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Articles by Derrick Harris
Branches aren’t a thing of the past-they’re a key to the future
In just the last 15 years, the number of bank branches in the U.S. has plummeted from nearly 100,000 to just 77,500. This is more than an effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. These closures reflect a broader trend of banking in the digital age that prioritizes digital space over brick-and-mortar establishments. But even as the use of chatbots and apps grows, in-person interactions are an essential component of providing the best possible care for members.
The Best Way to Achieve AGI Is to Invent It
On this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, longtime machine-learning researcher, and University of Washington Professor Emeritus, Pedro Domingos joins a16z General Partner Martin Casado to discuss the state of artificial intelligence, whether we’re really on a path toward AGI, and the value of expressing unpopular opinions.
Should we still teach or learn coding? A postgraduate student perspective on the use of large language models for coding in ecology and evolution
1 INTRODUCTION There are limited data on how widely coding is taught in undergraduate and postgraduate ecology and evolution courses. R is the most commonly used programming language in ecology publications and proficiency in R is increasingly a requirement listed in job and postgraduate course advertisements (Auker & Barthelmess, 2020). Despite this, anecdotally it seems that many students first encounter coding and using R during postgraduate study.
Why Computer Science Subsumed Biotech
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, a16z Bio + Health General Partner Vijay Pande walks us through the past two decades of applying software engineering to the life sciences — from the Folding@Home project that he launched, through AlphaFold and more. He also discusses the major opportunities for AI to transform medicine and health care, as well as some pitfalls that founders in that space need to watch out for.
Building Production Workflows for AI Applications
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Inngest cofounder and CEO Tony Holdstock-Brown joins a16z partner Yoko Li to discuss the reality and complexity of running AI agents and other multistep AI workflows in production. Tony also shares why developer tools for generative AI — and their founders — might look very similar to previous generations of these products, and where there are opportunities for optimization.
The Future of Image Models Is Multimodal
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Ideogram CEO Mohammad Norouzi joins a16z General Partner Jennifer Li to share his story of growing up in Iran, helping build influential text-to-image models at Google, and ultimately cofounding and running Ideogram. He also breaks down the differences between transformer models and diffusion models, as well as the transition from researcher to startup CEO.
California's Senate Bill 1047: What You Need to Know
On May 21, the California Senate passed bill 1047. This bill – which sets out to regulate AI at the model level – wasn’t garnering much attention, until it slid through an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 32 to 1 and is now queued for an assembly vote in August that would cement it into law. In this episode, a16z General Partner Anjney Midha and Venture Editor Derrick Harris breakdown everything the tech community needs to know about SB-1047.
Open Models and Maturation: Assessing the Generative AI Market
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, a16z partners Guido Appenzeller and Matt Bornstein discuss the state of the generative AI market, about 18 months after it really kicked into high gear with the release of ChatGPT — everything from the emergence of powerful open source LLMs to the excitement around AI-generated music.
Security Founders Talk Shop About Generative AI
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, recorded live at our San Francisco office, security-startup founders Dean De Beer (Command Zero), Kevin Tian (Doppel), and Travis McPeak (Resourcely) share their thoughts on generative AI, as well as their experiences building with LLMs and dealing with LLM-based threats.
How to Think About Foundation Models for Cybersecurity
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, a16z General Partner Zane Lackey and a16z Partner Joel de la Garza sit down with Derrick Harris to discuss how generative AI — LLMs, in particular — and foundation models could effect profound change in cybersecurity. After years of AI-washing by security vendors, they explain why the hype is legitimate this time as AI provides a real opportunity to help security teams cut through the noise and automate away the types of drudgery that lead to mistakes.
Securing the Software Supply Chain with LLMs
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Socket founder and CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh, and a16z partner Joel de la Garza, discuss the open-source software supply chain. Feross and Joel share their thoughts and insights on topics ranging from the recent xz Utils attack to how large language models can help overcome understaffed security teams and overwhelmed developers.
Vector Databases and the Power of RAG
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Pinecone Founder and CEO Edo Liberty joins a16z’s Satish Talluri and Derrick Harris to discuss the promises, challenges, and opportunities for vector databases and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). He also shares insights and highlights from a decades-long career in machine learning, which includes stints running research teams at both Yahoo and Amazon Web Services.
Remaking the UI for AI
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, a16z General Partner Anjney Midha shares his thoughts on how hardware for artificial intelligence might evolve over the years to come as we place more emphasis on AI inference workloads. Improvements in sensors, chips, models, and more could result in remarkably useful models that are able to run locally, resulting in wearable AI products that evolve the human experience.
Scoping the Enterprise LLM Market
Naveen Rao has been building artificial intelligence technologies and companies for more than a decade. He founded Nervana Systems (acquired by Intel) and MosaicML (acquired by Databricks), and now serves as vice president of generative AI at Databricks. From chips to models, there are few people with a better pulse on how enterprises are using AI.
AI Canon | Andreessen Horowitz
* * * The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z.
How Headless Commerce Will Change How and Where We Buy
Dirk Hoerig is the co-founder and CEO of Commercetools, and a veteran of the ecommerce space spanning two decades. In this interview, he explains “headless commerce” and why this API-centric architecture (often built atop cloud infrastructure and microservices) is especially important in the world of online retail and digital transactions, overall.
PlanetScale CEO on Cloud-Prem and Climbing the Engineering Ladder
Sam Lambert is CEO of PlanetScale, a MySQL-compatiable serverless database provider. Prior to joining PlanetScale (then as chief product officer), he was VP of engineering at GitHub. In this interview, Lambert discusses a number of topics related to cloud native software-delivery models, including what good serverless looks like, who should run Kubernetes, and the emergence of “cloud-prem” — a deployment model that combines the strengths of on-prem software and SaaS offerings.
The Rise of Domain Experts in Deep Learning
Jeremy Howard is an artificial intelligence researcher and the co-founder of fast.ai, a platform for non-experts to learn artificial intelligence and machine learning. Prior to starting fast.ai, he founded multiple companies — including FastMail and Enlitic, a pioneer in applying deep learning to the medical field — and was president and chief scientist of machine-learning competition platform Kaggle.
Why the Software Supply Chain Needs More Security
Kim Lewandowski is co-founder and head of product at security startup Chainguard. Prior to Chainguard, she worked as a product manager at Google, most recently with a focus on securing the company’s development pipeline and the open source tools it used. In this interview, she discusses the concept of a secure software supply chain and why the idea has caught on so strongly over the past few years.
What Is Negative Engineering?
It was the second game of a double-header, and the Washington Nationals had a problem. Not on the field, of course: The soon-to-be World Series champions were performing beautifully. But as they waited out a rain delay, something went awry behind the scenes. A task scheduler deep within the team’s analytics infrastructure stopped running. The scheduler was in charge of collecting and aggregating game-time data for the Nationals’ analytics team.
MongoDB CTO On Working with Cloud Providers and Working in Southeast Asia
MongoDB CTO Mark Porter has been on all sides of the technology industry. He was most recently CTO of core technology and transport at Grab, a super-app serving Southeast Asia, and prior to that held leadership roles at Amazon Web Services and Oracle, among other places. In this interview, he shares his views on the thawing relationship between software vendors and cloud providers, and why there’s still a big business in selling installed software.
Will It Scale? Applying Data, Science, and Economics to the Art of Ideas
John List is chief economist at Walmart (a title he previously held at both Lyft and Uber) and a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. He recently published a book titled The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale. In this interview, List discusses some of the book’s themes, such as the importance of knowing when to quit or pivot, and how practicing the science of scaling can help ensure an idea’s success.
A Decade of Deep Learning: How the AI Startup Experience Has Evolved
The artificial intelligence field has evolved dramatically since the deep learning revolution kicked off in 2012, and Richard Socher has been around for all of it. He earned his PhD from Stanford working on NLP (natural language processing) before co-founding an AI startup called MetaMind in 2013. He then spent several years leading the AI team at Salesforce (after it acquired MetaMind) before tackling the search space with his new startup, you.com, in 2021.
A Decade of Deep Learning: How the AI Startup Experience Has Evolved
The artificial intelligence field has evolved dramatically since the deep learning revolution kicked off in 2012, and Richard Socher has been around for all of it. He earned his PhD from Stanford working on NLP (natural language processing) before co-founding an AI startup called MetaMind in 2013. He then spent several years leading the AI team at Salesforce (after it acquired MetaMind) before tackling the search space with his new startup, you.com, in 2021.
How to Use Massive AI Models (Like GPT-3) in Your Startup
As machine learning technology has matured and moved from research curiosity to something industrial-grade, the methods and infrastructure needed to support large-scale machine learning have also evolved. Taking advantage of these advances represents both opportunities and risks for startups – almost all of which are leveraging machine learning in one way or another as they compete for a piece of their respective markets.
Amazon fuses your storage system with its cloud
Stay on Top of Enterprise Technology Trends Get updates impacting your industry from our GigaOm Research Community Amazon Web Services (s amzn) is rolling out a new feature called Storage Gateway that lets companies upload data to its cloud-storage services directly from their on-premise storage systems, the company said on Wednesday.
A programmer’s guide to big data: 12 tools to know
Stay on Top of Emerging Technology Trends Get updates impacting your industry from our GigaOm Research Community Over the past year, I’ve seen a lot of startups, projects and tools that aim to bring fairly advanced analytic capabilities to programmers. Sometimes they do this by enabling simple scripts that result in powerful dashboards or processes, while other times they just deliver the data in an easy-to-consume manner with little work at all on the developer’s part.
From Idea to Product: How VMware Pivotal Labs Helps Startups Grow
For some startups, it can be tough to transition from a great idea to a usable product—especially if that product involves software. The same often goes for teams within large enterprises trying to capitalize on new opportunities, or to modernize existing applications to meet the demands of modern users. They know what result they want, but they don’t always know what to build to achieve that outcome, much less how to build it.
Daily Legal News
Common Pleas Tort-motor vehicle Date Filed June 10, 2020 Case Number 933278 Amount $25,000.00 Case Type Tort-motor vehicle Judge Judge J. Calabrese Plaintiff Filed by. Derrick Harris 4075 Fulton Park Oval, #834 Cleveland, OH 44144 Plaintiff's Attorney Kats Law LLC 675 Northfield Rd Bedford OH 44146 Defendant Kathleen Adams 4364 West 47th St Cleveland, OH 44144 About your information and the public record.
MIT researcher says he can predict Twitter trends
A researcher at MIT claims to have developed an algorithm that can accurately predict what topics will trend on Twitter. But Twitter being a relatively minor business in the grand scheme of things, the algorithm might end up being more useful elsewhere, predicting stock prices, ticket sales and other dynamically changing quantities.
Daily Legal News
Municipal Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC Derrick Harris Date Filed June 9, 2020 Case Number F 004913 Judge Plaintiff Filed by. Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC Norfolk VA 23502 Plaintiff's Attorney Weltman, Weinberg & Reis Co. LPA 965 Keynote Circle Brooklyn Heights OH 44131 Defendant Derrick Harris 15812 Throckley Ave. Cleveland OH 44128 About your information and the public record.
Clouds Are Like Buses: Public Isn’t Always Better
Since the concept of “private cloud” was introduced, there have been efforts by certain people to prove it “wrong” or show that it doesn’t make sense when compared with the public cloud. This seems like a silly crusade, not because I’m a supporter of private cloud (which I am), but because both provide tremendous value if you actually understand the value that “cloud” has delivered to the industry.
IBM doing Hadoop as a service in its cloud
IBM (s ibm) has joined the big-data-in-the-cloud fray, announcing Monday that its Hadoop-based InfoSphere BigInsights product will be available as a service on the IBM SmartCloud platform. Big Blue’s timing for this capability is good, as Hadoop will likely have a far greater presence across public clouds within the next year.
How the AP got a hold of its big, old data
Holding onto millions of pieces of archived content it still wanted to monetize, the Associated Press turned to a NoSQL database. Specifically, it turned to MarkLogic, a non-relational database designed for storing and accessing lots of XML-based content — like the stuff the AP has lying around — and that has already earned itself quite a following among media companies.
VMware buys big data startup Cetas
VMware CEO Paul Maritz VMware (s vmw) has acquired Cetas, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based big data startup that provides analytics atop the Hadoop platform. Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed yet, but Cetas is an 18-month-old company with tens of paying customers, including within the Fortune 1000, that didn’t need to rush into an acquisition. So, why did VMware make such a compelling offer? Because VMware is all about applications, and big data applications are the next big thing.
Robot startup gets patent for neural networks on GPUs
Blog Post A robotics startup called Neurala has received a patent (No. 8,648,867) for a GPU-based system designed to run artificial neural network models. The patent covers the physical architecture of the system, which Neurala calls an “accelerator,” as well as aspects of data processing and user experience. It’s not clear whether the patent, which dates back to 2006, will affect others artificial intelligence efforts currently underway.
Study validates the quantum properties of D-Wave’s computer
Blog Post A new study might help confirm that D-Wave Systems’ quantum computer chip might actually be what it claims to be.
Research shows Pivotal Platform delivers users a 142 percent ROI in 3 years
In previous eras of computing, when pre-packaged commercial software was the norm inside most companies, focusing on the cost to buy or license those products made a lot of sense. If everyone in the industry is using basically the same tools to power basically the same applications, the only real competitive advantage is being able to get them for less money. Today, however, the opportunity costs of choosing the wrong technology can significantly outweigh the actual costs of choosing the best one.
Accelerating change: How GM's IT footprint went from zero to China in a year
General Motors (GM) is one of America’s most iconic companies—the Chevrolet logo, in particular, is synonymous with American muscle cars and cruising the open road—but today China is the company’s largest market. In fact, it’s responsible for 40 percent of the company’s global sales. So when a new Chinese law or regulation might significantly affect those sales, GM takes notice.
Cisco security GM: Consumerization drives everything
Employees love using their own devices to do corporate work, but the practice, known as consumerization, is rife with security risks. Speaking with New York Times (s nyt) deputy tech editor Quentin Hardy today at Mobilize, Tom Gillis, VP and GM of the Security Technology Business Unit at Cisco (s csco), said consumerization is causing a fundamental rearchitecture of how networks look that requires a reimagining of security solutions.
A Quick Guide For Getting Up to Speed on SRE
Site reliability engineering (SRE) is often discussed as the future of IT operations, but it’s so much more than that. Done correctly, SRE is a set of principles that—yes—can greatly improve application reliability, but can also lead to happier, healthier employees; an improved set of engineering priorities; and even better-performing teams across all parts of the business.
Why embracing the cloud means preparing for problems you can't control
Cloud computing. Cloud-native computing. Software as a service. They're all secure and reliable. Except when they're not. Recently, we've seen Microsoft Azure suffer an extended outage and Docker Hub get hacked. Organisations deploying SaaS applications often assume the vendor provides adequate data protection and they neglect the need for backup.
SRE and the value of treating operations as a software problem
Site reliability engineering—better known as SRE—has been around since about 2004, but really took off in around 2016 when Google engineers wrote a book describing how they use SRE principles to keep the company's applications online. Since then, SRE practices and "site reliability engineer" roles have popped up in technology companies large and small, and the topic comes up in any meaningful conversation about modern IT operations.
What happened to Hadoop
I spent a lot of time covering Hadoop during my time at Gigaom, and then the evolution of Hadoop and the companies behind it while I was managing this site on a regular basis. So as I watched that space more or less evaporate over the past year especially, I often found myself thinking about what happened. I wrote a post touching on some of these themes last October when the Cloudera-Hortonworks merger was announced, but this one fleshes things out a bit.
How Social Media Is Pushing the Limits of Legal Ethics
That some people simply cannot keep their social media usage to an acceptable level is no secret. Only unlike a student spending the entirety of Biology 101 updating her Facebook page or an NBA player tweeting from the locker room, this type of behavior can have real consequences when the user in question is sitting in a courtroom.
Bringing digital fluidity to bricks-and-mortar retail
By Derrick Harris, Principal Product Marketing Manager, Pivotal Software Inc. Boarded up windows, closing-down sales and a huge growth in e-commerce retail has seen the UK’s high streets continue to suffer in recent years.
Bringing digital fluidity to bricks-and-mortar retail
By Derrick Harris, Principal Product Marketing Manager, Pivotal Software Inc. Boarded up windows, closing-down sales and a huge growth in e-commerce retail has seen the UK’s high streets continue to suffer in recent years.
Learn the 'whats' and 'whys' of Apache Kafka in 15 minutes
If you’re an IT executive or software engineer at an enterprise of any reasonable size, the chances are that you’ve heard about Apache Kafka. However, whether you’ve implemented it—or even fully grokked the benefits it can bring to your data analytics, application architecture, and overall business strategies—is another question altogether.
Bringing digital fluidity to bricks-and-mortar retail
By Derrick Harris, Principal Product Marketing Manager, Pivotal Software Inc. Boarded up windows, closing-down sales and a huge growth in e-commerce retail has seen the UK’s high streets continue to suffer in recent years.
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