Aparna Dhinakaran

AI memory is fundamental for conversational AI and AI agents. It is critical for building personalized experiences and improving reasoning. Check out Letta’s course to understand how to use AI memory to enhance the customization and quality of your AI app.

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The most downloaded datasets from the California HHS site? If you follow me on LinkedIn, you've probably guessed it - the Medi-Cal enrolled provider list and Suspended and Ineligible list are the top two, followed by other datasets by a wide margin. The California Health & Human Services Agency (Cal HHS) has a nice data hosting site that resembles data.cms.gov. The site looks slick and provides interesting insights, including visitor statistics and download metrics. It's fascinating to see how people are interested in provider eligibility and exclusion data for Medi-Cal billing. Looking at how organizations use these public datasets, compliance emerges as the dominant use case. This makes sense - when accessing government data portals, users are typically verifying facts related to government programs. The user base spans health plans, hospitals, IPAs, medical groups, and even commercial payers, as Medicaid suspensions often trigger reviews across the healthcare ecosystem. What's interesting is that this pattern extends beyond healthcare. On data.ca.gov, which hosts all kinds of government data, the most downloaded dataset is the directory of certified electricians. This shows a consistent theme - whether it's healthcare providers or electricians, people come to government sites primarily to verify professional credentials and eligibility. This raises an intriguing observation about how government data is used. The way organizations use these datasets - downloading lists to verify credentials and eligibility - is functionally similar to what modern Identity Provider (IdP) systems do, but through a much more manual process. What are your thoughts on the future of government data in healthcare identity verification? #Healthcare #DigitalTransformation #Compliance #HealthTech #GovTech #Identity

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Vishal Sachdev highlights the strategic integration of open source and proprietary tech in architecting tech stacks, developer ecosystems and resulting business models. The world class companies effectively balance value commoditization in open source and value capture in proprietary tech. This is the strategic challenge for companies operating in #blockchain and #AI. I believe those who operate at the intersection of blockchain *and* AI stand to win this strategic battle...

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We're launching the inaugural edition of Beyond Benchmarks, a deep dive into the metrics and trends observed across the early-stage enterprise cloud market. This is the first look at some of the business data around GenAI in SaaS. Some initial observations: 1) 60% of SaaS companies have already integrated GenAI into their offerings (60% of these as part of their current product and 40% as a new product), and an additional 20% are planning to do so this year. Almost half aren't monetizing these features. Those that are are primarily experimenting with both usage-based and flat fee pricing models. 2) Most companies are utilizing OpenAI as their primary LLM, but many are experimenting with multiple models - and we are noticing an early trend towards intelligently routing GenAI inference requests to different models based on cost, performance, and security. 3) Though we are in the initial innings of GenAI, we are seeing some positive signals - companies that implemented GenAI had 7% higher NDR than those that did not. Still early days, but we'll be doing this benchmarking report regularly to track and share how things progress in this new era. Link to report in comments.

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I’ve been fortunate enough to do AI shows with Sam Altman, Yann LeCun & Arthur Mensch. But this show today with David Cahn at Sequoia Capital is the best of all of them: 🧠 AI’s $600BN question 🏃 Why no one will never train a frontier model on the same data center twice 🏗️ Servers, steel & power: The 3 pillars of the future of AI Not one to be missed, my 8 key takeaways 👇 1. The Oligopoly That is Blowing Billions on AI - Microsoft, Azure, & Google now represent $7T market cap. - Of course they will spend billions to protect their oligopoly - What is most interesting is Meta is the only incumbent that is financing this not with cloud being their cash cow. 2. How Startups Could Win with the Cost of Compute Coming Down - Big tech companies are producers of compute & startups are consumers of compute. - Overproduction of compute = lower prices.  - This gives startups higher margins & makes them more valuable. 3. Is Compute the Currency of the Future or Do the Costs Come Down and It Is Commoditised? - We are forgetting “compute” is a euphemism for a $2BN data center in the middle of nowhere. - They have GPUs & liquid cooling systems that need to be constantly optimized & upgraded. - We cannot simply build 15 years worth of compute all at once.  No one's ever going to train a frontier model on the same data center twice. 4. Data Centre Teams and Model Teams Need to Be Coupled - You cannot have separate teams running data centers & building models. - Elon & Zuck control all their data centres. - It will not work as these models get better & better. 5. Why the Data Center Is the Most Important Asset - There is not much difference between these models today. - AI researchers are jumping from one lab to another. - Scaling laws will become more dominant as these models get bigger. 6. Servers Steel and Power: The Three Bottlenecks of AI Three things: 1. Servers: NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom… 2. Steel: Construction & real estate developers for data centers. 3. Power: All the energy required for AI. - More factories will be built in 12 months for AI and we will see another industrial revolution. 7. You Have to Have a Cash Machine to Play the Big Model Game - Amazon has AWS - Meta has Instagram - Microsoft has Azure - You need a cash machine to compete and it CANNOT be the AI business. 8. There is One Definition of Success in Venture: Are you a Slugger? - If you are generating billion dollar gains, you are a slugger. - Doug Leone, Pat Grady, Andrew Reed are all sluggers. - You cannot be good at this business without being a slugger. (links in comments) #founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #seed #funding #sequoia

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Outcome-Based Pricing, AgentOS, and User Simulators: 3 takeaways from Sequoia Capital's Pat Grady & Ravi Gupta's chat with Sierra's co-founder Clay Bavor 🧠 1. Outcome-Based Pricing for High-Value AI Tasks: Charge based on the value delivered, not just usage 💰 2. AgentsOS: A powerful concept for coordinating and managing multiple AI agents 🤖 3. User Simulators: Testing AI agents with simulated users to accelerate user alignment and build a moat 🤯 User simulators could be a game-changer, providing a massive dataset of simulated customer behavior to train and refine AI agents. This could lead to a powerful "simulated customer data flywheel," offering a unique competitive advantage. What are your thoughts on these AI agent trends? 🤔 #AI #Agents #Sequoia #Sierra #Innovation #TechTrends Link to the original interview: https://lnkd.in/eK6MG6wx

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$2 H100s: How the GPU Bubble Burst Last year, H100s were $8/hr if you could get them. Today, there's 7 different resale markets selling them under $2. What happened? The market has flipped from shortage ($8/hr) to oversupplied ($2/hr), because of reserved compute resales, open model finetuning, and decline in new foundation model co’s. Rent instead. https://lnkd.in/gpQEidmC

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NVIDIA's Jensen said "ChatGPT democratized computing, Llama2 democratized generative AI" ...and now Llama3 is the next level 🔥 It's fascinating to watch Meta's strategic moves. With Llama3, they prioritized training on a massive 15T token dataset to pack all into a lean 70B param model, instead of building a massive model. This allows Llama 3 to match trillion+ parameter models like GPT-4, but at 1/10th the compute, storage and inference costs! 💰 This technique was published by Google DeepMind a few years ago https://lnkd.in/gx7VU8aA Meta is not a dark horse in AI anymore. They might be the top dog. https://lnkd.in/gRRJYuxt #llama2 #llama3 #llm #chatgpt #gpt4 #ai #ml

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Thanks for sharing these insights. What I am seeing is that orgs test an idea using a proprietary #LLM like #OpenAI, then put it into production with an open source LLM using a development platform like #Llamaindex. That way, private data remains private.

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Notion vs Glean reminds me a lot of Tesla vs Waymo... Just like I think Tesla is going to solve the 'software' problem of autonomous vehicles before Waywmo solves the 'hardware' problem... I think that Notion is going to solve 'enterprise knowledge search' before Glean solves the problem of document and knowledge creation... Why? A couple reasons: 1) Just like Tesla, Notion has a huge advantage when it comes to the amount of underlying data and documents to train on... They already have 100M+ users, and likely 10x that in terms of the number of documents, files, etc. in team's workspaces. 2) It's very hard to change people's behaviour re: where/how they create 'work'. It's why a lot of companies have come and gone in that category... As exciting as Glean's AI writing assistants might seem, most people are just fine (or even prefer) a good old fashioned editor/writer. I could be way off here, but this will be an intersting one to follow. Thoughts? Where am I getting it wrong? #ai #enterprise #knowledge #management #notion #glean

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Interesting answer from AlphaSense CEO Jaakko (Jack) Kokko on why they acquired Tegus - all about access to proprietary data, in this case the transcript library on private companies. You recently acquired a company called Tegus. Was this about having more proprietary data to feed into your models? First and foremost, it was about providing our customers with the best possible intelligence on the market, especially on private companies. A couple of years ago, we acquired a company called Stream, the No. 2 player in what you might think of as a library of interview transcripts between investors and experts on a company — their former executives, competitors, customers, partners. It allowed us to produce information that you can’t access anywhere else, and our customers loved it. Tegus is the market leader in that sector and was the natural next step for us. They have the world’s best library of private company content, and we immediately wrapped our search capabilities, our generative AI, our monitoring capabilities around their content and made it much more valuable. We now have the broadest coverage of insights on both public and private companies, allowing our AI to provide even better answers to our customers.

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Gemini 2.0 handles complex math and planning tasks previously out of reach of LLMs. You can turn on "code generation" in AI Studio and in the APIs. For context, let's talk about function calling and voice AI agents. (I spend a lot of time working on voice AI.) Voice AI agents use function calls for: - Interacting with external systems specific to particular use cases and deployment contexts. - A wide range of RAG-like information lookup tasks. - Conversation persistence, including complex actions like saving a privacy-redacted version of a conversation. - Script following. Some of these uses were obvious before we had built and deployed production voice AI systems. But some of them weren't. (Script following, for example.) We had to build experiments, and then production systems, to figure out what features and tooling these new systems really need. I'm convinced that code generation will be as important as function calling, once we've accumulated some experience building with Gemini 2.0 and similarly capable new LLM versions. Credit for this insight goes entirely to Shrestha Basu Mallick, who shepherds work at Google on the Gemini APIs and AI Studio. When Shrestha first told me that really good code generation was going to make a lot of new things possible, I didn't really get it. But after playing with code generation for a few weeks ... I still don't fully get it, but in a good way, now. It's clear that there are some obvious things to explore: - Context-aware math on demand driven by natural language. - Generative UI. - Better "binding" behavior with function calling. But I'm also convinced now that there is a lot of unexplored, non-obvious (at least to me, yet) territory. Let's take that last one — improved function calling performance. Function calling and code generation go together like peanut butter and jelly. Functions often take arguments that are fairly complicated. With code generation enabled, Gemini has access to this new pattern: natural language ➡️ code that creates argument structs for functions ➡️ multiple function calls Think about how powerful this is. The ability to use even very basic code structures — loops, for example — massively expands what LLMs can do. In fact, my impression is that function calling in Gemini 2.0 is now trained as a subset of the model's code generation capabilities. This feels quite different than how function calling works in other models that I have access to. In other models, function calling feels like a close cousin to structured output. Which is great. But this new "modality" is even better. (More on the prompt in this post, and the meta-prompt for this post, here: https://lnkd.in/gycKtnNX)

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I wrote a blog post on a thorny but underappreciated problem in ML-based marketing personalization: event attribution. It's how you go from the actions you take and customer behavior you observe to creating training experiences for your model. Good attribution makes a huge difference in driving uplift, there are a lot of degrees of freedom in configuring it, and at the same time, it's rarely discussed in ML/bandits/RL literature.

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This is a good article on using LLMs in the real world. It covers many aspects that we learned at Nurish over the last few months and more. Using LLMs is an inexact science, but has its own needs in processes and tools. While most of the attention has been on the LLMS, their capabilities, and RAG, there are mundane issues that need to be taken care of, issues where the solutions for pre-LLM development are not that well-suited. These include version management, integration, testing, data management, quality assessment, and more. This article covers many of those practical aspects. Eugene Yan, Bryan Bischof, Charles Frye & more https://applied-llms.org/

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🪦 RPA is dead – right? Yesterday, Andreessen Horowitz posted an investment thesis about the end of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and the subsequent rise of intelligent automation. Kimberly Tan made great points, and I think the thesis is pretty spot on. RPA as it exists today has fallen drastically short of what it promised to achieve. There’s a couple key problems: 1. Long and expensive (!!!) implementation process. If you want to implement RPA within your organization today, you have to go through a multimillion dollar implementation phase that can take months. Unless you’re a massive company, there’s no way you can make this work. 2. Brittle, hardcoded flows. RPAs today are heavily dependent on hardcoded rules. These automations break as soon as the underlying websites change, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of having an automation in the first place When you combine the two, you quickly reach a cost structure that makes a positive ROI impossible to achieve. As a result, the majority of repetitive, back-office workflows are still un-automated. LLM driven RPA will close this gap and deliver what the first wave of RPA companies promised 15 years ago. I don’t think RPA is ‘dead’, per se. But, I do think that new, vertical specific automation tools are going to force incumbents to decide between cannibalizing their business models or slowly fading into irrelevance. I can’t think of a more exciting space to be building in. —----- If anyone has anything to add or thoughts on these I'd love to hear them below!

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LLMs are not vast, infallible databases. As models grow larger so does their tendency to confidently state falsehoods (hallucinations). Matei Zaharia, co-founder & CTO of Databricks, warns against treating LLMs as internet-scale encyclopedias and proposes we focus on what they excel at:  → Reasoning → Interpreting language → Understanding context For founders building AI applications, treat LLMs as powerful reasoning engines and not fact repositories. Build your knowledge base separately, feeding the LLM with trusted up-to-date information through retrieval mechanisms and tool-calling. This approach lets you harness the LLM's strengths in language analysis and generation while sidestepping the risks of its unreliable memory. Building with AI? Share your approach to balancing LLM reasoning power with factual accuracy in the comments. Let's hear it!

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I just read an insightful piece by Eric Broda (published in Towards Data Science) that outlines the Agentic Mesh—a new ecosystem designed for autonomous agents to interact, collaborate, and transact. His work introduces a structured approach for managing the coming surge in autonomous agents, showing how they can function independently yet collectively. Agentic Mesh serves as a networked environment where autonomous agents operate in a safe, transparent, and efficient manner. It allows agents to find each other and securely interact under a framework of policies. Each agent has a specific purpose and autonomy, making it a valuable contributor to the ecosystem without sacrificing security or control. Core Components: 1. Marketplace: A centralized space where users discover agents by tasks and capabilities, offering a trusted environment for engagement. 2. Registry: A metadata repository organizing each agent’s purpose, owner, and policies, allowing agents and users to securely find and connect with each other. 3. DNS Integration: Each agent has a recognizable digital identity, enabling seamless discovery and interaction, just like an internet service. 4. Agent Stack: This layered structure of communication protocols, control services, and interfaces helps agents operate effectively and responsibly. It ensures that agents act independently within controlled parameters. Agentic Mesh’s effectiveness depends on agents sharing consistent attributes, including: • Purpose: A clear objective drives each agent’s actions. • Ownership: Transparency around ownership fosters responsibility and trust. • Autonomy: Agents act independently within set parameters to complete tasks. • Discoverability: Easily locatable, ensuring efficient interaction within the network. • Intelligence: Agents utilize language models to plan and execute tasks, adapting to complexity as needed. Operational Flow: Registration, Discovery, and Execution Agent interactions in the Mesh follow three core flows: 1. Registration: Agents set up purpose, policies, and registration data to gain visibility in the mesh. 2. Discovery: Through the registry, agents and users locate potential collaborators based on defined needs. 3. Execution: Engaged agents use AI models to plan and perform tasks, enlisting collaborators when necessary to complete workflows. Read the full article: https://lnkd.in/eVmq5BFC

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🚨🚨 🚨 Unlocking Innovation: The Power of the Adjacent Possible Innovation programs can stall when the team tries to ideate way beyond their collective perspective and frame of reference. Like a software engineer brainstorming genetic modification of mycelia, or a senior executive ideating process improvements which they haven't been participated in for decades. It's challenging, exhausting, and ultimately self-defeating. Enter the concept of the "Adjacent Possible" - a game-changer for innovation. What is it? The Adjacent Possible, coined by Stuart Kauffman, represents the realm of new ideas within reach based on our current knowledge, resources, and capabilities. Why it matters: ➡️ Realistic Innovation: it focuses on achievable advancements, not far-fetched concepts. ➡️ Incremental Progress: each innovation opens doors to new possibilities. How to leverage it: • Constantly explore the boundaries of your adjacent possible. What's in your line of sight is what you know best. • Combine existing ideas in novel ways. Even small perturbations from status quo can generate large innovation leaps. • Stay curious about developments in adjacent industries. Cross-domain patterns create fresh sources of ideas, while also expanding the adjacent possible. Most of all, it takes the 'genius' pressure off the team. No one knows everything, but each one of us knows a lot about something, and we can all drive plenty of innovation potential by focusing on the spaces we know best. Are you exploring your Adjacent Possible? Share your thoughts below! 👇 #Innovation #innovationsystems #AdjacentPossible

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Excellent article on Groq's LPU and it's blinding speed ( and cost 🙄 ) by Archana Vaidheeswaran . Gives you a sneak peak on the costs of speed when it comes to LLMs.

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