Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

NeurIPS 2023 Recap — Top Startups

Dec 30, 2023

Startups featured in the podcast discuss topics such as AI models, NeurIPS conference, reverse engineering, training models, synthetic data generation, Perplexity's success, hard work and tenacity, building communities in AI, networking at conferences, large Arabic language models, Vauxhall's toolkit for AI engineers, and collaborations with Google Cloud.

02:41:54

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Quick takeaways

Perplexity AI reached one million users on its mobile apps due to brand marketing and app improvements.

PPLX Online API provides unlimited access to web information for developers.

Cerebras Systems is making strides in language models and collaborating with Group 42 for large Arabic models.

Cerebras' unique hardware design enables cost-effective and efficient processing for various applications.

Cerebras Systems is actively exploring research directions like sparse models and streaming methods.

Deep dives

Perplexity AI achieves a million users on its mobile app

Perplexity AI recently reached a milestone of one million users on both its Android and iOS mobile apps. The success can be attributed to their brand marketing and focus on creating a fast and reliable app experience. The app has gone through improvements based on user feedback and has become a preferred tool for many developers.

The Role of Synthetic Data in Reducing Human Workload

01:33

Importance of Understanding Data for Model Building

01:27

Visualizing Multimodal Data Sets with NOMIC

01:19

Insights into the Misconception of Nerds

01:21

Introduction

3min

Multimodal Models and the Future

12min

The Power of Poster Sessions at NeurIPS

13min

Reverse Engineering Mixtrol and Retrofitting Models

3min

Discussion on Applications and Services Provided by an Inference Provider

3min

Training AI Models: Online vs Offline

13min

Synthetic Data Generation and Model Censoring

6min

Perplexity's Success and the Value of Accurate Information

32min

Discussions on Hard Work and Tenacity

2min

10.

Building and Nurturing Communities in AI

5min

11.

Networking and Deep Conversations at New Year's Conference

8min

12.

Training Large Arabic Language Models

17min

13.

Vauxhall's Toolkit for AI Engineers

14min

14.

Collaborations with Google Cloud on Publicly Available Datasets

33min

We are running an end of year listener survey! Please let us know any feedback you have, what episodes resonated with you, and guest requests for 2024! Survey link here.

We can’t think of a more Latent-Space-y way to end 2023 than with a mega episode featuring many old and new friends recapping their biggest news, achievements, and themes and memes of the year!

We previously covered the Best Papers of NeurIPS 2023, but the other part of NeurIPS being an industry friendly conference is all the startups that show up to hire and promote their latest and greatest products and papers! As a startup-friendly podcast, we of course were ready with our mics to talk to everyone we could track down.

In lieu of an extended preamble, we encourage you to listen and click through all the interviews and show notes, all of which have been curated to match the references mentioned in the episode.

Timestamps & Show Notes

* [00:01:26] Jonathan Frankle - Chief Scientist, MosaicML/Databricks

* see also the Mosaic/MPT-7B episode

* $1.3B MosaicML x Databricks acquisition

* [00:22:11] Lin Qiao - CEO, Fireworks AI

* Fireworks Mixtral

* [00:38:24] Aman Sanger - CEO, Anysphere (Cursor)

* see also the Cursor episode

* $8m seed from OpenAI

* Tweet: Request-level memory-based KV caching

* Tweet: GPT-4 grading and Trueskill ratings for rerankers

* [00:51:14] Aravind Srinivas - CEO, Perplexity