Cody Blakeney

Arcee.ai

@code_star

Redwood City, CA Joined August 2011

2K Following 8.1K Followers 23K Posts

Latest posts 5

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Cody Blakeney @code_star Sep 16

I’m so incredibly proud of what we are building at @arcee_ai . It’s a truly special place. We are only getting started though.

We’ve been quiet for a while, but we haven’t been idle. I can’t wait to share more about what we have been grinding on for the past ~6 months.

I won’t spoil anything, but you can get some idea from this announcement.

Arcee.ai Verified account @arcee_ai Sep 16

Today, we are announcing our Series B funding round, valuing the company at more than $1B.

This round accelerates our next-gen Trinity models across diverse infrastructure, expands our work with the DOE and national labs on Genesis-Science-1, and enables us to build the platform teams need to build, evaluate, deploy, and operate open models in production.

We are grateful to our team, partners, open-source community, and investors.

Led by @Vista_Equity, Cambium Capital, and @emergencecap, with participation from AI10 Ventures, @Hitachi, IAG, @M12vc, @p7ventures, and @Wipro.

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Cody Blakeney @code_star 4d

Training models is the best job in the world. It's important to remember this is supposed to be fun. It's hard, confusing 90% of the time, and almost constantly surprising. Its always crazy to me to see people talk about AI research work sometimes in such nihilistic ways. You get to melt GPUs for a living, enjoy it!

It's important to remember negative results are just as valuable as positive results, finding a strong baseline is important even if it means you don't get to run as many experiments, and always be willing to change your mind when presented with evidence.

It feels like the pressure to have big splashing success all the time is dialed up to 11 with all of the funding and attention in the past couple of years. It might feel like focusing on the fundamentals instead of chasing novelty will hold you back, but strong science always wins out. The facts don't care about novelty.

If you work on a team remember to be kind to everyone and be a source of joy. Everyone else feels the pressure of this moment as well. It means more than you think to crack a joke, or encourage people when they get a bad result.

Cody Blakeney @code_star 6d

Nah, we might soon hit a golden age.

Look at all the vision architecture tricks coming back into style recently.

I swear I’m watching resnets and densenets being reinvented from first principles each week.

I gotta go dust off my old zotero collection from gradschool and get some neural architecture search ideas.

Gonna rebrand it as RSI

Mira Verified account @_Mira___Mira_ 6d

Experimental novel AI architectures got less interesting once the transformer was demonstrated to do everything.

Now it's like "if successful, you could save OpenAI or Anthropic money, maybe" which makes me feel like an MBA.
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Cody Blakeney @code_star 6d

I hate to fall for the bit, but I’ll hand it to him, it does seem like a great match for our current transformers but in 1991.

It does make me wonder though, why it took so long for people to just get completely scaling pilled and put these together.

Did you need the magic of limitless “supervised” training data (seq2seq) to match with the architecture that might underperform on limited data but scale perfectly if you threw more layers, compute, and data?

If we’re transformers all you need, or seq2seq?

Jürgen Schmidhuber Verified account @SchmidhuberAI Nov 3

This is an old hat. That's exactly what the neural fast weight programmers did in the 1990s (including the 1991 unnormalised linear Transformer). Overview with links to the original papers: people.idsia.ch/~juergen/fast-…
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Cody Blakeney @code_star 6d

Another crazy similarity is they both took about the same time frame from founding to IPO. Almost to the month.

It FEELs like Anthropic has done this insane speed run that no one has ever seen ... but then ... maybe our attention spans aren't what they used to be.

Cody Blakeney Verified account @code_star 6d

Was reading this article by @Noahpinion and felt compelled to do some calculations.

The most valuable company in the world on the day Google IPO'ed was maybe GE? unclear, but by end of year it was Bank of America ($204B)

That puts Google at ~1/10 the value of the most valuable company in the world at IPO vs the 3/10 to 1/2 value ratio that Anthropic is expected to enter at.

It's still a super crazy event to see a larger than $1T IPO, but I guess it's interesting with some historical perspective that it some order of magnitude larger than any IPO by a tech company that the world has never seen before.

This is not financial advice

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