count models.

Number three is they’re nondeterministic fundamentally, and you can tune certain models to more reliably have the same output for the same input. But by and large, it’s hard to reproduce behaviors on these systems. What gives them creativity also leads to non-determinism.

And so this combination of it, we’ve gone from cheap, deterministic, reliable systems to relatively slow, relatively expensive but very creative systems. And I think it violates a lot of the conventions that software engineers think about — have grown to think about when producing software, and it becomes almost a statistical problem rather than just a methodological problem.

September 11, 2024 by Management Technology 0

Charlie : The guru I never met

Yesterday (Nov 28, 2023), the world lost a giant of investing and clear thinking: Charlie Munger. While I never had the privilege of meeting him in person, his wisdom, wit, and down-to-earth approach to life have had a profound impact on me. His speeches and writings have been a guiding light, teaching me not just about investing, but about life itself.

Charlie possessed a rare combination of intelligence, practicality, and brutal honesty. He never sugarcoated his words, always offering his insights with clarity and directness. One quote that particularly resonates with me comes from his 2007 commencement speech at USC. Reflecting on choices in life, he said:
“Let me use a little inversion now. What will really fail in life? What do we want to avoid? Some answers are easy. For example, sloth and unreliability will fail. If you’re unreliable it doesn’t matter what your virtues are, you’re going to crater immediately. So, faithfully doing what you’ve engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct.”

These words underscore the importance of basic principles like hard work, integrity, and commitment. Charlie understood that success wasn’t built on complex theories, but on a foundation of solid values and consistent action.

Charlie’s passing is a significant loss, but his legacy will undoubtedly continue to inspire and educate generations to come. His wisdom will remain a guiding force for those seeking to navigate the complexities of life and investing with integrity and a clear mind.

Rest in peace, Charlie. You will be deeply missed.

November 29, 2023 by Humanity Management 0

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

Interesting article on Arstechnica (https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/revealed-the-secret-notes-of-blue-origin-leaders-trying-to-catch-spacex/) about an internal memo from Blue Origin. The memo is about the discussion and feedback from senior leadership at Blue Origin on a report put together by an external consulting company on challenges facing Blue Origin.

Bezos is famous for growing Amazon into a behemoth by focusing on principals like Customer Obsession, Hire and Develop the best, Frugality… https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles .

Wonder why he did not implement the same tried and tested playbook at Blue Origin.

My take, it is as important to have a team that can execute on your vision as it is to have a vision.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

October 4, 2021 by Management 0

Overheard : Process

Love this quote about process attributed to Tobi Lutke in multiple interviews. He said it in different ways, but here is the gist

There are three kinds of processes

  • Process that makes things that were previously impossible to do, possible. That’s good.
  • Process that makes something that was previously possible significantly simpler, which is also good.
  • Remaining 99.9% of all process that exists in corporate America is the third category, which is actually just telling people to behave slightly different from what common sense tells them to do.

Source :

May 12, 2020 by Management OverHeard 0