Jay Kapoor

Lindon Gao used @DynaRobotics model to get 99.4% success rate folding napkins. Turned out customers didn't care about your "success rates" in a lab.

A few days before announcing Dyna 2.1 and their semi-humanoid Taku, @Lindon_Gao joined me on the Dirty Jobs main stage and teased for our invite-only audience:

— Why Speed, Throughput, Quality are most critical to what they measures now
— Why hardware remains the bottleneck in physical AI today and the semi-humanoid opportunity
— Why there's no such thing as bad data, only lazy labeling
— Why deployment data is essential to building the world's best robotics model

Hear how and why a model company evolves into deployment on Ep 103 of CLIMB with Lindon Gao and Jay Kapoor 🦾

The NFL has rescinded the $14,926 fine it imposed on 49ers FB Kyle “Juice” Juszczyk for what it thought was a distasteful celebration of chugging a beer. The league said it was withdrawing the fine “because his celebration was simulating drinking a juice box, not a beer….Mr. Juszczyk finally stated that the fine is hypocritical with the amount of Bud Light sponsorships surrounding the NFL.” Fine rescinded.

Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models

“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.

“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor.

“You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something.

“That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’

“I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”