NeurIPS 2023 Recap - AI Startups

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We can’t think of a more Latent-Space-y way to end 2023 than with a mega episode featuring many old and new friends recapping their biggest news, achievements, and themes and memes of the year!

We previously covered the Best Papers of NeurIPS 2023, but the other part of NeurIPS being an industry friendly conference is all the startups that show up to hire and promote their latest and greatest products and papers! As a startup-friendly podcast, we of course were ready with our mics to talk to everyone we could track down¹.

In lieu of an extended preamble, we encourage you to listen and click through all the interviews and show notes, all of which have been curated to match the references mentioned in the episode.

Timestamps & Show Notes

• [00:01:26] Jonathan Frankle - Chief Scientist, MosaicML/Databricks

  • see also the Mosaic/MPT-7B episode

  • $1.3B MosaicML x Databricks acquisition

• [00:22:11] Lin Qiao - CEO, Fireworks AI

  • Fireworks Mixtral

• [00:38:24] Aman Sanger - CEO, Anysphere (Cursor)

  • see also the Cursor episode

  • $8m seed from OpenAI

  • Tweet: Request-level memory-based KV caching

  • Tweet: GPT-4 grading and Trueskill ratings for rerankers

• [00:51:14] Aravind Srinivas - CEO, Perplexity

  • 1m app installs on iOS and Android

  • pplx-online api 7b and 70b models

  • Shaan Puri/Paul Graham Fierce Nerds story

• [01:04:26] Will Bryk - CEO, Metaphor

  • “Andrew Huberman may have singlehandedly ruined the SF social scene”

• [01:12:49] Jeremy Howard - CEO, Answer.ai

  • see also the End of Finetuning episode

  • Jeremy’s podcast with Tanishq Abraham, Jess Leao

  • Announcing Answer.ai with $10m from Decibel VC

  • Laundry Buddy, Nov 2023 AI Meme of the Month

• [01:37:13] Joel Hestness - Principal Scientist, Cerebras

  • CerebrasGPT, all the Cerebras papers we discussed

• [01:56:34] Jason Corso - CEO, Voxel51

  • Open Source FiftyOne project

  • CVPR Survival Guide

• [02:02:39] Brandon Duderstadt - CEO, Nomic.ai

  • GPT4All, Atlas, Demo

• [02:12:39] Luca Antiga - CTO, Lightning.ai

  • Pytorch Lightning, Lightning Studios, LitGPT

• [02:29:46] Jay Alammar - Engineering Fellow, Cohere

  • The Illustrated Transformer

1. Notable misses we still hope to make happen eventually: Together, Character, Midjourney, Mistral, Weights & Biases, Huggingface, Stability, Eleuther. And basically every BigCorp we talked to including Microsoft, Google, Meta and Apple declined to speak on the record without PR clearance.