My Client: "You were a little too helpful" - Weekly Update - Feb 5 2024

The quote in the title is what a client that I was involved with in AI advisory capacity texted me last week. Read on to see more details!

I'm still wrapping my head around what update to keep where (substack, LI, youtube, etc). So bear with me as I try this out! So, instead of substack weekly updates, going to keep all the startup updates under the Startup Journey newsletter on Linkedin for the time being!

Asks

1. I updated my Calendly and now you can book me for ama (eg. career coaching), AI discovery call, and paid advisory. Share with anyone that might be interested.
2. I am interested to speak to any small business owner who is trying to understand how ChatGPT and similar tech is going to impact their business. Let me know if you can intro me to anyone.

Last week at Aggregate Intellect!

I was discussing an ongoing contract with a startup to advise their engineering team on some ChatGPT like system they were building. We wanted to work out a plan where we would work through a number of hurdles together and we were thinking that this would take a few month. But as a starter we figured we would do a few calls where they would just pay me hourly to talk to the engineers. And that's what we did. While we were busy with back and forth re contract I received the text:

• them: "we did some extensive testing yesterday based on the tips you gave and we are happy with what we saw. we are moving on to pushing things into production"
• me: "wow! that's great. I thought that would help but it's good that it is robust like that"
• them: "you were a little too helpful! lol"

They paid me for a retainer to continue helping them as they go through the next phases, but it is good to see that their system is working as they hoped.

Other than that, I was inspired by a discussion we had at our GTM Hackers Mastermind group to rethink how I was designing and executing my go to market experiments. So, I've been busy thinking about that and trying out some new tools that I might use.

Last week's unsung hero

I went to an event hosted by NVIDIA called "AI Ecosystem" that was celebrating what is going on in Toronto in AI. There was good food, catching up with old friends, and meeting some new ones. I owe this to Alireza Darbehani who kindly invited me to this event. Thanks, Ali. You rock!

It was also good to see so many old and new friends: Ehsan Amjadian , Helen Kontozopoulos , Patricia Thaine , Fion Lee-Madan (she/her) , Alán Aspuru-Guzik , Armando B. , Florian Goebels , Penny Ji , Sunil Sharma , Ernest Namdar, M.Sc., MEng, P.Eng , Heathcliff Lewis , Hormuz Sethna Dadabhoy , Johannes Dyring, PhD , Deval Pandya , Gordon Gibson , Denys Linkov , Peter A.I. Forsyth and perhaps a bunch of people I am forgetting right now.

LLM Stuff

• We did a retro for our "LLM Journal Club" and decided that we wanted to focus on more practical stuff going forward. You can see the the details of the new proposal here and comment on it.
• I shared the video and summary of Megan Risdal 's talk on Community Driven AI
• I came across AI Guardrails repo

Startup Stuff

• We discussed how to handle "fear of rejection" at our "founders' health" group.
• I went to Collision Conf "count down" party and was inspired by listening to Katherine Maher (former CEO of wikipedia) speaking about her journey
• We went for a fun walk and Filipino brunch with "founders and friends activities" group

Podcasts

• AI for Mathematics Education
• Why Machines will never Rule the World
• Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai on Leadership, AI, and Big Tech

Call to Action

BOOK ME TO TALK

READ MY ESSAYS ON SUBSTACK