fraser
@Fraser
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VC at Spark Capital. Past: Head of Product at OpenAI; co-founder/ceo of an AI startup that was acquired by Airbnb
Joined December 2006
After leading product at OpenAI for two and a half years I’ve made the decision to move on. I’ll be telling the story of modern AI and investing in OpenAI alumni and other remarkable founders. More in the thread below and at:
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Our car window was smashed and my backpack stolen. Men rolled up in a car wearing ski masks and jumped out. Us and our four kids a few feet away. Laptop, phone, etc all gone. The city is suffering. This is not normal and we should demand better.
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In March 2021 I contemplated leaving @OpenAI to start a company around the ideas that open source and open research were going to win. I decided it was too early but obviously that's no longer the case. Here was my thinking at the time. Who is building this? I Want to help them.
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On the one hand, I feel for @ylecun and Meta/Google researchers. Not seeing your research released in usable products due to big tech bureaucratic bs would be hard to stomach. Yet what they have released has been so fumbled it suggests a profound ignorance about shipping product.
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@ylecun This wasn't meant to be controversial. I'm saying the same thing as LeCun:. "It's nothing revolutionary, although that's the way it's perceived in the public," the computer scientist said. "It's just that, you know, it's well put together, it's nicely done.".
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If you're an eng or researcher who wants to work on the forefront of AI, I want to help. I know everyone at @openai, Spark has invested in @AnthropicAI, @AdeptAILabs and others. I am an angel in @trychroma, @perplexity_ai, @dust4ai, @contextualai, etc. DM me.
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The Financial Times wrote that "OpenAI ranks as one of the most unusual organizations on the planet". I’ve been here just over a year and I must agree! . Here’s a thread.
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I believe strongly that:. 1) The best products that will emerge from this moment are “full stack”, with teams training their own models, and the models & UI informing one another. 2) This requires researchers who care deeply about what’s best for the product, including data.
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I joined Spark two weeks ago and wired my first investment today. I love entrepreneurship and technology. I love that a small team can ship and change the world. As a former founder, I’m excited to support founders building remarkable products.
Spark Capital hires OpenAI’s former head of product in AI push:
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In the summer I heard from about ~500 people because of the note below and helped many of them. In the next few weeks, I'd like to connect with more engineers and researchers looking to work on the frontier of AI. If you are interested in @OpenAI @AnthropicAI @AdeptAILabs.
If you're an eng or researcher who wants to work on the forefront of AI, I want to help. I know everyone at @openai, Spark has invested in @AnthropicAI, @AdeptAILabs and others. I am an angel in @trychroma, @perplexity_ai, @dust4ai, @contextualai, etc. DM me.
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I just used ChatGPT to interpret ultrasound results for my son (all is well) and it felt utterly remarkable. It is hard to even comprehend how much better our lives are going to be because of AI.
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Here are some of my thoughts on the future of AI, in response to the leaked google memo:. The case for open ai. tl;dr: there will be an oligopoly and a vibrant open ecosystem.
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Appreciate the kind words. We are all OK. Kids range from confused to shaken. I’m troubled that I have become so desensitized to the ills of the city that my immediate response was a resigned sigh at the nuisance this was going to create for us.
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But we’re at the earliest stages of a technology wave that will make the world dramatically better, in countless ways.
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@OpenAI I did not foresee that the champions of this movement would be Facebook. Rather wild! But we can thank @GuillaumeLample, @ylecun, and others.
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Proud to share that Spark Capital is leading a $35m round in Profluent. We’ve seen what happens when the scaling hypothesis is applied to language and are excited for a future where AI makes biology programmable.
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Congratulations to all of my friends at OpenAI! Many chapters will be written in the years ahead about the ingenuity that went into building GPT-4. They won't say it, but I can: this is a truly remarkable accomplishment by a team unlike any other in the world.
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We’re now entering the era of AI-first products and the world is changing in beautiful ways. I’ll be exploring this change with something new, telling the story of modern ai, and investing in OpenAI alumni and other remarkable founders. Follow along
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This is such a stunningly good post: AI systems focused on specific high-value use-cases are already emerging.
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And I’d like to be closer to people who share this view and who are building to this.
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"A badass sheep wearing a lab coat in a science lab, 1980s Miami vibe, digital art"
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Perhaps the most inspiring part of the Claude 3.5 release is that Artifacts is evidence we are early in the S Curve for productizing an assistant.
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New funds, same love for founders and those who build.
The Spark Capital team is thrilled to share that we have raised $2.3 billion in aggregate commitments for our new early-stage and venture-growth funds: Spark Capital VIII & Spark Growth V.
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2022 was especially sweet for me. From leading the DALLE product release to building and leading the team that launched ChatGPT — all while relocating a family of 6 to the Bay Area — it was a fun year (albeit busy).
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Maybe it’s because I came into AI accidentally, using it to help scale a product that supported people at risk of self harm and suicide, and later applied it to help Airbnb provide safer experiences for their hosts and guests.
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What a fabulous year. Thank you to everyone at @sparkcapital and the many friends at @OpenAI who helped make this possible. And thank you to the many founders I’ve gotten to know and get to work with.
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@finbarrtimbers Stakeholders gotta stake hold. And that’s the real super alignment effort of our time.
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@dece @stevesi @sama The challenge in the proposal is defining a compute threshold. Every time one has been set in recent years based on “danger” we’ve quickly learned the risks were ~zero. GPT-2 was deemed too dangerous to release. Evidence to date suggests a lack of credibility in forecasting risk.
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In summer 2020 many couldn’t appreciate why I’d join a research lab. After selling our AI startup to Airbnb in 2018 I realized that the AI world had changed because of the transformer and that soon AI would change the world.
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We're introducing DALL-E 2 today, AI that generates images from text. It's delightful, fun, and feels completely magical.
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In January, we introduced DALL-E, AI that generates images from text, and one of the most delightful pieces of technology I’ve ever used.
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It’s been enjoyable to help the world’s most ambitious research lab embrace product development. When I wrote the first product roadmap for OpenAI a lot of discussion focused on answering why product was important. The culture has come a long way!.
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If you love building products with exceptionally talented and compassionate teammates, come shape the future of AI. We're hiring on the product team for curious, determined, and kind individuals: .
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Set up a Lindy that gets cc'd, looks at my schedule, and replies with times to meet. Once confirmed, the Lindy delegates creating the calendar event to another Lindy, which informs the original Lindy once done so it can reply to the thread. Magic from @Altimor and team.
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@E0M @OpenAI @peteflorence @andyzeng_ Congratulations for all that you helped create, the products, yes, but especially the team you built and led. What a run and excited for all that you'll do next.
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Just over a year ago, we released GPT3. The MIT Technology Review named it one of the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2021 (alongside mRNA vaccine, no less) .
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I believed that with their talent and ambition OpenAI was the group most likely to shepherd in this change. It’s been an honour supporting the researchers and engineers who have done exactly that. They are the best at what they do.
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Few things in tech over the past decade have been more inspiring than what's happening in the open ecosystem around AI. I'm thrilled that @sparkcapital is supporting @csahil28 as he works to democratize AI via @GlaiveAI .
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We also introduced CLIP, a state-of-the-art image classifying AI. An “AI-generated art scene has exploded as hackers have been modifying an OpenAI model to make astonishing image-generation tools.”.
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This was a remarkable effort from a remarkable team. @joannejang led this from the product side, one of her first projects since joining a few months ago. If you are determined, curious, and kind -- and want to ship product this ambitious -- join us. fraser@openai.com.
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For Canadians in California the July 1st - July 4th combo is always sweet, especially so when Canada Day falls on a Saturday!.
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"Directly Competing With Open Source Is a Losing Proposition" purported leaked memo from Google
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@Carlos_A_Wong @OpenAI @huggingface Their focus on the researcher as the user will preclude them from delivering on this, though they're obviously building part of the ecosystem that will enable it. I think the closest today is @bfirsh / @replicatehq and @NaveenGRao / @MosaicML.
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One year ago today the technique to have GPT follow instructions was released, which went on to enable ChatGPT, and which will enable many startups to create differentiated product experiences
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@bobmcgrewai So much magic has radiated out of the research org, a constant stream of moments that made the world gasp. One. After. Another. Many talented researchers behind them but one constant behind the researchers. What a run, the rest is well earned.
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This research by @IreneSolaiman and @cbd was so surprising that in response I wrote a memo arguing that OpenAI should become the best in the world at human data annotation. Their work was foundational .for a lot of what's to come with OSS.
LIMA :.LLaMA 65B + 1000 supervised samples = {GPT4, Bard} level performance. From @MetaAI.
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@OpenAI @ravin_tham and jack are the ideal founders to solve this problem. They worked together at Palantir for many years, deploying AI into enterprises where data security was critical. The future of work tools may be smart but they also have to be safe. Protect the jewels!.
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@johnschulman2 Success, as the saying goes, has 1,000 fathers. Undoubtedly ChatGPT was the result of many brilliant people and a lot of good luck. But you were the one who breathed life into it. Congrats on all that you have done and all that you will do during this historical moment.
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We’ve shipped a tonne of ambitious product beyond these major releases - a fine-tuning product, specialized endpoints, the Instruct Series of models, and much, much more. And we’ve done this all with a small, collegial team.
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“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again. " - Steve Jobs.
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An organization is in trouble the moment it prioritizes doing things right ahead of doing the right things.
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"We weren't at neurips last week". Product motivated researchers are an under appreciated reason for why what's happening is happening within AI.
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Bill Gates on the age of AI: "The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other.".
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Too much talent across the world, too much entrepreneurial energy emanating from researchers, too much wonder to explore. for a future like this not to take shape.
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"In a moment when all these large language models are converging to become roughly functionally equivalent, no one is going to win the game on technology alone. AI is moving from a science problem to a product. problem".
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Novelty vs utility, science vs belief, and where we are with AI-first products.
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