Yes start with a monolith but split it sooner than later ( was at a company where they realized it too late, after being in business for 8+ years) .

It was a nightmare at that point. We pretty much gave up.

I worked at a startup where a new architect decided everything needed to be split into micro services for “scaling”.

Thing is we were in an illiquid market that didn’t require the kind of scale he envisioned.

Long story short we burnt a hell of a lot of runway building something that was painful to work with compared to the monolith. It did not end well.

Micro services are something that sounds good to the inexperienced but are almost never right for an immature business looking for market fit.

If you really know you can’t scale with just a big box from the outset use something like Elixir or Erlang. Otherwise stick to a modular monolith for as long as you can.

Very clever - they bought the distribution platform for AI!

I was in Vegas a few years back with friends. While walking the strip, notice this massive throng of kids all around us. I learned they were in town for the BTS concert.

I noticed this young girl, no older than 20, wearing a Pink Floyd "Dark side of the Moon" t-shirt, I asked her what she thought of the band.

To my abject dissatisfaction she responded "I bought the T-shirt because it looked cool".

In that moment I a GenExer, felt a profound generational dissonance.

To be fair it is a cool-looking cover.

There's no reason to expect someone to have listened to an album released 50 years ago. That would be like upbraiding an 80s kid for not caring about Elvis.

I see three-year-olds wearing Nirvana shirts all the time. I don't bother asking them if they prefer Bleach or Incesticide. Also a GenX'r FWIW.

The big tongue? Yea, people do enjoy pop art.

The big tongue is a Rolling Stones thing and was used inside the fold of their Sticky Fingers album (the outer cover for which was an Andy Warhol photograph that seems primarily focused on a gentleman's sausage and/or the tight pants that constrain it; a working zipper was an included part of this published work).

Pink Floyd's popular Dark Side of the Moon artwork, meanwhile, involves an illustration of a prism splitting a beam of white light into a rainbow.

What makes the Chinese models this good? I don't believe it's distillation alone.

This from OpenAi's Head of Strategic Futures "Some observations on Kimi: It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that"

https://x.com/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412

China's strategy of spending billions on training these models and open sourcing these models away is strategic - they want to kill the US LLM industry at any cost.

To win on the AI front by any means necessary.

> China's strategy of spending billions on training these models and open sourcing these models away is strategic - they want to kill the US LLM industry at any cost.

Why is it when Anthropic and OpenAI spend billions trying to beat each other it is competition, but when the Chinese companies do it then it is trying to kill the US LLM industry at any cost.

The US federal government spends billions in subsidies via the US Chip Act, and bans chip sales to China to support US companies.

But the implication is that somehow Chinese competition is illegitimate because "strategic".

Jingoism is the answer I believe.

I am not defending the US LLM industry or the government, all I am saying is it's similar to an arms race. I did not suggest anywhere that what China is doing is illegitimate. China has state supported capitalism, and they will do whatever it takes to prop up the AI industry. Anthropic and OpenAI want the same protections.

>What makes the Chinese models this good?

Why wouldn't it be? China is pumping out AI research and researchers at a staggering pace and there is no inherent reason why western models should be better

The pushing problems around under the guise of solving them for political gain is what corporate and government malfeasance is all about.

The better you are at the game the higher you climb!

More noise than actual speed.

Why are you assuming that the machines or their masters will be benevolent? All actions so far have been contrarian.

This is a rather optimistic take in my opinion. My take is more Orwelian, given how the folks in charge of shepherding AI have behaved so far

Most people are not good at articulating their thoughts into words, let alone writing well.

Now, AI has given all these Linkedin psychopaths who did not have a voice because of their affliction a rare kind of superpower to endlessly spew their meaningless dribble.

I cringe every time I have to go on the cesspool that is Linkedin, but forced to since am job hunting.

Microsoft, Amazon are all building forward deployment engineering teams - to increase AI adoption. It will take time, but it will happen.

This is more marketing hype than substance. Amazon isn’t “building” a team, it’s broadly just taking existing people and now calling them “forward deployment engineering teams.”

Also, adoption isn’t lacking because of lack of awareness. Adoption isn’t happening because the math doesn’t add up and the ROI isn’t there. Consulting pixie dust can’t fix that.

Ah man it’s gonna be hilarious when this comes crashing down -and it will. It’s pretty obvious ‘demand is infinite’ was always a lie - demand is infinite only when price approaches zero lol! Prices are going further away from zero not closer

Feels like a new consulting wave which is implementation-led by AI vendors taking a large share of the services layer. The existing consulting companies (big 4 etc) will have to shift to niche advisory or heavy channel partnerships with way fewer consultants.