John Whaley

🌉 San Francisco's Surprising Comeback: From 'Doom Loop' to Renaissance? Recent data suggests that San Francisco, once trapped in a pandemic-induced 'doom loop', is showing strong signs of recovery. Here's what's changing: 📈 Positive Trends: - Population Growth: Net gains over the past two years, with domestic in-migration positive for the first time since 2012. - Housing Market: Median home sale prices up 1.2% YoY to $1,427,500 in June. - Job Growth: The Bay Area added 7,400 jobs between January and June. Downtown Revival: Foot traffic beyond typical work hours has recovered to over 90% of pre-pandemic levels. - Crime Reduction: Property crime down 32% and violent crime down 14% in Q1 2024 compared to Q1 2023. - AI Boom: The city is positioning itself as a hub for the AI revolution. 🚧 Ongoing Challenges: - High office vacancy rates - Homelessness and drug crisis - Lagging tourism and business travel 🔑 Key Initiatives: - "Vacant to Vibrant" program offering free rent to businesses in empty storefronts - Increased police patrols and encampment sweeping - Crackdown on open-air drug dealing 💡 Expert Insight: "The rising AI empire is giving the city a new edge. Funding, talents, and culture related to the AI revolution will help the city turn the corner." - Lu Chen, Senior Economist at Moody's Analytics 🤔 What's Your Take? Are these positive trends sustainable, or is it too early to declare a comeback? How can other cities learn from San Francisco's recovery strategies? What role will AI play in reshaping urban economies, particularly in tech hubs? https://lnkd.in/gCnPCBRU

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There are three educational experiences that stand out in my memory as capturing "the most important things I've ever learned." 1. MDA 365 at USC taught by Warren Bennis and Steven Sample (and Sadie Moore) 2. Design for Extreme Affordability by James Patell 3. Probabilistic Marketing by Peter Fader There's a lot to unpack in each of these experiences. What unifies them, however, is that they taught me something about the world that I would have been unable to uncover on my own and, in the process, made me reflect deeply about who I am and how I could be better. (And in #3's case, how I could approach business differently) Recently, I came across an old artifact from #1 - Dr. Sample's Supertexts. How many of these have you read? Have you thought about the lessons on leadership and life that could be applied? Of course, I'm focusing on institutional educational experiences, but it doesn't have to be: What have been the most important learning experiences for you? I'm interested in hearing about the journeys that have shaped folks - be it institutional or professional.

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CEO of NVIDIA Jensen Huang: “We never talk about market share in our company… Why are you fighting people for market share? The whole concept of market share says there’s a whole bunch of other people doing the same thing. And if they’re doing the same thing, why are we doing it? Why am I squandering the lives of these incredibly talented people to do something that has already been done? --- Found this helpful? Follow for more content like this. --- #startups #business #startup #entrepreneurship

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Why punish students for using AI when they will need it in future careers? Good question, in my own teaching at University of California, Riverside I don't prevent students from using GenAI, I encourage them. But this means I have to find different ways to assess their learning and it's not going to be based on memorizing information, and instead needs to be based on understanding and applying the information. Of course some subjects are more reliant on memorizing, for example in math you can not just let chatgpt or another AI solve all the questions. I'd be interested to know how math teachers are assessing students, while allowing the use of AI. There must be creative ways to do this, but educators need to evolve and cannot do what we've done in the past. It's a new world! https://lnkd.in/gz8wvqZK

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Exciting times in AI workforce development! Intel’s recent commitment to integrate AI education into community colleges starting with Maricopa County Community College District marks a transformative shift in how we view workforce training in the age of AI. Intel plans to reach millions of workers through this initiative by funding AI education and degree programs in states across the country. They have already launched 100 public-private partnerships according to their Chief People Officer Christy Pambianchi. This commitment from Intel is a strategic investment in future-proofing our economy and empowering a diverse range of students with high-demand skills in AI. Initiatives like this are what's going to bridge the huge gap that we see in Americans who know what AI is but might not understand how to use it or use-cases that it could support in - something Forrest Alonso Haydon and I dove into on this post (https://lnkd.in/gfPS68WN) Whether through partnerships with educational institutions or investing in internal training programs, there’s an opportunity to profoundly influence the future of work. For the AI enthusiasts in my network, how do you see the future of AI education? Do you think community colleges will begin to lead in educating folks on how to leverage these technologies in our economy? #AI #WorkforceDevelopment #TechEducation #FutureOfWork

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absolutely right - very easy to get high scores just with prompt engineering on these weak benchmarks. I just tried Reflection 70B on a few reasoning examples and compared its responses to other models - in some cases such as as word puzzles (river crossing problems), Reflection just seemed to be really confused, wracked with self-doubt, and gave warbled answers. (edited - ) just tested it a bit more and it is sometimes better off in some simpler logical puzzles. I also tested with mate-in-one to mate-in-3 problems - some of them I devised myself. In these cases, Reflection70B verbosely showed its reasoning, but suggestions were wrong. Surprisingly, gpt3.5 actually did better than even Sonnet. Obviously, models are not consistent in reasoning - they may shine in a few places and actually are frustratingly bad in other places. A few puzzles here and there do not really test their reasoning capabilities efficiently. Need a better comprehensive benchmark with an uncontaminated testing set.

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🤔 Curious about the Future of Work? Thrilled to host Matt Beane, professor at UCSB. Listen in as we discuss topics from his new book, "The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines," exploring how AI can be a partner to augment human skills, the role of digital apprenticeship in practical skill development, and the nuanced challenges of technology integration that benefit experts but may inadvertently impact novices.

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Congrats Neural Magic -- especially Prof. Nir Shavit and Dr. Alex Matveev -- on the acquisition announcement by Red Hat (and parent IBM). Love it! It's great to see Nir, Alex, and company do amazing things. I'm super grateful to have worked with some of you. :) From all of us at Merly, thanks for building amazing technology that's advancing our scientific understanding and making AI more efficient. And, best yet, helping us reducing the computational footprint and friction of DNNs/LLMs. Your success is evidence that we *can* push the boundaries of science and achieve technological breakthroughs, while simultaneously reducing compute costs: financial, temporal, and environmental. The big cloud providers could learn a lot from you. You're role models to all of us, especially me! https://lnkd.in/grVUvD4Y

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Really interesting podcast that brings up one of the characters that seems to not go away in #bayarea #tech culture, i.e #ayn #rand . Conceptually if you fled authoritarian regimes, some of her ideas are good, but in practice the idea that being purely selfish is good, is what is deeply wrong with tech. The real world is complex and simple philosophies like “selfish good” are appealing to simple people or exploitive people looking to exploit.

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What to do when training an AI model seems financially out of reach? Read what savvy, creative state and local agencies can do to get AI outcomes. Great blog written by my colleague Nicole Fisk . #HPEAI #AI #HPE

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Great article on how San Francisco is leaning in and leveraging its vast wealth of innovative thinkers, tech intensity, and vast learning and funding resources. San Francisco Chamber of Commerce is doing an amazing job embracing the next wave! Rodney Fong Anita LW Huang Katy Brown #Microsoft #AzureAI #Startups #AI

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🚀 Exciting news! #Cohesity adopts NVIDIA NIM to supercharge retrieval augmented generation apps for enterprises. 🚀 This collaboration enhances #AI capabilities: 1️⃣ Faster deployment of generative AI models 2️⃣ Streamlined development with prebuilt microservices 3️⃣ Accelerated AI innovation for your enterprise

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An interesting alternative emerges to transformer-based architectures, and here comes a new acronym - the LFMs...MIT spinoff Liquid debuts non-transformer AI models and they’re already state-of-the-art https://bit.ly/3TQdvnO #govtech #AI #genAI

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