Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

NeurIPS 2023 Recap — Top Startups

Dec 30, 2023

In this dynamic discussion, Jonathan Frankle, Chief Scientist at MosaicML, shares insights on their $1.3 billion acquisition by Databricks. Lin Qiao, CEO of Fireworks AI, talks about optimizing PyTorch for inference. Aman Sanger from Cursor reveals innovative memory strategies for AI coding. Aravind Srinivas discusses the impressive growth of Perplexity AI, hitting 1 million installs, while Jeremy Howard emphasizes the need for accessible AI. Together, they explore the vibrant AI startup landscape showcased at NeurIPS 2023, reflecting on innovation, collaboration, and the future of technology.

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

Intro

1min

Navigating the Acquisition Landscape

5min

The Evolving Landscape of AI Models and NeurIPS Insights

2min

Navigating the AI Conference Landscape

21min

Exploring AI Applications in the Enterprise Sector

2min

Advancements in AI Recommendations and Inference Techniques

17min

Innovations and Growth in the AI Startup Landscape

4min

Navigating AI Innovation and Search

18min

Tech, Talent, and Togetherness

27min

10.

Advancements in Language Modeling and AI Hardware

14min

11.

Advancements in Computational Efficiency

5min

12.

Innovations in AI Debugging and Visualization

14min

13.

Exploring Low-Resource AI and Open Source Contributions

3min

14.

Advancements in PyTorch Lightning and AI Collaboration

14min

15.

Navigating AI Innovations and Conference Insights

4min

16.

Innovations in Text Generation: Diffusion vs. Autoregression

7min

17.

Navigating NeurIPS: Insights and Future Directions

3min

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