Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show where we niche down to a single topic and dig deep.

This week we had a very special guest on the podcast: Matthew Lynley. Long-time listeners will recall that Lynley was in fact one of the founding hosts of Equity, and a former TechCruncher to boot. Since those days, Lynley went off and had a number of gigs before branching out and starting his very own AI-focused publication called Supervised.

As a day-one subscriber of Supervised, and someone who texts Lynley all the time for input on AI topics, I decided to bring him back to the show and ask him questions in a format where we can all learn together. Here’s what we got into:

• From Transformers to GPT4: How attention became so critical inside of neural networks, and how transformers set the path for modern AI services.
• Recent acquisitions in the AI space, and what it means for the “LLM stack:” With Databricks buying MosaicML and Snowflake already busy with its own checkbook, a lot of folks are working to build out a full-stack LLM data extravaganza. We talked about what that means.

• Where startups sit in the current AI race: While it’s great to think about the majors, we also need to know what the startup angle is. The answer? It’s a little early to say, but what is clear is that startups are taking some big swings at the industry and are hellbent to snag a piece of the pie.

Woot, and thanks to everyone for hanging out with us. Equity is back on Friday for our weekly news roundup!

Is ChatGPT the iBeer of LLM’s? by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/12/is-chatgpt-the-ibeer-of-llms/