Watts Occurring is now on YOUTUBE! Click HERE to watch G podding from his Tour de France massage table.

The Tour de France always starts with a bang. You never want to miss the first stage... and this year was no different.

G made it through unscathed and joined Tom on the massage table to tell you all about it.

See you tomorrow with Luke and special guest Ben Swift.

Don't forget the incredible competition from our friends at Continental Tyres. Visit www.continental-tyres.co.uk/watts-occurring, enter, and you could join us in Paris for the final weekend of the Tour. It's a once in a lifetime trip. What have you got to lose?

And we also have a brilliant offer from our friends at Rouleur for July. Use code WATTS at rouleur.cc/subscribe to get 10% any of their subscription offers and enjoy their unparalleled daily Tour de France coverage.

Watts Occurring is brought to you by Continental Tyres

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Before the twentieth century, most cities were highly permissive about what people were allowed to build on their land. Nearly all Western householders lost these liberties during the first half of the twentieth century. Samuel Hughes calls this phenomenon The Great Downzoning. In the first episode of the Works in Progress Podcast, he describes how and why this happened, and what it means for modern pro-housing campaigners.

Greg Brockman—OpenAI cofounder and Stripe's first engineer—joins John Collison to talk about research-driven product development, an early moment he thought OpenAI was doomed, S curves in AI advancement, and energy bottlenecks.

Full episode transcript:

https://cheekypint.transistor.fm/1/transcript

Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(02:51) Was OpenAI the first company to take the scaling hypothesis seriously? 

(04:53) Lessons from Dota about deep learning 

(08:08) What is a good new Turing test?

(08:57) Personalization in AI 

(09:57) Research-driven product development

(10:26) An early moment OpenAI felt doomed 

(15:01) OS limits on AI product development

(17:59) When will AI make novel advancements in math or science?

(20:03) Energy bottlenecks

(22:30) S curves in AI advancement 

(24:00) AI coding 

(26:25) Refactoring as a killer AI use case

(27:26) How OpenAI decides what products to built

(28:53) Growing up in North Dakota

(30:17) How far away is AGI?

Susan Li of Meta—the youngest chief financial officer of a Fortune 100 company—joins John Collison to talk about capital allocation, managing investors, and how Mark Zuckerberg has changed over the 17 years of working together.

Full episode transcript

https://cheekypint.transistor.fm/2/transcript

Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(01:20) Early education and career

(02:15) Lessons from Michael Grimes at Morgan Stanley

(03:12) Leadership traits and succession planning at Meta

(06:05) Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership and culture of feedback

(09:06) Financial forecasting and capital allocation

(14:18) ROI on Meta’s portfolio of bets

(15:05) Investor sentiment in 2022

(17:49) The story behind the “free cash flow” hats

(18:58) CapEx trends in the AI era

(21:48) A memorable earnings call

(24:16) Challenges of allocating compute vs headcount budgets 

(26:55) AI’s impact on productivity and operations

We sit down with Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue to understand the current state of the open source AI ecosystem. Hugging Face is the leading platform to host and collaborate on AI models, datasets, and applications. They also have a compute offering for AI builders to train their models directly on the platform. Clem has a contrarian take on the future: there will not be just a few major foundation model companies with everyone using their APIs. But rather, that thousands of companies will have their own specialized AI models built in-house for their particular use case. It's obviously a very dynamic landscape and we'll have to see how it shakes out, but Clem has a pretty great viewpoint to see it all, working with their 5 million registered Hugging Face users!

Links:

• Hugging Face
• Hugging Face's Series D valuing the company at $4.5 billion

Sponsors:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra

Duolingo has fundamentally changed the landscape of self-guided education, starting with language learning. It is now a $9B publicly traded company in a space where everyone thought you could never build a large and exciting company. We’re joined by Duolingo founder and CEO, Luis von Ahn. Luis dives into how learning English was transformative in his personal trajectory and opportunities in his life, inspiring him to create the most successful EdTech product of all time. A few topics in this episode:

• How Duolingo became a leader in the gamification and mobile-first movements in the early 2010s
• How the company balances rigorous experimentation with gut instinct to build an app with customer experience at its core
• The backstory of Duolingo’s “unhinged, yet wholesome” green owl mascot trending on your TikTok feed

Sponsors:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra

ARM is an incredibly unlikely story. They were founded in Cambridge, England in 1990 to design a new chip architecture just for low-power devices (like the Apple Newton!), leaving the “serious computing” on desktop and servers to Intel’s x86. Now, nearly three decades later, ARM is the dominant architecture in all of computing today.

ARM is in your phone, your car, data centers, the most advanced AI chips… there are hundreds (or thousands!) of ARM chips you encounter in your everyday life. In this episode, ARM Holdings CEO Rene Haas joins us to tell the story of how ARM become so dominant, weaving through the through the iPod, smartphone, and AI eras. Plus, their wild corporate story of going public, getting bought by SoftBank, going public again, and nearly being acquired by NVIDIA!

Sponsors:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra

Vercel has become the infrastructure platform powering modern web development over the past several years, with companies from Stripe to Adobe to Runway all building their front ends on them. Today we’re joined by founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch, who shares why Vercel has been uniquely successful in the fragmented (to say the least!) world of web development platforms. There are now more than 6 million Vercel users, 80,000 active teams, and users have grown 200% year-over-year. The company also crossed $100m in annualized revenue last May, and Guillermo shared with us that they’ve been growing at 80% since, and were recently valued at $3.25 billion.

This is also a particularly interesting moment for Vercel. Last year they launched a new product, “v0”, which lets anyone create and deploy a working website simply by describing it in English and letting AI take care of the rest. Guillermo shares its origin story within the company (and insanely that it reached $2m ARR in the first 14 days!), and how it’s changed their entire thinking about what’s possible now with AI products.

We also cover:

• How to build a business around an open source project (Next.js)
• How they balance both being a fast and nimble platform for startups with being a reliable platform for enterprises
• Guillermo's unconventional approach to staying deeply technical as CEO at scale

Links:

• Vercel
• V0.dev
• Next.js

Sponsors:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra

Estamos en el año 211 a.C. Las guerras más encarnizadas se libran con la toga y las conspiraciones políticas. A Marco Claudio Marcelo, conquistador de Siracusa, se le negará el triunfo y será acusado de crueldad por los habitantes de Sicilia, azuzados por sus rivales políticos. Mientras tanto, en tierras macedónicas, Marco Valerio Levino mantiene a raya a Filipo V de Macedonia al aliarse con la liga etolia.

"Hay una inmensa presión sobre mí. No puedo moverme sin dejar caer el peso de los siglos. Un millón de flechas me atraviesan. El desprecio y el ridículo me atraviesan". 'Las Olas' es la novela más experimental de Virginia Woolf. Narra la vida de seis personajes en diferentes momentos de su vida, desde la más tierna infancia hasta la vejez, y cuenta cómo sus realidades van variando con los años. Una novela sobre el paso del tiempo, que trae consigo un oleaje de pensamientos, emociones y cambios.