blog – Lawrence Wu

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Summary of Karpathy’s Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT

LLMs

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

Fitness

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

Fitness

Christian Life

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

LangGraph

LLMs

Agents

Python

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

God

Marriage

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

LLMs

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?

layoffs

UKG

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

LLMs

Fine-tune

Axolotl

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

Anthropic

LLMs

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

LLMs

Jobs

Work

AI

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

ode to

Costco

Acquired

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

BERT

ColBERT

Information Retrieval

NLU

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

LLMs

Summarization

NeurIPS

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

LLMs

Google

Gemini

Function Calling

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

Whisper

ASR

Transcripts

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

Conference

AI

LLMs

AI Engineering

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?

LLMs

Jobs

Work

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

Conference

KDD

LLM

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

Double Machine Learning

Causal Inference

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

Conference

KDD

LLM

Causal Inference

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

LLMs

Llama

Llama2

Paper 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

LLMs

Llama

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

Code Interpreter & Data Analysis

LLMs

Agents

Data Analysis

Data Science

Code Interpreter

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

LLMs

Agents

Data Analysis

Data Science

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

Jobs

Layoffs

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

Focus

Work

Musk

Isaacson

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

LLMs

Production

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

LLMs

GPT

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

All-In Hosts Opinion on Jobs

LLMs

Work

GPT

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

LLMs

Work

GPT

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

LLMs

Work

GPT

OpenAI

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

GPT

OpenAI

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

Developer Tools

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.…