For anyone who is technical and wants to play with AI but doesn’t want to use cloud services it’s worth digging into LangChain, CrewAI, OpenDevin. Coupled with Ollama to serve the inference from your local network. You can scratch the AI itch without getting in bed with OpenAI.
I'll throw out a VC's perspective on liquidation prefs:
1) I think 1x is very fair and meant to protect investors from bad company behavior. If you didn't have 1x preference, this would be an easy way for an unscrupulous founder to cash out: raise $X for 20% of the company, no liquidation preference. The next day, sell the company and its assets ($X in cash) for, say, 0.9x. If there's no liquidation preference, the VC gets back 0.18x and the founder gets 0.72x, even though all that the founder did was sell the VC's cash at a discount the day after getting it.
2) >1x liquidation preferences are sometimes the founder's fault and sometimes the VC's fault. Sometimes it's an investor exploiting a position of leverage just to be more extractive. That sucks. But other times it's a founder intentionally exchanging worse terms for a higher/vanity valuation.
For example, let's say a founder raised a round at $500m, then the company didn't do as well as hoped, and now realistically the company is worth $250m. The founder wants to raise more to try to regain momentum.
A VC comes and says "ok, company is worth $250m, how about I put in $50m at a $250m valuation?"
Founder says "you know, I really don't want a down round. I think it would hurt morale, upset previous investors, be bad press, etc. What would it take for you to invest at a $500m+ valuation like last time?"
VC thinks and says "ok, how about $500m valuation, 3x liquidation preference?"
The founder can now pick between a $250m and a 1x pref, or $500m and a 3x pref. Many will pick #1, but many others will pick #2.
It's a rational VC offer -- if the company is worth $250m but wants to raise at $500m, then a liquidation preference can bridge that gap. The solution is kind of elegant, IMHO. But it can also lead to situations like the one described in the article above where a company has a good exit that gets swallowed up by the liquidation preference.
3) generally both sides have good lawyers (esp. at later stages of funding), so the liquidation preference decision is likely made knowingly.
Related to #3, if you're fundraising, please work with a good lawyer. There are a few firms that handle most tech startup financings, and they will have a much better understanding of terms and term benchmarks than everyone else. Gunderson, Goodwin, Cooley, Wilson Sonsini, and Latham Watkins are the firms I tend to see over and over.
>Ilya claims the transformer architecture, with some modification for efficiency, is actually sufficient for AGI.
I thought this guy was supposed to know what he's talking about? There was a paper that shows LLMs cannot generalise[0]. Anybody who's used ChatGPT can see there's imperfections.
It's compatible with cgroups v2 unlike the standard Docker. If you're using Fedora, you have to add a kernel parameter to Grub to use cgroups v1 instead.
RedHat seems to be pushing a standard ecosystem for Linux: systemd, Wayland, SELinux, GNOME, and now maybe podman. I've been on Linux for a while; it's a welcome change from all the fragmentation I'm used to. Whereas others try to work around the kernel and implement their own things in parallel (see: Canonical's AppArmor, LXC, OpenZFS), RedHat just goes with what Linux already has like SELinux/cgroups v2/btrfs, which I think is more likely to last and just feels better. If RedHat goes away, I'm fine since I'm ultimately only relying on Linux features. If Canonical goes away, then I'd have to switch to a different stack. That's probably why government, enterprises, Amazon, etc. still prefer RedHat.
These last few days I've been tickering with wasm3 and Rust as way to run Rust on ESP32. The xtensa architecture has still not been merged into upstream llvm so it's quite hard to run Rust on these MCU.
https://leanpub.com/sysprog