Dara Khosrowshahi: “A lesson with Uber is actually the power of aggregating supply. Certainly you need demand, but there are certain aggregation categories where supply brings demand, it brings more eyeballs. That, for example, is definitely true for us as it relates to our rides business, but even more so in the delivery business. Every single restaurant that we add is a new item to sell, but also the more restaurants we have in a particular search, the greater your conversion is. It not only brings in eyeballs, but it also brings in conversion. Those two obviously are multiplicative, which gets to be a much bigger business as well. We’re very supply-led as a company. I think as a manager of a big company, once in a while you get to learn, and I’ve definitely learned my lesson here.”
VentureBeat: “Currently, transformers are the dominant architecture for many use cases that require LLMs and benefit from the most research and development. Although this does not seem likely to change anytime soon, one different class of model that has gained interest recently is state-space models (SSMs) such as Mamba. This highly efficient algorithm can handle very long sequences of data, whereas transformers are limited by a context window. For me, the most exciting applications of transformer models are multimodal models. OpenAI’s GPT-4o, for instance, is capable of handling text, audio and images — and other providers are starting to follow. Multimodal applications are very diverse, ranging from video captioning to voice cloning to image segmentation (and more). They also present an opportunity to make AI more accessible to those with disabilities. For example, a blind person could be greatly served by the ability to interact through voice and audio components of a multimodal application.”
FT: “We believe organisations should consider four pivotal questions when contemplating automation. First, how complex is the task?…Second, how frequent is the task?…Third, how interconnected are the tasks…Fourth, when executing a task, what is the cost of failure?”
Virginia Woolf: “To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice. Even, if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them. For this certainly is true—one cannot write the most ordinary little story, attempt to describe the simplest event—meeting a beggar, shall we say, in the street, without coming up against difficulties that the greatest of novelists have had to face.”
Tim Donahue: “In her memoir, Dorothy Allison writes, “Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.” Throughout my teaching career at independent schools, which began during the Clinton administration, I’ve also been telling students that reading a story all the way through is an act of love. It takes stillness and receptivity to realize this, it takes a willingness to enter the life of someone you’ll never meet, and it requires great practice.”
