Roland Osborne

Principal at 500 Global. Cofounder - Olark

[Nathan Baschez @nbaschez]

Vibe coding a design is hilarious because it's a perfect simulation of being the most horrible design manager imaginable

> "move it a bit to the right"
> "ok, now make that font a bit smaller"
> "colors can be a bit brighter"

[Roland Osborne @RolandOsborne]

@nbaschez Artistry

[Roland Osborne @RolandOsborne]

@skdh @An_AGINear https://t.co/4Tr1t47Qui

[Brett Adcock @adcock_brett]

Spent the last 20 years building software & hardware companies

> Last software company sold for $100M
> Then took my company public at $2.7B

Here are my top 9 lessons learned:

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

“Coding” was never the source of value, and people shouldn’t get overly attached to it. Problem solving is the core skill. The discipline and precision demanded by traditional programming will remain valuable transferable attributes, but they won’t be a barrier to entry.

Many times over the years I have thought about a great programmer I knew that loved assembly language to the point of not wanting to move to C. I have to fight some similar feelings of my own around using existing massive codebases and inefficient languages, but I push through.

I had somewhat resigned myself to the fact that I might be missing out on the “final abstraction”, where you realize that managing people is more powerful than any personal tool. I just don’t like it, and I can live with the limitations that puts on me.

I suspect that I will enjoy managing AIs more, even if they wind up being better programmers than I am.

[500 Global @500GlobalVC]

Live from #500Batch34: Manal Habib, Founder and CEO of MightyFly joined us in Palo Alto to share her insights with Batch 34 this week. 🔥

[Jeremiah Owyang @jowyang]

Startups startups startups. Someone in this photo will be famous or rich or both.

At @500GlobalVC preview day in Palo Alto to get a sneak preview of the latest batch.

Just met founders from many countries across mobility, education, sexual health, auto dealers, legal, media, customer care, and more.

[Roland Osborne @RolandOsborne]

@aaroncbailey Congrats!

[Roland Osborne @RolandOsborne]

How you feel when you receive AI generated emails (assuming you can tell)?

[Ankur Nagpal @ankurnagpal]

The O-1 Visa Resource Guide

If you are a high potential immigrant to America, an O-1 visa is your best bet

It has:

- No annual cap

- Premium processing

- Ability to start a company

- Earn a green card with the same criteria

A mega-thread with everything I send my friends:

[Roland Osborne @RolandOsborne]

Has anyone else flying @united used a flight credit, been assigned a seat + spent points to upgrade only to have it be invalid / waitlisted <24 hours before your flight? App and website are still showing the correct flight. On hold for hours - what the terrible UX is this?

[500 Global @500GlobalVC]

Our planet, more rapidly than ever, is changing around us. That’s why we're focused on helping to grow the next wave of sustainable tech companies. Learn how you can join here👇

https://t.co/aoZlnhPmZh

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

GPUs are built with more memory bandwidth, but higher latency and lower capacity than CPUs. AI accelerators could usefully make a different memory trade — the bandwidth of a GPU (or more), but the capacity of a CPU, in exchange for even higher latency.

For inference, all the weights, potentially a couple TB, can be accessed in a completely linear manner. It could even be a single transaction, streaming at a constant speed into an L2 ring buffer for a GPU core to chase calculations in, akin to racing the beam on old CRT game architectures. You could build a memory system out of masses of dirt cheap RAM, fully in parallel.

Even for training, the memory access patterns can be just a forward read of the weights, a reverse read , and a staggered reverse write of gradients and weights. You could have minimum transaction sizes in the megabytes, and first byte latencies in the many microseconds.

[Roland Osborne @RolandOsborne]

What's some startup advice from the last 10 years that no longer holds true in 2023?

[𝖦𝗋𝗂𝗆𝖾𝗌 ⏳ @Grimezsz]

I'll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice. Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings.

[Arvind Narayanan @random_walker]

I keep thinking about the early days of the mainstream Internet, when worms caused massive data loss every few weeks. It took decades of infosec research, development, and culture change to get out of that mess.

Now we're building an Internet of hackable, wormable LLM agents.

[Roland Osborne @RolandOsborne]

@mauraball @marksbirch As a tall person I still almost always choose the window!

[Peter Nixey @peternixey]

I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again.

Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge.

A canary that signals a change in the airflow of knowledge: from human-human via machine, to human-machine only. Don’t pass human, don’t collect 200 virtual internet points along the way.

StackOverflow is *the* repository for programming Q&A. It has 100M users & saves man-years of time & wig-factories-worth of grey hair every single day.

It is driven by people like me who ask questions that other developers answer. Or vice-versa. Over 10 years I've asked 217 questions & answered 77. Those questions have been read by millions of developers & had tens of millions of views.

But since GPT4 it looks less & less likely any of that will happen; at least for me. Which will be bad for StackOverflow. But if I'm representative of other knowledge-workers then it presents a larger & more alarming problem for us as humans.

What happens when we stop pooling our knowledge with each other & instead pour it straight into The Machine? Where will our libraries be? How can we avoid total dependency on The Machine? What content do we even feed the next version of The Machine to train on?

When it comes time to train GPTx it risks drinking from a dry riverbed. Because programmers won't be asking many questions on StackOverflow. GPT4 will have answered them in private. So while GPT4 was trained on all of the questions asked before 2021 what will GPT6 train on?

This raises a more profound question. If this pattern replicates elsewhere & the direction of our collective knowledge alters from outward to humanity to inward into the machine then we are dependent on it in a way that supercedes all of our prior machine-dependencies.

Whether or not it "wants" to take over, the change in the nature of where information goes will mean that it takes over by default.

Like a fast-growing Covid variant, AI will become the dominant source of knowledge simply by virtue of growth. If we take the example of StackOverflow, that pool of human knowledge that used to belong to us - may be reduced down to a mere weighting inside the transformer.

Or, perhaps even more alarmingly, if we trust that the current GPT doesn't learn from its inputs, it may be lost altogether. Because if it doesn't remember what we talk about & we don't share it then where does the knowledge even go?

We already have an irreversible dependency on machines to store our knowledge. But at least we control it. We can extract it, duplicate it, go & store it in a vault in the Arctic (as Github has done).

So what happens next? I don't know, I only have questions.

None of which you'll find on StackOverflow.

(I write on AI from a technical and product perspective. If you find that interesting then please do follow me for more)

[Lyn Alden @LynAldenContact]

Inflation from 2000 to 2022

Gold price: 8.4% per year
Money supply growth: 6.8% per year
Oil price: 4.7% per year
Median house: 4.6% per year
Education: 4.6% per year
Medical services: 3.4% per year
CPI: 2.6% per year
Deposit yields: <2%
Apparel: flat
Electronics, software: down

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

people are getting very confused about this whole Silicon Valley Bank / FDIC issue, so here's a thread:

-Majority of accounts over $250k are BUSINESSES, not individuals
-While FDIC is only required to pay out up to $250k, in practice, they tend to arrange a sale...

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