Amir Efrati
@amir
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Executive Editor @theinformation . We're hiring. amir @ DM for Signal
San Francisco
Joined February 2010
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Pinned Tweet
OpenAI NEWS:
Sam Altman, Jony Ive, and Masa Son working on a AI hardware device, per
@Jessicalessin
@steph_palazzolo
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Exclusive: Microsoft deepens partnership w/ OpenAI as it looks to add GPT to Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Teams, etc.
Big move with big implications.
@aaronpholmes
@KevKubernetes
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NEW: Prominent Google AI researcher resigned after warning Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and other senior execs that Bard—Google’s rival to ChatGPT—was *using data from ChatGPT*.
Big no-no in that world.
w/
@jon_victor_
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Jensen Huang to CEOs: Tell me how much you lov—
Every CEO: Done.
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F—ing blockbuster bonkers criminal allegations against Uber. This is like reading a spy flick script:
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New:
@fast
is shutting down, a dramatic collapse for a 3yo company that raised $120M from
@stripe
& others, and hired hundreds of employees despite generating barely any revenue from its fast-checkout software.
by
@Jessicalessin
@luxeoflique
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980
Apple made Facebook ads appear worthless, but often they weren’t.
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❗️Almost 700 of 770 OpenAI employees including Sutskever have signed letter demanding Sam and Greg back and reconstituted board with Sam allies on it.
That’s…powerful.
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EXCLUSIVE:
@elonmusk
personally takes over Model 3 production, bumping Doug Field (ex-Apple), who had had meteoric rise til now, plus other new details: $TSLA
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~Big~ news in AI land—
Meta wants to make the next version of LLaMA — its open source LLM —available for commercial use.
@SylviaVarnham
@jon_victor_
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#Android
OEM profitability by
@charlesarthur
(). OEMs tell me they're at peace with this.
http://t.co/tU4PB5GZAf
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🚀notable startup-funding alert🚀: productivity app maker
@NotionHQ
just raised $10M at $800M valuation. Only new investor is
@danielgross
. Lot of funds have been asking to get in on this. We talked to COO
@akothari
this afternoon...
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"Her" is coming :)
NEW: OpenAI developed a new model with audio-in, audio-out capabilities and better reasoning. Even beats GPT-4 Turbo on some queries.
@steph_palazzolo
#AI
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Uh oh—
After Google got hammered for trying to use OpenAI data to train Bard, news has emerged that OpenAI secretly used YouTube data to train its models.
@jon_victor_
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Exclusive: Uber algorithm calculated lowest possible comp offer for job candidates, perpetuating gender pay gap
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Some news: OpenAI has been preparing to release its first open-source language model.
Meaning the startup taking a more hybrid approach than we realized.
Pressure will rise on Google to follow.
by
@jon_victor_
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News: AI coding startup said it made a breakthrough in AI reasoning, not unlike OpenAI's Q*.
w/
@steph_palazzolo
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I can confirm that the Expensify Lounge in downtown SF is one of the most head-turning things I have seen here in the past 10 years.
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Ok it’s real. Woof.
Google has some serious work to do in the coming weeks to clean up its confidence scoring on conversational answers.
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New: Travis Kalanick has said his kitchen-rental startup, CloudKitchens, could be worth $2.5b *now*, up from $450m in early 2018, and will be bigger than Uber. $uber
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people call
@satyanadella
bet on OpenAI a management masterclass.
getting the rest of $msft to fall in lockstep behind outsourcing R&D... not simple.
Love this top from
@aaronpholmes
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Ilya Sutskever has reaffirmed his earlier decision to remove Sam.
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New:
OpenAI developing two types of “AI agents.”
You’ll hear a lot about agents this year as they become all the rage.
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🚗new: Amazon agrees to buy Zoox for $1B+
$amzn
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Exclusive:
OpenAI is blowing by earlier revenue projections, already passed $1b ARR.
Turns out plenty of big companies like LLMs :)
w /
@aaronpholmes
@OpenAI
$msft
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Google’s CEO just said he is unaware of tech theft by China, targeting US cos. He may have forgotten the seminal 2009 Aurora cyberattack from 🇨🇳, allegedly tied to PLA, that Google itself said successfully obtained *Google IP/source code*.
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May seem like a small thing to non-reporters but Facebook loses credibility by issuing a Friday night press release to “front-run” publications that were set to publish negative articles about its platform. If you want us to become more suspicious, mission accomplished.
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Senior execs/managers at 🚗🛴Uber🚐🍟 say:
*"Ride-sharing" aka UberPool doesn't work
*Uber less efficient than rival startups in food + scooters/bikes
*Autonomous vehicle R&D: 👎
*Uber Cash, Uber Bus: 🦥
*Unit leaders being held accountable?🤷♂️🤷♀️
$uber
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At a high level, the self-driving car race is between:
Team Integrated:
@waymo
@Ford
@GM
@voyage
@DidiChuxing
@UberATG
@torcrobotics
@aurora_inno
@driveai_
@Tesla
@AI_motive
Team Modular:
@BMW
@DelphiAuto
@fiat
@Volkswagen
@Baidu_Inc
@renovo_auto
@nvidia
@lyft
@Zenuity
@Daimler
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whoever did Oracle's due diligence for its $30B acquisition of electronic health records firm Cerner in 2022 did bad, bad job. quite a story.
@dodgeblake
@ashannstew
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.
@Waymo
engineers said today that using neural nets and behavior cloning to do an "end to end" self-driving system probably will not work. ()
They do not name Tesla but it appears to be an implicit dig at Tesla's approach/long-term philosophy.
I also learned a lot about how Autopilot works, including the use of “behavior cloning” in path planning and the limitations of “shadow mode” testing on the existing fleet.
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New:
Andreessen Horowitz and other investors / partners in Synapse, the just-collapsed fintech, were aware of recordkeeping discrepancies for years
@MichaelRoddan
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❗️exclusive: Jony Ive & Sam Altman's mysterious AI device company in funding talks w/ Laurene Powell Jobs's firm & OpenAI investor Thrive.
it will not look like a phone btw :)
more here:
@Jessicalessin
@KateClarkTweets
@coryweinberg
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A senior DataRobot data scientist resigned last night and sent this note to staff:
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Also these must be end times because the leaders of Google Brain and
@DeepMind
do NOT like working together but were forced to do so.
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🚨OpenAI made a major technical breakthrough before Altman firing and we figured out what it is.
Meet Q* (Q star) & the method Ilya Sutskever developed to get over LLM limitations around training data.
@jon_victor_
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NEW: Silicon Valley Bank CEO just held a call with VC firms where he asked them to stay calm during the “panic” and that the bank is fine—unless everyone tells everyone SVB is in trouble. $sivb
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Vast majority of Uber & Lyft drivers *still* don't want to be employees, prefer being independent contractors, per
@TheRideshareGuy
. (Presumably because these have been side gigs for them, not primary source of income.)
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New:
OpenAI employees are jumping ship after Sutskever reaffirms Altman firing.
Sunday bloody Sunday.
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Addendum: Vast majority of Uber employees arrived after Uber's share price reached $48.77, and many of them got RSUs at that price or near it. Current price: $41.60. For many, the bonus awards they received are worth less today than at the time they were granted.
#UberIPO
The story of $uber IPO isnt the massive amounts made by the founders and investors, but the 1000s of employees that are receiving life changing money for their hard work.
They are the future angel investors, founders and philanthropists.
They are the story of Silicon Valley.
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NEW: Trouble in the Musk-verse as his hand-picked leader for anti-woke AI company was arrested last month for domestic violence.
by
@jon_victor_
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Ethereum: ~30 transactions per second.
Visa: 24,000 transactions per second.
“We are in the dial up days.” —
@katie_haun
of
@a16z
Architecture hasn’t been built yet to scale up programmable money.
#subscribersummit
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honest question: why does twitter allow an account to follow 20k or 50k people? most such accounts aren't actually reviewing the content generated by those people.
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When we called
@Tesla
about this news more than a week ago, they told us it was not true. Next time we will know what "no" really means 😄
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Goldman Sachs paid $5M for 14M Uber shares in 2011. Sold those shares for about $420M in past 2 years. And Goldman got some business from Uber (handling fundraisings, SoftBank secondary transaction, though not the IPO lead). Not a bad haul!
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Love it when
@aamir_khan
says controversial things. Shows me what it's like to be Twitter celeb. My notifications:
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Musk has 29 hours to hit his public goal, a goal that got EVERYONE'S attention in the auto industry. (People still talk about it constantly.) Let's see what he puts up.
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🚗👮Just in: ex-Google & Uber exec Anthony Levandowski gets 18-month prison sentence for stealing a document from Google's self-driving car program. Judge Alsup had a lot to say about why it was the "biggest trade secret crime" he had seen.
More here:
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Whoa. Gov’t workers use
@telegram
to keep conversations out of public record.
@coryweinberg
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The
@Yahoo
building got quite a makeover between Seasons 1 and 2 of
@SiliconHBO
:) $BABA
http://t.co/ga93zC2idd
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Are Airbnb and Uber a luxury/high cost product? 100% yes.
Are they inferior to what existed before? Absolutely not. Are you kidding me?
Airbnb and Uber are the antithesis of technology
An inferior product that now costs more than legacy equivalents
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The CEO of Alphabet/ Google has what you might call a delicate leadership style, which was not an issue during monopoly time.
Can it work in a time of crisis?
$goog w/
@jon_victor_
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“The trouble with self-driving cars is people”—specifically, predicting their behavior, Gill Pratt, who is head of Toyota Research Institute, told me recently. Today’s AI doesn’t know that a mother holding a child likely won’t cross the street illegally but two teenagers might.
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Ilya told staff tonight that kicking out Sam was the “only path” to do AI right at OpenAI.
@anissagardizy8
just spoke to Ilya and he did not want to say more, answered her brusquely. More details on the fallout here:
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New: Mistral seeks $5B valuation just a few months after getting $2B.
Funding action at the head of the LLM race continues unabated.
by
@kateclarktweets
7
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149
Another update: mora than 92% of OpenAI employees say they will join Altman at Microsoft if board doesnt capitulate.
Singees include cofounders Karpathy, Schulman, Zaremba. (And Sutskever, who capitulated five hours ago)
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Per
@dkhos
, $Uber modeled that if its ride business declined 80% (year over year) for the rest of the year, as a worst case scenario, Uber will still have $4B in cash on Dec. 31.
Reason: about 2/3 of its costs, including insurance, don't happen when trips don't happen.
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NEW: My colleagues got inside the OpenAI situation.
Schisms over AI "safety" and the OpenAI charter/mission. Looks like a mirror image of when Anthropic broke off from OpenAI in 2020:
@jon_victor_
@steph_palazzolo
@anissagardizy8
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But replicating driving is hard because it’s more complex than you and I ever think about. There’s much we do that’s hard for a robot. And if the robot actually follows the law, that makes things harder because human drivers are rule breakers. [Our article gets into this.]
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🚘New🚘: ~10% of Tesla Autopilot software team churned in past few months. Heads of perception, path-planning & simulation replaced (not to mention the overall chief of unit). Why? It's hard to adapt highway driving system to streets. $tsla
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Love this team. Onward!
The opportunity in tech reporting has never been greater and more important. Which is why I asked
@amir
to be
@theinformation
's new Executive Editor to bring his reporting and sourcing to our broader team. Congrats
@amir
!
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You should get everything for free. I'm sure that is how you do things at AWS, that great free service.
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Wondering if other writers experience this: you write something you think is good in font you like, such as Georgia or Times New Roman. Then you convert to Arial and you realize what you wrote is not good. It was the font all along.
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A lot of AI startups are consultancies, not software businesses.
They all hope to be Palantir, which (successfully) transitioned from one to the other. Few can pull that off.
@steph_palazzolo
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Dear anyone in tech, I know you haven't seen
@HaltAMC
but please start now. There needs to be a season 3.
#SaveHalt
http://t.co/fG16KKLkx6
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...in suburban Phoenix starts here, at a T intersection at East Fairview St. and South 56 St., the closest one to Waymo’s vehicle depot in Chandler. Waymo’s vans sometimes have trouble finding a gap in traffic to turn left, frustrating people who say they get stuck behind them.
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Exclusive: an Uber whistleblower and others tried to prevent disaster in the self-driving car unit. This is the story:
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Exclusive: 🥕Instacart🥕 has turned its first net profit as America *fully* embraces grocery delivery amid Covid-19, tho that doesn’t tell the full story… (1/thread)
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From this piece on Google laughing all the way to the bank, thanks to Apple.
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This is the kind of scruff you grow when you live in an Uber IPO cave for weeks.
Despite some negatives, Uber, Lyft and other ride-hailing companies have "really modernized the taxi market,"
@amir
tells
@WmBrangham
.
0
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Not sure how to say this delicately, but for fast coffee/lunch decisions,
@foursquare
is my new
@yelp
. Worth another look, folks.
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Silicon Valley startups run on trust. Among the unwritten rules are that employees & investors get equity if things go well. But what happens when things go *very* well & not everyone plays by those rules? Happens more than you think. Thread 👇
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My quick tally on “disengagements” (humans taking over to avoid accidents) per 1,000 miles by self-driving car prototypes in California.
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.
@a16z
is serious about being a media publisher and is looking for two senior editors to launch, among other things, an opinion section that is “unapologetically pro-tech.”
@zoeSaintBernard
reports.
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Here are the 200 people who make Tesla Autopilot (in org chart form), specifics on what the senior managers do, and how they interact with Elon Musk, who is bug-finder-in-chief
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Where does this leave us? There are times when it seems “autonomy is around the corner,” and the vehicle can go for a day without a human driver intervening, said a person familiar with Waymo. Other days reality sets in because “the edge cases are endless.” Photo not from AZ :)
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Scooplet -- Yet another 🚗 Tesla VP is out. This time in finance. This exodus is like the🔋 🐰 $TSLA
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So lower your expectations for truly driverless taxis to get you through the day. We’re still close to the starting line of this long but worthwhile race. If you are interested in the field & what the worldwide leader is going through, check this out:
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🚘🚘 Double parked vehicles: Rough stuff for an AV prototype. Remote assistance drew him a new trajectory. 🚗
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How many startups announce $10M in revenue or financials of any kind? Some of them freak the f--- out when we tell them we are about to write about their revenue. The reason everyone writes about funding is because startups often don't disclose anything else.
Make $10mm. Crickets.
Raise $10mm. Everyone writes about you. You get invited to all the hot events. Your network goes crazy with congratulations.
This is how we get a culture that trains founders to raise $$ > make $$.
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NEW: exclusive data on 🚕🚘Waymo🚖🚗 self-driving car performance in Phoenix. We just finished a big reporting effort… (1/6)
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