blog – Lawrence Wu

Little Theology of Exercise

book review

Starting a new type of post where I’ll review books. I recently read A Little Theology of Exercise: Enjoying Christ in Body and Soul by David Mathis. The beginning part of…

First Marathon Reflections

running

I did it. I ran a marathon. Long Beach 2025 Marathon is finished. What an amazing race day and training block. I’ve heard that a race is a celebration of the training you…

How to Learn AI

ai

I was recently asked how you can learn AI. This is a pretty difficult question to answer because 1) AI’s development is so rapid and 2) everyone is coming from a different…

Why Companies Should Open Source and Host Their Own MCP Servers

ai

Model Context Protocol (MCP) has quickly become a standard interface for how agents and LLM-powered clients interact with tools and APIs. What’s exciting is that some…

Summaries of Talks from Code with Claude Conference 2025

ai

events

summary

Claude had a conference recently all about Claude Code. I transcribed all of the talks using transcripts and hosted it here. The YouTube playlist is here. Below are…

Summary of Armin’s Talk - Agentic Coding Ecosystem 2025: Navigating the Tool Explosion

ai

events

summary

I’ve learned a lot about Claude Code and agentic coding tools from Armin Ronacher. He’s the creator of Flask and Jinja and he’s very interested in Agentic coding tools. This…

Claude Code Camp - hosted by Every

ai

events

Every hosted a Claude Code Camp today for an hour. Different members from their team shared in detail how they use Claude Code. I’ve only started using Claude Code in my…

Starting to Use Claude Code

ai

I had tried Claude Code briefly when it first came out 4 months ago. However I wasn’t that impressed. Lately though, I’ve seen more and more people turn to Claude Code. The…

LangChain Interrupt Conference 2025 - 1 Hour Recap

ai

events

I tried my best to condense the ~16 hours of content from the LangChain Interrupt Conference to less than an hour.

Levels of AI Use

ai

As I’ve talked to different people at work and amongst friends, there is a growing gap between those that use AI (mostly ChatGPT) and those that do not. It got me thinking…

LangChain Interrupt Conference 2025 AI Recap

ai

events

This page contains AI-generated summaries of the LangChain Interrupt 2025 conference talks.

Andrew Ng & Harrison Chase Fireside Chat

ai

events

The questions and answers extracted from the fireside chat between Harrison Chase (LangChain) and Andrew Ng (AI Fund) at LangChain Interrupt 2025.

LangChain Interrupt Conference - Day 1

ai

events

I had the privilege of attending LangChain’s first conference. The first day was a hands-on workshop going through the creation of an agent (an email assistant) from…

Summary of Karpathy’s Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT

ai

summary

I’ve been experimeting with writing CLI utilities to fetch and summarize YouTube videos. This is primarily for personal use. ~~May open source the CLI in the future~~. The CLI…

Second Half-Marathon in the Books

running

Second half-marathon complete (Strava)! Goals for this race at Surf City 2025 was just to 1) not get injured and 2) beat my first HM time of 1:49. Felt like the conditions…

Running Lessons

running

faith

I never considered myself a runner. I actually never enjoyed the activity of running. I usually didn’t look forward to it. I would occassionally still do it because I knew…

Introduction to LangGraph Tutorial

ai

summary

The LangChain team recently released the first course in their LangChain Academy called Introduction to LangGraph (repo). As I’m working through it I will make some notes on…

God’s Design for Marriage

faith

summary

My church is hosting a retreat this weekend and we are privileged to have John Street as our speaker. He was planning to speak on God’s Design for Marriage. I was curious…

How Dwarkesh Patel Uses AI & Claude

ai

summary

Dwarkesh Patel is becoming the new Lex Fridman of podcasting. Lex got his start a podcaster interviewing AI experts. Since then Lex has branched out and most of his guests…

What to do after getting laid off?

career

My company, UKG, announced layoffs last Wednesday (see an industry expert’s take on reasons why). 14% of the company was let go which is around 2,200 out of the 15,000…

Finetuning LLMs with Axolotl

ai

I started Hamel Husain’s ~~fine-tuning LLM course~~ Mastering LLM course last week. I don’t have a ton of experience fine-tuning LLMs so I thought this would be a good way to…

Dario Amodei & Elad Gil

ai

events

summary

At Google Cloud Next 2024, Elad Gil interviewed Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic. I recorded the talk (really bad audio) and transcribed it using a whisper (small-en)…

AI Impact on Jobs

ai

career

Andrew Ng gave a talk recently on AI’s Potential Effect on the Labor Force. Here’s the transcript of the video.

Ode to Costco

personal

I’ve been a fan of Costco for many years. Charlie Munger famously loved Costco too. I still remember growing up and going to Price Club with my mom or dad and seeing them…

ColBERT and Information Retrieval

ai

summary

I recently learned about ColBERT, a BERT-based model for efficient passage retrieval. The authors of the paper ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via…

LLM Summarization and NeurIPS Papers

ai

events

summary

I didn’t get the chance to attend NeurIPS last week. The sheer number of papers submitted is staggering: 13,300 submitted papers that were reviewed by 1,000+ people. 3,540…

Google Gemini and Function Calling

ai

Google’s latest LLM called Gemini was released in December. Google trained three model sizes: Nano, Gemini and Ultra (small, medium and large respectively). Ultra hasn’t…

Whisper Transcripts

ai

Whisper is a speech recognition model by OpenAI that is open source. It is a multi-task, multilingual model that can perform speech recognition, speech translation and…

AI Engineer Summit 2023

ai

events

sywx was the first to define the job title “AI Engineer” as a role in between a Data Scientist and Full Stack Software Engineer, someone that builds on top of large…

How LLMs will affect Jobs?

ai

career

I have been interested in how language models will affect the future of work. Having worked with LLMs the last ~6 months, I’ve seen their impact on my work as a data…

KDD 2023 - Recap

ai

events

I attended KDD 2023 which was held in Long Beach, CA from Aug 6-10, 2023.

Double Machine Learning

ai

summary

At KDD2023 I was introduced to the term “Double Machine Learning” (DML). I was surprised I had never heard the term before so here are some notes on this important method in…

KDD 2023 - Workshops: LLM and Causal Inference

ai

events

I attended KDD 2023 which was held in Long Beach, CA from Aug 6-10. The first day I attended was Monday which had half-day workshops around a topic. The two I attended were…

Paper Summary: Llama2

ai

summary

Llama2 was released by Meta on 2023-07-18. My first exposure to the model was running it locally on my Mac and being blown away by the quality of the results. With most of…

Running Llama2 Locally on a M1 Mac

ai

Llama2 was released by Meta 2 days ago. See the:

Code Interpreter & Data Analysis

ai

In this post I’ll go over some observations I’ve had while using OpenAI’s Code Interpreter for the first time. It is not available as an API, rather only through the ChatGPT…

LLM Agents with Langchain

ai

I’m currently working my way through the Databricks LLM101x Course on EdX. It’s actually pretty good. During the third section, there was this interesting example where they…

Layoffs Attributed to AI

ai

career

This WSJ article highlighted AI’s impact on marketing related roles. In one the paragraphs, a statistic was cited that I had never seen before, the number of layoffs that…

Being Able to Focus is a Superpower

career

productivity

Walter Isaacson is set to release a biography of Elon Musk later this year. He was recently on a Twitter Space with a few other people talking about Musk. One of the things…

LLM in Production Conference Takeaways

ai

events

I didn’t get to attend the LLM in Production Conference but found these takeaways Demetrios Brinkmann shared in an email to be quite insightful:

State of GPT - Andrej Karpathy

ai

summary

Andrej Karpathy gave a talk at a Microsoft conference in late May about the State of GPT:

All-In Hosts Opinion on Jobs

ai

career

During Episode 132 of the All-In Podcast, (transcript here) the hosts took a live question from the audience:

Staying Human in the Age of LLMs

ai

career

The WSJ’s Ben Cohen wrote an article highlighting Professor Po-Shen Loh, a math professor from Carnegie Mellon University and coach for Team USA’s International Mathematical…

Large Language Models, Work and the Future of Jobs

ai

career

Last month, Allen Downey showcased the power of ChatGPT by using it to solve every problem in his Think Python books. As a result, he encouraged everyone who writes code to…

GPT Related Papers, Code, and News

ai

There’s seemingly a firehose of development in the last month or so. I’ve been trying to keep up with the latest developments in GPT and related models. Here’s a list of…

Useful Applications (mostly for Mac)

productivity

In this blog post, I’ll introduce you to a list of useful applications, covering both developer tools and productivity applications that I’ve found useful over the years.…