Commoditizing LLMs @ Stanford University ๐ค๐
โ๐ฅ Mark your calendars for an electrifying afternoon on August 13, 2023, from 2pm to 5pm, as aligns.ai, a non-profit AI community in Silicon Valley (https://twitter.com/AlignsAI), and Martian co-host a captivating discussion on the future of LLMs. Join us at Stanford University (register to see location) to explore how these cutting-edge AI models are transitioning from innovation marvels to accessible tech commodities. Gain insights into todayโs AI hype and prepare for a future where these AI wonders are as common as cloud services.๐ค๐ฌ
โAnd that's not all! After the afternoon's event, we're excited to host an invite-only afterparty at Geek House ๐ป๐ , the very place where Mark Zuckerberg lived during Facebook's early days. ๐
โ๐ Host: aligns.ai & Martian
โ๐ฌ Event Experience Officer: Harry Zhou, co-founder of aligns.ai
โ๐ Founder Talks
โAmr Awadallah, co-founder of Vectara - Discover how embedding powerful generative AI can change the game! (Oh, and Mr. Awadallah co-founded Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR) too! ๐)
โDrew Beller, co-founder of Spanning Labs - Dive into the future of technical documentation.๐โ๏ธ
โEtan Ginsberg, co-founder of Martian - Ever wondered about real-time LLM routing? Here's how! ๐ฆ๐ค
โJared Wilber, co-founder of CambioML (YC S23) - Unify ML development and production seamlessly. ๐ฅ๏ธ๐
โ๐ค VC Panel Discussion
โLu Zhang, Founder & Managing Partner of Fusion Fund
โUllas Naik, Founder & General Partner of Streamlined Ventures
โAaron Jacobson, Partner of New Enterprise Associates
โBryant Wang, Investor at SoftBank Vision Fund
โModerator: Jason Hu, core member of aligns.ai
โ(๐ Scroll down to view detailed profiles of the speakers)
โ๐ Agenda
โ1:40 - 2:05 PM: Check-in and Welcome
โ2:05 - 3:35 PM: Founder Talks
โ3:35 - 3:40 PM: Break
โ3:40 - 5:00 PM: VC Panel Discussion (LLM commoditization: learnings from the past 9 months)
โ5:30 - 7:00 PM: Afterparty at Geek House (by invitation)
โ๐ฎ Join Our Slack (https://join.slack.com/t/alignsai/shared_invite/zt-2129zfpwi-RViBs_6tSmDqUwbfPWLcYA)
โ
โจSpeaker Profilesโจ
โAmr Awadallah
โDr. Amr Awadallah is the CEO and cofounder of Vectara, a company that is revolutionizing how we find meaning across all languages of the world using the latest advances in Large Language Models, Deep Neural Networks, Natural Language Understanding and Information Retrieval. Amr previously served as VP of Developer Relations for Google Cloud. Prior to joining Google in Nov 2019, Amr co-founded Cloudera in 2008 and as Global CTO, he spent 11 years working closely with enterprises around the world on how to ingest and extract value from big data (he famously coined the concept of โschema-on-read vs schema-on-writeโ). He also served as vice president of product intelligence engineering at Yahoo! from 2000-2008. Amr joined Yahoo after they acquired his first startup, Aptivia, in mid-2000 which was a search engine for online product information. Amr received his PhD in EE from Stanford University, and his Bachelor and Master Degrees from Cairo University, Egypt.
โDrew Beller
โAlways obsessed with innovating on the cutting edge, Drew Beller founded his first company in High School 3D printing protective covers for Pebble smartwatches. After studying robotics at MIT, he joined self-driving car startup Zoox where he met his current co-founder Prateek Shah. At Zoox, Drew gained a deep understanding of working with complex ML systems and what it takes to continually test, validate, and improve them. This experience has proven invaluable in building his own AI powered startup, Spanning Labs, and understanding what it takes to ensure it is differentiated and scalable.
โEtan Ginsberg
โEtan Ginsberg is the co-founder of Martian. He previously founded and exited two companies, an algorithmic trading startup and the original American Ninja Warrior e-commerce platform. He is a former World Memory Championship competitor.
โJared Wilber
โCo-founder and CEO of CambioML (YC S23). Previously I was an Applied Scientist at AWS and a lecturer at UCSD's Halฤฑcฤฑoฤlu Data Science Institute. Author of the MLU-Explain interactive machine learning articles (https://mlu-explain.github.io/) and the roughViz charting library (https://github.com/jwilber/roughViz).
Lu Zhang
โLu Zhang, Founder and Managing Partner of Fusion Fund. With a strong technical background, Lu has extensive experience bringing a broad range of technologies to commercialization, and deep domain expertise in AI in healthcare, Enterprise AI/Networks, Edge Computing and Data Privacy. Founded by Lu in 2015, Fusion Fund is dedicated to supporting early-stage entrepreneurs working on innovation in healthcare, enterprise AI and industrial automation. With investments in over 80 companies across the U.S. and Canada, Fusion Fund has generated substantial exits over the years. Prior to starting Fusion Fund, Lu was a serial entrepreneur and materials science researcher. Following the acquisition of her startup by a leading public medical device company, Lu began investing in and supporting early-stage entrepreneurs. This eventually led her to create Fusion Fund in 2015. Since then, Lu has built a distinguished eco system and established her reputation in the VC industry. She was honored as Young Global Leader by World Economic Forum (Davos), Silicon Valley Women of Influence, Best 25 Female early-stage investor by Business Insider, Featured Honoree of VC of Forbes 30 under 30 and Town & Country 50 Modern Swans - Entrepreneurship Influencer Lu frequently speaks at high profile tech conferences such as World Economic Forum(Davos), Future Investment Initiative (FII), Web Summit, SuperReturn, etc. and she is a guest lecturer at Stanford University and Wharton. Lu serves as a board member of many portfolio companies, the Board and Chairwomen of the Youth Council of Future Science Award, and Jury Board of the Cartier Women Initiative and Young Leader Award. She holds an M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University.
โUllas Naik
โUllas is the founder and General Partner of Streamlined Ventures. Previously he was the co-founder of Cota Capital and a senior member of the investment team at Globespan Capital. Ullas is a seasoned venture capitalist, angel investor and entrepreneur with over 25 years of early-stage investment experience across more than 500 companies. A large number of those companies have gone on to become significant publicly traded companies or were acquired in large outcomes. Since the inception of Streamlined Ventures, Ullas has been investing in various iterations of what is now broadly referred to as โAIโ. His knowledge of the ecosystem is vast and he believes that the next 5-10 years will see the emergence of increasingly powerful AI technologies for consumer applications as well as for every business vertical market, which will meaningfully transform the dynamics of those markets.
Aaron Jacobson
โAaron Jacobson invests in entrepreneurs building the next-generation of AI ML, developer tools, cybersecurity, cloud / data app infrastructure, and robotics. He serves as a director of Flox, Crowdbotics, Embrace, Pulumi, Deltastream, Rapid Robotics, Outrider, Tigera, and ForAllSecure. He also works closely with many other NEA portfolio companies such as Databricks, Antimatter, Juvo, and Built Robotics. Previous investments include Box (NYSE:BOX), NGINX (acquired by F5), Streamsets (Acq. by Software AG), and Illusive Networks (Acq. by Proofpoint). In 2016 he was named to Forbes Magazineโs โ30 Under 30โ in Venture Capital and the Silicon Valley Business Journal's "40 Under 40".
โBryant Wang
โBryant Wang is an investor at SoftBank Vision Fund, investing in generative AI, gaming, and consumer internet. Some of the investments he covers include AccelByte, ByteDance and Aleo. Previously, he was an investor at Caspian Capital, a NY-based special situations hedge fund.
