Drove back today. Will miss the snow.

No exercise, tired and traveling. Not much space for work in Tahoe, so back to focus.

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Wonderful time up here in the thin air with family and friends, headed back home tomorrow.

Starship launch was scrubbed, moving the next window back to Wednesday.

LLMs

What I’m reading today re LLM’s:

• RedPajama is a project to create open-source base models (like llama) from the ground up. They’ve released a 1.2T large training dataset that’ll serve as the foundation for an open vicunia-like chat model.
• Minigpt-4 looks to Enhance Vision-language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models and combines Vicunica with a vision recognition model using a small, easily trained linear layer. So, the “GPT-4” aspect is the vision-language combination, and the SOTA is that this model can be run on commodity GPUs (3090)
• Google web-comic on federated learning. Reads like propaganda, but brought up the concept of secure aggregation, where training data can be collected from end-user devices without exposing personal user data. Particularly relevant when trying to encourage collaboration between entities with silos of private data.

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Exercise

Full day of boarding out at Kirkwood, and a reminder that Kirkwood is my favorite mountain. No Wagon Wheel, but I felt solid on everything but.

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Yesterday went to a Banff Mountain Film Festival showing ten short films. Highlights were North Shore Betty (always adventure), Wild Waters re Nouria Newman, and the Wide Boys crack climbing under a British motorway. O, and Heavenly remains a gorgeous mountain.

Bruised my rib at the beginning of the yesterday by catching an edge. That one’s gonna stuck with me for awhile.

Some California to Nevada pictures:

Exercise

Got in about 4mi of x-country skiing out at Camp Richardson with the crew (CEO, RL, A&J).

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Packing up for Tahoe tomorrow – should get in two days of downhill and one day of cross-country. Supposedly slushy, but with thick bases.

Continuing to be in shock and awe of the AI’s, this time Midjourney’s image generation. Best I’ve seen yet, and the fingers are sometimes correct. Five years from now…

Exercise

Felt real good. Still monitoring my left shoulder – open grip decline bench riles it up the worst.

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