D-Squared Musings – Week 42

Tech
🧑💻 AI Engineers, Pendants, and Competition Between OpenAI and Developers with Swyx of Latent Space
- Swyx is likely one of the most undervalued thinkers in the AI space. His original training in quant trading shaped his perspective, allowing him to make connections most people struggle to do. I always appreciate listening to him chat about different forms of tech.
🤖 AI Food Fights in the Enterprise with Databricks’ Ali Ghodsi
- Ali has an obvious position on how the distribution of models will turn out based on the nature of his business – everyone will have their own niche models, instead of one model to rule them all. Even though it’s obvious, he has some interesting perspectives worth hearing… For instance, “I think all the benchmarks are bullshit”, which has some validity.
- If you’re a ChatGPT Plus user, I recommend you take time to play around with the new voice interface. Before using it myself I was skeptical about how important it would be, but the first night I gained access, I spent 1.5 hours speaking to ChatGPT. The longest session I’ve had with my friendly bot.

Education
🎤 Marc Andreessen Making The Podcast Rounds
- Andrew Huberman and David Perell. Both of these podcasts are high quality. Both Andrew and David cover a diverse set of topics, both unrelated to each other. That makes them both worth listening to.
- I had not heard about the whole TED debacle until listening to this week’s recent All-in podcast. It’s disappointing to see a place like TED losing the community it originally was created for. Here’s the talk if you’re interested.
📖 The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
- Just finished this book. The author did a solid job arguing for an optimistic future for humanity and more importantly, it’s a practical argument. His focus on the importance of “idea sex” and the evolution of humanity through ideas is an interesting one that’s new to me.

Miscellaneous
- Looks like a movie worth seeing.