LLM Value Chain

Posted on by Brendan

I found this image provided by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) very helpful for understanding the current LLM value chain. In the image they use FM which stands for Foundation Models. Specifically you can see where the big tech incumbents are currently playing. Some interesting pieces to me are:

  • The FM release will be how other enterprise and start up companies are able to leverage these FMs at scale for proprietary data. Perhaps startup FMs will run in tandem with these as well. I am excited about innovation here because it opens up the door for a lot of improvements to SEO and CRO executional improvements and changes. 
  • It will be interesting to follow how the bottom row continues to play out since that is where the end users. I am excited to see how AI makes its way into productivity software like Gsuite, Android, Microsoft Office, or  iOS. 
  • Notice where Apple is playing? They’re developing models and with its mobile ecosystem of users has a chance at shaking things up. 
  • When people talk about GenAI favoring incumbents, this image makes that clear. 
LLM Value Chain

Returning to Work after Vacations

Posted on by Brendan

Vacations are necessary for me, and I think most people. I took Thursday and Friday off last week and traveled to the Dominican Republic to celebrate a friend who is getting married in a few months. It was a fun time. Warm weather, sun, golf, good food, beach, pool, and most importantly many conversations and laughs with old friends. It is quite surreal spending time away from kids for a few days. It is great to get away from constant parenting once in a while but I also missed them. And when I got back they seemed like they grew up in 48 hours. 

Back to the point I want to make about returning from vacations. I’ve learned the importance of mindset on the first day back at work after a vacation. It is important to take the vacation and truly enjoy yourself during it. I used to take less vacation because I didn’t like coming back and feeling out of the loop and catching up. 

Rather than taking less vacation, I simply switch my mindset when I return. My mindset is to ease into the first day back. I do this by giving myself the morning to be meeting free. At least 830AM to 11AM or so. In that time I catch up on data, weekly planning, team priorities, and email/slack. I like to do this off a fresh night’s sleep. I find after spending 2 to 3 hours in these areas, I reap the recovery benefits of the vacation and I dive back into work with a mindset of excitement and control rather than letting calendar or other people’s priorities dictate my first half of the day which leads me feeling more stressed and bored than excited and engaged. 

Take the vacation, come back and be deliberate about your time for the first half of the day.

Make it Happen

Posted on by Brendan

My neighbor published a children’s book, Birdie & Bodhi: Coastal Tails. Our dog, Tide, made it in the book and is friends with Bodhi, one of the main characters. 

I found the story my neighbor told about creating the book very inspiring. She got the idea for the book after her and her daughter got Birdie and Bodhi. She was watching them play often and thought a book would be fun to write. 

She then went out and made it happen by finding an illustrator and someone who can do the publishing and distributing of the book. 

Pretty cool and a lesson in if you have an idea and are passionate about it, find a way to make it happen. 

The book can be pre-ordered here.

Relationship Principles

Posted on by Brendan

Relationships shape our experiences and influence who we become. They take consistent effort. Yet they can be easily put on auto-pilot. After all, there’s work to be done. 

It is important to reflect and think about your relationships and act on building healthy habits around them. 

I saw this tweet yesterday from Ray Dalio. I found this list of 8 principles for better personal relationships quite helpful and profound.

AI, Blockchain, and Search

Posted on by Brendan

I recently finished Read Write Own by Chris Dixon. I found the brief section titled, Artificial Intelligence: The New Economic Covenant for Creators the most interesting because it most closely ties to search. He quickly summarizes historical context around content creators bringing supply and distributors like Google putting that content in front of relevant users. The creator base was fragmented back in the 90s and early 2000s and still today. Dixon argued the fragmentation of content creators prevented them from gaining any sort of power in the relationship between supply and distributor. Had creators been able to band together, the Google we know today might have been different. Instead the result was Google gathering more users to amass a 80%+market share in search today through moving to compliment products it gave away for free such as an internet browser (Chrome) and mobile OS (Android) then moved most of the commerce to search with ads and built a great product that kept users coming back. 

The connection both AI and blockchain have to this history of the internet is that it is a chance to reset the power dynamics. His big argument is that blockchain is the only way to do it because of the network design. The root of the design is to give more power to people who contribute value to the network, not the management teams of those networks. If a traditional corporate network tries to do this, over time it will just turn into what you see today as the network attracts users and then extracts as much value as it can for the benefit of the people who own the corporate network (founders, shareholders,etc.).  

It is a short part of the last chapter on pages 216 to 222 with some thought provoking questions at the end.

My thoughts are that I want the creative work I am a part of on the internet to have a chance to perform in search and get credit when value is generated. I also want to be able to find and point to the creative work of others as a user. I am really excited about that end-state. The design or technology that powers that discovery is less of my expertise but I find it interesting to stay on top of new technologies and ideas that might gain traction like blockchain.