Pear VC: Generative AI Mixer and Fireside Chat with Stanford Researchers

​Join Pear VC's Aparna Sinha in a conversation on safe and efficient AI with Stanford CS PhD researchers Dan Fu and Eric Mitchell. Dan is co-inventor of FlashAttention and is doing seminal work in increasing context length in LLMs. Eric is co-author of DetectGPT, which was recently featured in various press outlets for its ability to distinguish between AI vs. human generated text. We will talk with Dan and Eric about new capabilities we can expect from LLMs and how they could impact the use cases for generative AI.

​ABOUT DAN FU:

​Dan Fu is a fifth-year Computer Science PhD candidate at Stanford, where he is co-advised by Chris Ré and Kayvon Fatahalian, affiliated with the Stanford AI Lab, Stanford CRFM, the Stanford Machine Learning Group, DAWN, and the Stanford Computer Graphics Lab. In his research, Dan develops ML and systems algorithms to break crucial modeling bottlenecks. Recently, he's been very interested in enabling longer-sequence models, with a line of work starting with H3 and FlashAttention. In the past, he has also done work on labeling (Liger, FlyingSquid), data (TABi, Thanos), and human (Rekall) bottlenecks.

​ABOUT ERIC MITCHELL:

Eric is a fourth-year PhD student in Stanford’s CS department, where he is advised by Chelsea Finn and Christopher D. Manning. The goal of his research is to make the knowledge embedded in neural networks more reusable and updatable in an ever-changing world. Eric is interested in deep learning generally, as well as meta-learning and continual learning more specifically, particularly in the context large language models (or ‘Foundation Models’).

​ABOUT PEAR VC:

​​​​Pear VC is a pre-seed and seed stage VC firm that partners with entrepreneurs from their earliest days to build category defining companies. We've invested in top-tier companies including Doordash, Gusto, Branch, Guardant Health, Aurora Solar, Vanta, Affinity and so many more. We're company builders, having founded 10 companies: we help companies find product-market fit, recruit their first engineering hire, and overcome other critical business challenges.