Memory Leak — #32
VC Astasia Myers’ perspectives on AI, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, open source, and security. Sign up here.
🚀 Products
Ollama now has built-in compatibility with the OpenAI Chat Completions API, making it possible to use more tooling and applications with Ollama locally. Additionally Ollama is now Vercel AI SDK compatible.
Why does this matter? Ollama allows you to run open-source large language models, such as Llama 2, locally. Ollama bundles model weights, configuration, and data into a single package, defined by a Modelfile. It optimizes setup and configuration details, including GPU usage. Ollama adding OpenAI compatible HTTP endpoints means that developers can easily replace their dependency on OpenAI with an open source model of their choice.
Bard Becomes Gemini: Try Ultra 1.0 and a New Mobile App Today
Gemini Advanced is a new experience that gives users access to Ultra 1.0, Google’s largest and most capable state-of-the-art AI model. With Ultra 1.0 model, Gemini Advanced is far more capable at highly complex tasks like coding, logical reasoning, following nuanced instructions and collaborating on creative projects. Gemini Advanced not only allows you to have longer, more detailed conversations; it also better understands the context from your previous prompts.
Why does this matter? Google Bard has been perceived as a good not great. Bard’s rebrand to Gemini, the core model, is an effort to unify Google’s consumer AI brand. The team continues to feel the heat from emerging players like Perplexity and Phind.
Amazon Debuts ‘Rufus,’ an AI Shopping Assistant in Its Mobile App
Amazon announced the launch of an AI-powered shopping assistant it’s calling Rufus that’s been trained on the e-commerce giant’s product catalog as well as information from around the web. The company says the new tool will launch to a subset of U.S. customers in beta before expanding to more users in the weeks ahead. Customers will be able to chat with Rufus inside Amazon’s mobile app to get help with finding products, performing product comparisons, and getting recommendations on what to buy.
Why does this matter? Like the story above, GenAI is transforming search. In Amazon’s case, reimagining search means offering a new chatbot. Amazon built a new, internal LLM specialized for shopping to power the experience, which speaks to enterprises’ interest in fine-tuning their own models for specific use cases. Amazon.com is ranked as the #11 website in the world so the breadth of adoption could be incredible.
📰 Content
Generative AI Tools for Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) helps DevOps, ITOps and other engineers manage data, applications and infrastructure in dynamic IT environments with increasing scale, complexity and diversity. With a GitOps-driven workflow, engineers can bring much-needed standardization, security and operational consistency across diverse environments. This piece discusses how engineers can use generative AI to generate, interpret and debug code and accelerate their workflows.
Why does this matter? We are strong believers in AI-enabled developer tools. When speaking with buyers, unprompted they raise how LLMs that create IaC could help improve the consistency of cloud resource provisioning. Builders state AI-enabled IaC would be a big unlock that would help unburden DevOps teams.
Sanchan Saxena (Ex-VP Product): Lessons From Instagram, Airbnb, and Coinbase
Peter Yang of Creator Economy interviews Sanchan Saxena, ex-head of product at Airbnb and ex-VP at Coinbase. Sanchan has worked directly with four incredible founders — Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger (Instagram), Brian Armstrong (Coinbase), and Brian Chesky (Airbnb). They discuss leadership principles.
Why does this matter? I always enjoy pieces that distill exceptional leaders’ core values. One of my favorites from the interview, “unconstrained thinking” from Brian Chesky at Airbnb.
Vercel’s Path to Product-Market Fit — From Open-Source Project to Billion-Dollar Business
Vercel, the frontend cloud service behind open-source development framework Next.js, was recently valued at $2.5 billion. It is used by eBay, Zapier, and The Washington Post. Next.js has more than 850,000 developers using it to build websites with billions of global users, like ChatGPT, TikTok and Notion. This piece discusses Guillermo Rauch’s beginnings and building Vercel.
Why does this matter? Founder journeys aren’t clear from the outset. It is inspiring to read Rauch’s story and his emphasis on the power of open source, “If I were to do it over again, I would do it the same way: using open source. And I would continue to invest in making the product as free and available as possible.”
💼 Jobs
⭐️DragonflyDB — React Tech Lead — Dragonfly Cloud
⭐️Chroma — Member of Technical Staff
⭐️Speakeasy — Product Engineer
Views expressed in posts and other content linked on this website or posted to social media and other platforms are my own and are not the views of Felicis Ventures Management Company, LLC. The posts do not constitute investment, legal, tax, or other advice and do not constitute an offer to invest in any security.
