HackrLife

Large Language Model’s don’t really have a database to query on. They analyse petabytes of data on a range of topics (as part of “training”), and measure the distance between clusters of words or pixels that are most likely to appear together. They then match the pattern to a given natural language prompt, and generate a remixed output in the form of text or image. It is generally a learnt synthesis of the kind of content or image that has been created before on the subject of the prompt.

The output depends on what you ask (hence prompt engineering), but in most cases a basic human language query is enough for the system to match patterns and return some text or image which looks good and reads ok.

Question though, is novelty aside, what do you ask a system that (apparently) can answer anything? Where does it truly help beyond writing content or creating images?

A single man can break a stone single-handedly. But how can his credo help our self discovery and development ?

We often overemphasise on effort, without equally emphasising on the environment in which this effort can be successful.  The fact however, is that the environment we live in, continuously and gradually shapes us, just like the repeated strikes of a stonecutter eventually weaken the rock. Our chances of success can be gradually increased by positive factors such as supportive work environments, educational opportunities, and nurturing communities. 

From the time of its inception, the best real world use case of Blockchain technology has been in the realm of decentralised finance or DeFi. But for years it failed to gain traction due to three key things

• Non inclination of financial institutions and governments  towards tokenisation of real world assets

• Very high annual percentage yields which made it seem like a game of blackjack than an actual stable investment option

• Lack of institutional interest and integration into real world financial systems

This happens. Every new technology undergoes this curve of adaptation and 2023 was mostly a year for DeFi to shore back and consolidate after the scams and scandals of yesteryears.

But with meaningful and sustainable changes like Real Yield over APY, increasing interest in tokenisation of real assets, and more institutional interest in using the innovation offered by DeFI over blockchain for real world financial systems, the tide is starting to slowly re-shape. 

2024 can turn out to be the surprise year for DeFi if it continues on this path of real world integration. But which DeFi protocols do we start looking at, given there are so many?

The origins of Occam's Razor are in theology. It was named after the medieval philosopher and theologian William of Ockham, who simplified its inference into a basic concept stating that when faced with competing explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest one is more likely to be correct. 
This principle when applied across disciplines can be an invaluable tool for individuals, businesses, and organisations to make better-informed decisions that lead to efficient outcomes. 

But how do mere mortals like us use it in everyday life to make things a bit less complicated?

Let’s find out.

Sharding, a database partitioning technique, has been heralded as a solution to blockchain scalability issues. By dividing a blockchain into smaller, parallel segments or "shards", it promises increased transaction throughput.

It is is a pivotal innovation in the realm of Web 3.0 and DeFi, offering a tangible solution to the pressing scalability challenges faced by current blockchain networks. As the digital landscape evolves and the demand for decentralised services grows, sharding will likely play a central role in shaping the future of the decentralised web.

In the fast-evolving realm of artificial intelligence, few innovations have captured the imagination of researchers and entrepreneurs alike like LLMs akin to Chat GPT and what they can do. At its essence, GPT ( Generative Pre Trained Transformer) is a type of machine-learning model designed to understand and generate human-like text.

The "Generative" in its name hints at its ability to create or generate content.

What truly sets GPT apart, however, is its underlying architecture: the Transformer. This allows GPT to pay "attention" to different parts of a sentence, understanding the context and relationships between words, no matter how far apart they are. To keep it simple, GPT is like a linguistic wizard, blending vast knowledge from its training with the magic of the Transformer architecture. The result? An AI model that not only comprehends the intricacies of human language but can also emulate it with astonishing proficiency.

Yield farming, often likened to staking, is a method where users provide or "lock up" their assets in a DeFi protocol to receive rewards. These rewards can be a result of interest from borrowers, fees generated by the platform, or even new tokens minted as incentives. The allure of yield farming is the potential for high returns, especially when compared to traditional financial instruments.

It offers an innovative way for retail investors, to potentially amplify their returns. The technology, rooted in blockchain and smart contracts, provides a transparent and automated way to engage with financial protocol

Conversational search refers to the ability of search engines to understand and respond to user queries in a natural, dialogue-like manner, rather than relying solely on traditional keyword-based searches.

LLMs, with their advanced capabilities in understanding and generating human-like text, will play a pivotal role in enhancing conversational search and while there is no doubt that LLMs are here to stay, how the content , ecommerce and payment ecosystems evolve to leverage them is where monetisation methods will change.

Integration with IoT devices, emotion recognition and multimodal transitions will be some of the key factors to watch out for.

Just like the iPhone created the app industry and that became part of our everyday lives,  LLMs are just the foundational element in how search and online transactions change over the coming years.Unbiased recommendations based on indexing petabytes of data generated everyday is not an easy task , but technology has always evolved.

It’s the timing that will be important.

At its core, a neural network is a system of algorithms that attempts to recognise underlying relationships in a set of data through a process that mimics the way the human brain operates.

Neural networks are inspired by our brain's structure. Just as we have neurons, these networks have artificial neurons or "nodes".

They consist of layers. The input layer (where data enters), one or more hidden layers, and the output layer (where we get the result).

They're computation-intensive, need lots of data, and their 'black box' nature can make results hard to interpret. But for now, they are are powerful tools letting machines approximate any function, detect patterns, and make predictions by mimicking some of the brain's processes.

How does Midjourney create images in real time? Understanding diffusion models

While Midjourney’s model is proprietary and not documented as open source, it probably integrates diffusion models with language models to create images in real time. The language model interprets the textual description, extracting key features and themes. This interpreted information then guides the diffusion process, ensuring that the generated image aligns with the textual description.

The process possibly begins with an initial noise tensor, essentially a random array of values that doesn't resemble any meaningful image. Think of this as a canvas filled with random splatters of paint.

Before the diffusion process starts, the system needs to understand the text prompt. A language model or a text encoder processes the prompt and converts it into a fixed-size vector, known as an embedding. This embedding captures the semantic essence of the text and guides the diffusion process to ensure the final image aligns with the prompt.

Vector databases are specialized storage systems designed to handle high-dimensional vectors, enabling efficient similarity searches. Unlike traditional databases that rely on exact matches or keyword-based searches, vector databases excel in finding "approximate" matches based on the closeness of vectors in a high-dimensional space. This capability is particularly beneficial for Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4.

LLMs convert text into vectors using embeddings, capturing the semantic essence of the content. When a user poses a query to an LLM, the model translates this query into a vector and then searches for the most similar vectors in its database to provide a relevant response. This is where vector databases shine, offering rapid retrieval of the most semantically related answers. By utilizing algorithms like Approximate Nearest Neighbors (ANN), vector databases allow LLMs to sift through vast amounts of data in real-time, ensuring users receive contextually appropriate responses swiftly. In essence, vector databases supercharge LLMs, enabling them to understand and respond to queries with a depth of context and relevance that would be challenging using traditional database systems.

If you are working in software and driving product or growth, then your life is pretty much a combination of metrics, measurement and excel sheets in between zoom calls.I have often wondered with all this data and the obsession around it, how much do we actually use to make actionable decisions?

Which ones actually matter?

After many years of intellectual pontificatory, I think  I have a simple collection of 8. These 8 according to me give  a very clear idea of the business, growth, profitability, cash flow and red flags that need immediate fixing.

While in Q2 of 2021, there were just 23 companies which got valued as Unicorns, by Q2 of 2022, that number had grown to  136 companies. A YoY increase of 491 %.

So what drove this growth?

Why did $100 million rounds triple year on year even at Series A?

Why did 1/5th of entire global funding pour into Fintech?

Fund out some macro trends , some numbers and some thoughts. 

The internet has connected all of us and while it has created tons of new opportunities and made life easier, it has also created a dystopian present where cancel culture, lack of privacy, fear of missing out, trolling and misinformation are as much part of the internet firmament, as is our ability to get grocery delivered within the hour.

Can we balance our dystopian present by controlling our technology consumption  

Can we fast our way to a technology balanced world?

One thing that is absolutely critical about consumer apps, is that they require phenomenal scale and growth in a very small amount of time. Scale that cannot be bought by marketing, PR and paid media alone. Scale that cannot be managed by distribution alone.

This scale can only be created if consumers feel an inherent organic reason to want to use the product and keep using it many times in a day. At the same time it has to appeal to consumers of different ages groups, across different cultures, across different languages, different needs and different economic standings.

While ESPs focus on the specific email delivered to your inbox, MSPs focus on your entire mailbox behaviour to determine where they would filter and place emails within your inbox (spam/ trash/ promotions etc)

So what are these metrics?

Well according to a study conducted by Demand Metric and Return Path, there are six key email metrics that mailbox service providers track to create better filtering algorithms.

For a long time marketers and advertisers believed that the real value of location data lay in targeting a specific individual in real time, but now it’s becoming secondary to finding insights into audiences, consumer journeys and offline shopping behavior. 

The increased role of AI in ad buying makes this trend an ever more important used case. 

If Google Sheets and Zapier had a kid, it’d be Actiondesk! Actiondesk lets you create and schedule automations that:

- Import data from various sources (database and business apps),

- Run data transformations

- Trigger actions in your favorite business applications.

Your beautiful podcast website makes a great first impression when a new listener finds and plays their first episode, making sure that what they see and what they hear will blow them away (and turn them into a forever fan of podcasts, starting with yours).