LLM

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GenAI, GPT, LLM

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), especially ChatGPT, captures everyone’s attention. The transformer based large language models (LLMs), trained on a vast quantity of unlabeled data at scale, demonstrate the ability to generalize to many different tasks. To understand why LLMs are so powerful, we will deep dive into how they work in this post.

LLM Evolutionary Tree

Will Libra Succeed?

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Facebook, Libra

Facebook has finally revealed its cryptocurrency, Libra, which it will launch in 2020. Like other cryptocurrencies, users can access Libra through apps and use to pay for things or to send money to each other. While Libra shows a lot of more potentials with its careful design choices, Facebook lacks of expertise and experience in regulations and financial service operations. In this post, we will investigate the potentials and challenges of Libra.

Two Fundamental Changes in Apache Spark

Barrier execution mode and Delta Lake are two new Apache Spark features. Interestingly, they break apart from the root of Apache Spark. Let’s figure out together what they are and why they are developed. More importantly, will they be a success?

Cloud is Not Cheap

Lyft is going public. Its S-1 filing reveals that “[Lyft] committed to spend an aggregate of at least $300 million between January 2019 and December 2021, with a minimum amount of $80 million in each of the three years, on AWS services.” If its usage of Amazon’s cloud doesn’t hit or exceed that $300 million threshold, Lyft will have to pay the difference.

Private cloud is dead. Long live private cloud.

To remain valuable and relevant to their lines of business (LOB), in-house IT organizations have to be able to deliver private cloud services that are competitive with public cloud services. Correspondingly, the community has been developing private cloud solution such as OpenStack, which mimic public cloud services by offering virtual machines and other resources. However, corporate are realizing they could never build an AWS-like cloud in-house. In 2018, Walmart, the biggest cheerleader of OpenStack, announced that they signed a five-year deal to make Microsoft Azure the preferred cloud provider. Although Walmart won’t leave OpenStack completely in the dust, it does raise questions about Walmart’s future use of OpenStack.

What are missing in Kubernetes?

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Batch Jobs, Container, Docker, HPA, HPC, Kubernetes, Spark

As Kubernetes becomes the de facto solution for container orchestration, more and more people expect that it will be the orchestrator of data centers. For example, ZDNet predicted Kubernetes will rule the hyperscale data center in 2018. In a little over four years’ time, the project born from Google seems going to change everything. Tracing back to its root from Google Borg, Kubernetes is nicely designed to run web services. As StatefulSets became stable in 1.9, it is also able to manage stateful applications such as database, message queue, etc. To conquer enterprise data centers, however, there are still several missing pieces.

IBM Is Missing A Disruptive Innovation In Her Own Hand

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AI, Disruptive Innovation, IBM, Oncology, Watson, Watson for Oncology

With $80B revenue but a streak of 21 consecutive quarters of declining revenue, IBM has a big appetite for growth. The hungry of growth drives IBM investing billions into their AI business, namely IBM Watson Group. However, it also drives IBM away from a disruptive innovation even though it is in her own hand. The disruptive innovation in spotlight is Watson for Oncology.

What’s Wrong with Bitcoin

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Bitcoin

There are many debates on the technical shortfalls in the design of Bitcoin such as the block size, transaction throughput, etc. But the biggest problem of Bitcoin is its anti-economics mindset.

How to Kill Bad Projects

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Discovery-Driven Growth, Escalation of Commitment, Sunk Cost Fallacy

It is an open secret how hard to kill projects in development. In the Harvard Business Review article “Why Bad Projects Are So Hard to Kill“, professor Isabelle Royer says that many projects are hard to kill because of a “fervent and widespread belief among managers in the inevitability of their projects’s ultimate success.” The desire to believe in something is primal. The excitement and exuberance associated with a project typically originate with the project champion, whose unyielding conviction that the project will succeed is often based on a hunch rather than on strong evidence. The champion’s exuberance spreads because others also want to believe, especially if the champion is charismatic and well networked within the company.

The Future Business Model of Payroll

	ADP	Paypal
Money Movement	$1.7 trillion	$354 billion
Revenue	$12.21 billion	$11.27 billion
Profit	$1.75 billion	$1.42 billion
Market Cap	$43.3 billion	$59.7 billion

• ADP revenue includes full HCM services besides payroll.

Notice something here? ADP moves a lot of money than Paypal, but makes less revenue on money movement (less the revenue from other HCM services). It has a smaller market cap too. Why? Well, ADP is in the business of solution shop and value add process while Paypal is a facilitated network.