And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper’s robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet’s engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn’t worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business – not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.
Machine Learning
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I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again
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1 min read
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Duolingo’s Premium subscription offering, which launched in 2017, has contributed to a meteoric increase in annual bookings. It continues to invest more and more R&D into AI and machine learning to power its tutoring software and growth. Duolingo raised some serious money from Alphabet bringing the total valuation of the charming Pittsburgh startup, to roughly $9 billion:
Popular language learning app Duolingo has raised $30 million in a series F round of funding from Alphabet’s investment arm CapitalG. […]
Duolingo claims 30 million users are actively learning languages on its platform, and it has emerged as one of the most downloaded educational apps globally. Since its last funding round more than two years ago, it has more than doubled its employees from 95 to 200 and has opened additional offices in Seattle, New York, and Beijing. It also now claims annual bookings of $100 million after it launched its premium plan in 2017, a significant increase from the $33 million it drew in last year.
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FarmWise, and the Rise of the Agribots
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2 min read
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Automating agriculture is a complex proposition given the number and variety of tasks involved, but a number of robotics and autonomy companies are giving it their best shot. FarmWise seems to have impressed someone — it just raised $14.5 million to continue development of its autonomous weeding vehicle.
Currently in the prototype stage, these vehicles look like giant lumbering personnel carriers or the like, but are in fact precision instruments which scan the ground for invasive weeds among the crop and carefully pluck them out.
A pretty impressive, lumbering, weed-pulling, beast-of-a-prototype. It looks like an absolute unit too:
Image: FarmWise These sorts of bots have became very well known in the auto industry, the textiles industry, and now they’re coming to agriculture. Simply put, they’re designed to replace mundane awful tasks previously occupied by human hands. In the long-scheme of things, this is a good thing. Not-so-fun jobs should be automated. Improving the quality of life for mankind is a good thing.
But, if you think your job can’t be automated, think again. We have robots writing headlines and blog posts, self-writing their own programs, nailing roof tiles, and just about everything else (questionable or otherwise) in-between. That may sound really scary (and it is a little bit). The long-arc of these sorts of innovations will make create abundance with little effort, and will ultimately lead to a world where a majority the human-race are unemployable. I won’t claim to know the solution to that problem, but is an unavoidable outcome (see below) we should debate and talk about more freely, because it’s happening faster than you think.
I’m serious about the nail-gun wielding roofing-robot. It’s really something to behold:
Further Watching:
If you have 15 minutes and you’re convinced your job can’t be occupied by automation, I urge you to watch CGP Grey’s film, Humans Need Not Apply. It’s a gripping must-watch short.
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Microsoft Hires Apple’s Former Siri Chief, Bill Stasior
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2 min read
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Stasior has an incredible resumé. A small selection of the giants he’s been stationed at include: Amazon, A9, Alta Vista, (and now Apple joins the A-list) Oracle and various positions at MIT before that.
According to CNBC’s reporting, he led the growth of Apple’s machine learning initiative which wasn’t siloed to the Siri product alone:
He said that he expanded the team from 70 engineers to more than 1,100 people and that he “played the leading role in bringing modern machine learning to Siri and Apple.” Apple said in 2018 that Siri was being actively used on more than 500 million devices, and earlier this year the company said that Siri would sound more natural in the forthcoming iOS 13 release. Apple previously made gains in this area through AI work.
Microsoft has always been a company who grows throw acquisition, but recently they’ve been on a hiring spree. Which isn’t normally their modus operandi for acquiring talent. Something tells me they’re laying the pipework for an aggressive regime of ML and Voice growth in the coming years.
I find this to be curious timing. Given Apple’s vestigial connection to its Jobsian past. Jony Ive has essentially severed that connection with his departure and newly launched design firm LoveFrom. Apple hasn’t engaged in this sort of assault from software and hardware competitors in decades.
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Microsoft Acquires Lobe
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2 min read
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It’s been an exciting year for Microsoft. Microsoft continues to make bets on thrilling components of software development. This was a huge missed opportunity for giants like Apple, Google and even Adobe. This morning, Microsoft announced they have acquired Lobe.
If you don’t know what Lobe is, here’s a primer: Lobe, is basically software for building, training, and exporting custom deep learning models. The interface is very Quartz Composer-esque. I previously wrote about Lobe here.
From Lobe.ai To be honest, I’m a little shocked Apple didn’t acquire Lobe first. Considering the boundless software opportunities and Lobe’s earnest genesis in Quartz Composer, it’s strange Apple didn’t beat Microsoft to the punch. Maybe there were meetings between Apple and Lobe, who knows. What I do know, is that Microsoft knows that ML tools are going to be huge.
From Lobe’s announcement email:
As part of Microsoft, Lobe will be able to leverage world-class AI research, a global infrastructure, and decades of experience building developer tools. This will allow us to rapidly scale Lobe to its full potential, making it more intelligent and available to more people.
We plan to continue building Lobe as a standalone service, supporting open source standards and multiple platforms. Together we are committed to making deep learning simple, understandable, and accessible to everyone. We deeply appreciate your support and look forward to sharing more with you soon!Sounds familiar huh?
I’m nervous Lobe will be assimilated into some obscure product, never to be heard from again. But, historically that hasn’t always been the case — LinkedIn and Github (at the time of writing this) are both still stand-alone services.
On the other hand, I’m really happy for the Lobe team. They have a remarkable product on their hands. And Microsoft has essentially given them AI research carte blanche. Lobe lacked that world-class research ability until now. It’s entirely possible that joining Microsoft might have been the only real way to scale their shared vision of “deep learning for everyone.”
So all-in-all, I’m into it. ✌️
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Lobe
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2 min read
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Lobe, is a visual composer of sorts — for building, training, and exporting custom deep learning models. The interface is very Quartz Composer-esque. Check it out:
If you’re in a hurry, watch from 6:12 for a walkthrough on how to create a project from scratch.
Lobe is a start-up from Mike Matas, Markus Beissinger and Adam Menges. Matas, an ex-Apple and ex-Facebook Silicon Valley designer veteran — previously released published this demo called The Brain (see below), which was entirely built in Quartz Composer. A fucking awesome demo.
No wonder Lobe looks like a Quartz composition. Keep in mind, this was published about one year ago:
This is really really exciting stuff. Building and training deep learning models are simple in concept, but complex in reality. Lobe, may just be the first visual tool to bridge that divide.
To quote John Gruber:
Lobe is to CoreML what Illustrator was to PostScript — a profoundly powerful tool that exposes the underlying technology to non-experts through an intuitive visual interface.
Gruber’s analogy is probably the best, and he’s right. When Desktop Publishing Software exploded in popularity the late 80’s and late 90’s, everything changed. Productivity skyrocketed, and progress in tooling, production and creative software just took of and to be honest, it never really cooled down. We’re still in living in that same epoch, but having different conversations about the same problems.
Lobe truly exposes a whole new world of problem-solving to non-experts and that will lead to some really exciting tools. Hats off to everyone at Lobe. Remarkable work.