Technology Notebook
02/22/2024 | An interview with Elizabeth Stone (CTO of Netflix) – her philosophy of leadership, how she looks for context and not control, how talent density affects how Netflix manages itself, the process of 360 feedback, how she pursues transparent leadership, how she brought IC leveling to Netflix, and the demise of Chaos Monkeys.
12/14/2023 | An interview with Jeff Bezos – his early attempt at being a theoretical physicist, his self-perception as an inventor, the technology and aspirations of Blue Origin, the decision making philosophy of “disagree and commit”, designing a high velocity culture, his “skeptical view of proxies”, on why he always speaks last in meetings, how we co-evolve with our technology, on crisp documents and messy meetings, thoughts on PowerPoint, and ultimately how he gets people’s best thinking.
11/28/2023 | Opening Keynote at AWS re:Invent with Adam Selipsky on working backwards from customer needs, S3 Express One Zone, Graviton4, work with Nvidia in model training, collaboration with Anthropic, Bedrock, CodeWhisperer, Amazon Q, Amazon Connect, Zer0-ETL Integration with Amazon Redshift, POsgresSQL and MySQL, and Project Kuiper.
11/08/2023 | Opening Keynote at GitHub Universe with Thomas Dohmke with a visit from Satya Nadella, CoPilot as an IDE, and accessibility and barrier breaking by utilizing natural language as a programming language.
11/06/2023 | OpenAI DevDay Opening Keynote from Sam Altman, improving the API, GPT-Turbo, TTS (Text To Speech), Custom Models, copyright infringement protections for Enterprise, a visit from Satya on using GPT in GitHub CoPilot, and using natural language to build GPTs (applications based on ChatGPT).
08/29/2023 | Andrew Ng on potential opportunities in AI, when (and if) AI will reach the capabilities of extrapolation that the human mind possesses, and if he thinks it is a threat to humanity in the future.
06/08/2023 | Michio Kaku on his book “Quantum Supremacy”, which I read recently and recommend to anyone wanting to understand how quantum computers work and receive a good dose of scientific history.
05/23/2023 | Satya Nadella’s keynote at Microsoft Build 2023. Demonstration of how AI plugins are being curated for use by developers, most notably legal document review from Westlaw (Thompson Reuters) and an introduction to Microsoft Fabric, which could provide AI tools to data analysts and decision makers in a business use case.
04/20/2023 | Greg Brockman’s TED talk where he lays out the shift AI will have on current technologies and the way we interact with them, how OpenAI based success on pushing the technology available and enabling high functioning teams, and their commitment to weighing the pros/cons of what this technology means for the world before any future releases.