08.27.17 Recap

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Uber Picks Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi as chief executive officer

Fiat Chrysler joins BMW-Intel self-driving car alliance

Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

Winner-takes all effects in autonomous cars

The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial
Such good commentary from Venkat.

The Boring Company is building a hyperloop

Tesla developing self-driving tech for semi-truck

The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Competition From Startups

Amazon launches Macie - a new platform powered by machine learning

Handheld spectral analyzer turns smartphone into diagnostic tool
Love to see great work come out of the Big10!

Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice: On-device Deep Mixture Density Networks for Hybrid Unit Selection Synthesis

Amazon will put 1,600 Echo Dots in Arizona State University’s engineering student dorms
Interesting move by Amazon and great experience for students to get some practical experience with emerging technologies. Would be cool to see more companies follow suit in a similar fashion.

The Coinbase Seed Round Pitch Deck
Always enjoy taking a look back to the beginning. Offers some perspective into how far things have come and all the hard work that goes into making great companies great. Also, did I catch a word cloud in there? 😉  Keep up the good work Coinbase!

Similarly, Garrett Camp offers a look into The Beginning of Uber after sharing one of their original pitch decks

a16z YouTube channel

Google launches Chrome Enterprise subscription service for Chrome OS
Google Cloud pushes further into the enterprise.

Walmart, Kroger & Nestle Team with IBM Blockchain to Fight Food Poisoning

And a lot happening in mobility:

Uber Weighed Changes to Autonomous Vehicle Unit

Uber in talks with NSW government to fill Sydney's public transport gaps

Ford, China's Zotye Auto plan JV to build electric vehicles

Infiniti unveils all-electric concept with next-gen Nissan Leaf technology

Cloud driver profiles mean any Tesla could automatically become your Tesla

Volkswagen is finally putting an electric Microbus into production

Waymo patents flexible vehicle that loses rigidity in accident event

GM's Maven assembling building blocks for ride, delivery services

08.06.17 Recap

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TL;DR Review of KPCB’s 2017 Internet & Tech Trends
Full 2017 report posted here by Mary Meeker

Marc Andreessen answers questions from Stripe Atlas founders
Also wrt Stripe, a nice feature of the company/founders -  How Two Brothers Turned Seven Lines of Code Into a $9.2 Billion Startup

The End of Typing: The Next Billion Mobile Users Will Rely on Video and Voice

How to Start a Cultural Revolution | Ben Horowitz
Sage advice from Ben with his classic Toussaint case study - always enjoy hearing him tell this story.

Apple launches a machine learning journal (blog? 🤔) 
In any event, nice to see technical details and transparency around some of the work they're doing.

Q&A with YC Partners at the Female Founders Conference

Jeff Dean’s Lecture for YC AI

Beijing Wants A.I. to Be Made in China by 2030

Cardiologist-Level Arrhythmia Detection with Convolutional Neural Networks

This DNA-mimicking protein can make gene editing more precise and safe

Cracks in the ridesharing market—and how to fill them

Google’s AI Guru Says That Great Artificial Intelligence Must Build on Neuroscience

Lyft launches a new self-driving division and will develop its own autonomous ride-hailing technology

Combining design with data to reimagine ridesharing

BMW says self-driving car to be level 5 capable by 2021

The business of AI:  What it can — and cannot — do for your organization

Bringing neural networks to cellphones

Google.org is launching a $50 million effort to prepare job seekers for the ‘future of work’

The future of deep learning

Britain to Ban New Diesel and Gas Cars by 2040

A Brighter Future for Electric Cars and the Planet

Electric car startup Lucid Motors is short of cash and weighing its options

Hedge Fund Uses Algae to Reap 21% Return

Cheat Sheets for AI, Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Deep Learning & Big Data
Interesting overview of the space from a technical perspective

 

07.16.17 Recap

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How Nature Solves Problems Through Computation

DARPA Wants Brain Implants That Record From 1 Million Neurons

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Tokens, ICOs: Why should anyone care?

TinyDesk:  Chance the Rapper - including bc it's 🔥 🔥 🔥 

Tesla’s First Mass-Market Car, the Model 3, Hits Production This Week

All New Volvo Models Will Be Electric Or Hybrid Starting In 2019
Also, Volvo admits its self-driving cars are confused by kangaroos

Daimler, BAIC to invest $735 million in electric vehicles in China

Open source isn’t just altruistic - it’s smart business. TensorFlow has been a win-win for Google and AI overall

Capitalism the Apple Way vs. Capitalism the Google Way

Ask the AI experts: What are the applications of AI?

Technical Debt in Machine Learning 
ICYMI - mentioned in the post, but worth highlighting Gooe great paper from NIPS '15 on the topic from Google. Also

The Brain as Computer: Bad at Math, Good at Everything Else

I can grade you, or I can teach you, but I can’t do both

Microsoft Workplace Analytics

Microsoft creates an AI research lab to challenge Google and DeepMind

Alphabet’s AI arm DeepMind opens research lab in Canada, first outside the U.K.

Emergence of Locomotion Behaviours in Rich Environments -- aka DeepMind’s AI is teaching itself parkour, and the results are adorable

NVIDIA, Baidu Announce Partnership to Accelerate AI

Sam Altman on UBI with Fortune

Andrew Ng announces Deeplearning.ai, his new venture after leaving Baidu

No surprises: The key to the founder/VC relationship and avoiding the “Oh shit” board meeting

03.26.17 Recap

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03.19.17 Recap

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02.26.17 Recap

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Attacking Machine Learning with Adversarial Examples by Ian Goodfellow, Nicolas Papernot, Sandy Huang, Yan Duan, Pieter Abeel & Jack Clark

Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning by Barret Zoph and Quoc Le

Ford is putting $1 billion into an AI startup, Detroit’s biggest investment yet in self-driving car tech by Johana Bhuiya

Understanding Agent Cooperation by DeepMind

A Low-Power Artificial Synapse Could One Day Interface With the Brain by Rachel Courtland and IEEE
Attn: Elon Musk 😉  Jokes aside, this is very interesting work and is something I am tracking, as well.

Stipe Atlas by Stripe (Great work 👏 )

Building Global Community by Mark Zuckerberg

Inside Facebook's AI Machine by Steven Levy

Navigating Mid-Success by Sam Altman

Doing the Right Thing > Doing Things Right by Mark Suster

What great managers do daily by Ryan Fuller and Nina Shikaloff...

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02.12.17 Recap

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How to Build a Hard Tech Startup by Jason Rosenthal
MVP --> MVTV (minimally viable technical validation). Offers some interesting perspectives on chasing hard tech problems. 

ACLU joins YC by Sam Altman
This is awesome. And timely. Excited to see how things go. More non-profits, NGOs, and even governments could benefit from such an experience. 💯

Managing With Immature AI by Sam Ransbotham
Just because we are in an AI spring doesn't mean it's always fully baked. With so much hype, the current state of AI doesn't always live up to its promise and early products can disappoint. Sam offers why managers should not sit on the sidelines and wait until it develops further — they should start incorporating AI into business processes now.

Cybersecurity Experts Uncover Dormant Botnet of 350,000 Twitter Accounts by  Emerging Technology from the arXiv

Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy by YCombinator
Very important issues with lots of room for innovation and disruption

Chan Zuckerberg Biohub funds first crop of 47 investigators by Jocelyn Kaiser
💯

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01.29.17 Recap

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AI Software Learns to Make AI Software by Tom Simonite
So meta.

The Story of My Life by Ivan Rodriguez
Inspirational read from one of my all time favorite players reflecting on his career as he is admitted into the MLB Hall of Fame. Congrats Pudge!!

Four Questions for Geoff Hinton by Bryon Reese and Geoff Hinton

arxivML: An Alexa skill to read latest machine learning papers from arXiv by Amine Ben Khalifa
Alexa and arxivML, a match made in heaven.

Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer by Google Brain, et al

Repealing the ACA without a Replacement -- The Risks to American Health Care by Pres. Barack Obama
It's true you never really know what you've got 'til it's gone...

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01.15.17 Recap

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Annnd we're back, mostly. Happy New Year! Continuing to log my digital notebook with a not so annotated and poorly kept list of what I've been reading recently and a bit over the holidays. Some interesting reads, though!

The Google Brain Team - Looking Back on 2016 by Jeff Dean @ Google Brain

#define CTO OpenAI by Greg Brockman

Pytorch by Facebook/FAIR
🔥 !!

Tensorflow + Keras by Rachel Thomas
🤗 !!

Office Hours with Sam Altman by Sam Altman and Craig Cannon

Yes you should understand backprop by Andrej Karpathy

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10.23.16 Recap

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Reid Hoffman at Startup School with Sam Altman by Y Combinator
"Anyone inventing products should be able to articulate a...robust theory of human nature." Always enjoy hearing Reid talk, this being no exception. Great insights and interview with Sam.

Historic Achievement: Microsoft researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition by Microsoft Research
Major advances in speech recognition by Microsoft Research -- essentially, as accurate as a human. Here is the research paper, worth the read.

And now, a major appearance by POTUS...

Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence by WhiteHouse.gov
As a follow up from the RFI, the White House posted a report on what they perceive to be the future with AI. Plenty to dig into here, but if you are interesting in more of the policy, check out the National AI Research and Development Strategic Plan.

Barack Obama, Neural Nets, Self-Driving cars, and the Future of the World 
The president in conversation with MIT's Joi Ito and WIRED's Scott Dadich on how AI will shape the future.

Hey Silicon Valley: President Obama Has a To-Do List for You by Jason Tanz
President Obama outlines imperatives for the Silicon Valley and industry leaders respond...

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10.16.16 Recap

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Annnd, we're back. Continuing to map various readings, notes, and musings over the weeks.

Differentiable neural computers by Google DeepMind
Blog post on DeepMind's recent work on adding memory to neural networks (see below for paper).

Hybrid computing using a neural network with dynamic external memory by Google DeepMind
The associated paper in Nature from DeepMind mentioned above ☝️.

Graph Powered Machine Learning at Google by Sujith Ravi
Highlights Google's work with graph-based, semi-supervised learning. Pretty awesome work where they are taking multi-graph representations of data and are pairing them with nodes of concepts and edges connected by similarities.

Large Scale Distributed Semi-Supervised Learning Using Streaming Approximation by Sujith Ravi and Qiming Diao
A paper from the Sujith Ravi (author of the Google post above ☝️) that covers some of this work.

The Hive is the New Network by Arjun Sethi
Networks are so 2015, or so they say. Arjun Sethi from Social Capital outlines the notion of a 'hive' and its implications for products and companies.

We don't sell saddles here by Stuart Butterfield
Found this old memo from Stuart Butterfield to the team as they built Slack. Great principles for early stage companies to embrace and hits on core topics from building great product, to selling, to driving change, to execution. TL;DR - Build something people want. Market from both ends. Sell the innovation, not the product (to which he noted, we're not selling "a group chat system...what we're selling is organizational transformation). Who do we want our customers to become? How do we do it? ("We do it really fucking good.") Why? ("Because why the fuck else would you even want to be alive but to do things as well as you can? Now: let’s do this.")...

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09.04.16 Recap

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How Tech Giants are Devising Real Ethics for Artificial Intelligence by John Markoff
Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are coming together to form an industry group focused on the creation of a standard of ethics around artificial intelligence. The group's aims will be to be to ensure that AI research is focused on benefiting people, not hurting them.

One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) by Stanford + Co. (thx Eric Horvitz)
A consortium of researchers released a report out of Stanford University that details the impact of artificial intelligence on society. The brainchild of Eric Horvitz, a computer scientist at Microsoft Research and Stanford alum, the group includes a host of leading academicians and talented contributors. Certainly an interesting read and, incidentally, the inspiration for the industry group noted earlier ☝️ .

The Next Big Shift in SaaS by Tomasz Tunguz
In addition to sharing his thoughts on the workflow of the future, which I shared a week or so ago, Tomasz discusses how SaaS applications can move from being displacers to disruptors. I had a recent conversation that arrived at a similar conclusion. Doing some reading after the fact led me to this post from July. A timely read, despite the delay.

First Round Capital's FAQs from First Round Capital
First Round Capital opens up their playbook to provide more insight into what they're looking for in new investments, their process, and how they make decisions. Great to see this type of increased transparency in the venture space. ICYMI - Bloomberg Beta recently open sourced their manual, too.

Facebook AI Research open sourcing tools
FAIR is releasing some of Facebook's tools including fastText for text classification and DeepMask, SharpMask, and MultiPathNet which are used to understand objects in photos...

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08.21.16 Recap

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Machine Intelligence 2.0 in charts and graphs by Shivon Zilis and VentureBeat
Nice general overview of the ML/AI landscape aptly dubbed here as Machine Intelligence 2.0.

Event Driven SaaS - The Workflow Of The Future by Tomasz Tunguz
Outlines how a new wave of SaaS products, if properly designed, can mitigate / eliminate the agency problem of classic software by benefiting users directly. I am personally a big fan of this play. By offering value to the people actually using the product from day to day -- not just the executives -- products can generate buy-in through accruing benefit. This, in turn, creates both stickiness for the product and the ability to generate even more value through increased data capture and engagement.

What’s the Difference Between Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning? by Michael Copeland and NVIDIA
In case you were wondering, NVIDIA spells it out for you in a thoughtful post (and Part One of their series on the fundamentals of deep learning).

Human collective intelligence as distributed Bayesian inference by Peter Krafft, et al
Awesome new study finding that a cognitive decision mechanism can treat a variable as a prior distribution upon which to base decisions...

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Introducing the Recap* (*until I find a better name for it)

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If not evident from the lack of recent content, I've found less time to write. Or, more precisely, to write here. While building product and growing a company keep me more than fulfilled creatively (more on those in due time), I recognize that reflection remains important. So instead of writing longer form posts, until further notice, I've decided to at least provide a weekly(ish) recap of some things that I've found interesting from the days prior -- mostly articles, blog posts, podcasts, and others bits primarily focused on tech. Perhaps, but not always, they might be accompanied by the occasional commentary from yours truly. For readers, I hope it will be an interesting curation of content. For me, it will help keep track of some of the interesting things I've read from week to week.
 

08.14.16 Recap

Innovating at Scale by Arun Sethi
A good commentary on (and reminder of) the Innovator's Dilemma. Basically, companies have to disrupt themselves through innovation or they will be victims of their own success. Old news, perhaps, but companies still continuously fall victim to the plight. Worth a read to refresh with some survival tips for the operators...

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