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Shawn Wang: belief

30 May 2024 Latent Space How to train a Million Context LLM — with Mark Huang of Gradient.ai

“I think there's definitely a few of us ex-finance people moving into tech and then finding ourselves gravitating towards data and AI.”

— Shawn Wang

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Speaker
Shawn Wang
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
30 May 2024
Publisher
Latent Space

Transcript context

…Yeah, exactly. Kind of crazy, right? So it all goes full circle. I was a quant for quite a few years and then made it out into Silicon Valley and now we intersect again when it kind of feels like more or less the same, right? Like the AI wars, the trading wars back in the day too, to a certain extent and the grab for talent. I think there's definitely a few of us ex-finance people moving into tech and then finding ourselves gravitating towards data and AI. Seems like you did that. You were at a bunch of sort of quant trading shops, but then as you moved to tech, you were a lead data scientist at Box and staff ML scientist at Splunk. And then before working on the startup that eventually became Gradient. You want to tell that story? Yeah, I think part of the reason why I came over from the quant finance world is to get more collaboration, learn about what big data and scaling machine learning really looks like when you're not in this bubble, right? And working at Box, I worked mostly in a cross-functional role, helping product analytics and go to market. And then at Splunk, it was a lot more specific role where I was helping with streaming analytics and search and deep learning. And for Gradient, like really why we started it was whether it was in finance or whether it was in tech, I always noticed that there was a little bit more to give in terms of what AI or ML could contribute to the business. And we came at a really good time with respect to wanting to bring the full value of what that could be into the enterprise. And then obviously, OpenAI created this huge vacuum into the industry to allow for that, right? So I myself felt like really, really empowered to actually ship product and ship stuff that I could think could really help people.…

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