Richard MacManus

What if you could combine your own private data store with a large language model (LLM) like OpenAI’s GPT, and query it programmatically? That’s the promise of LlamaIndex, a new framework that helps developers avoid fine-tuning and overly long prompts. It’s part of an emerging category of LLM application tools that some are calling “orchestration … Read more

When Adobe announced that it would acquire the design tool Figma for $20 billion last September, an open source equivalent called Penpot immediately began seeing a spike in signups. Penpot, which is developed by a Spanish company called Kaleidos, continued to grow rapidly after it launched General Availability in February. Since then, Penpot sign-ups have … Read more

MosaicML is launching its second open source large language model (LLM), called MPT-30B, which follows on from the smaller MPT-7B model it debuted in May. To discuss the new model and what it means for developers, I spoke to MosaicML co-founder and CEO, Naveen Rao. His previous startup was Nervana, a deep learning company that … Read more

Forget the LAMP stack, it’s now all about the LLM stack. Tools such as LangChain and Anyscale’s Aviary have launched over the past year to help developers build apps based on — or connected to — large language models (LLMs). Although it’s still early days, Hugging Face has quickly become a key part of this … Read more

Today at Canva’s first-ever developer conference in San Francisco, the company announced a new developer platform, along with a $50 million “Innovation Fund.” Canva, a design platform that competes with the likes of Adobe and Figma, claims it has 135 million monthly active users. So this is potential of great interest to devs — including … Read more

The company behind Ray, an open source AI framework that helps power ChatGPT, has just released a new tool to help developers work with large language models (LLMs). Called Aviary, Anyscale describes it as the “first fully free, cloud-based infrastructure designed to help developers choose and deploy the right technologies and approach for their LLM-based … Read more

“Welcome to the era of spatial computing,” announced Apple as it unveiled its latest device, a pair of mixed-reality goggles called the Vision Pro. CEO Tim Cook described it as “a new kind of computer that augments reality by seamlessly blending the real world with the digital world.” A new operating system powers the device, … Read more

AlphaSense has used artificial intelligence technologies for over ten years, as a way to compete against the likes of Bloomberg in the market intelligence industry. It recently launched its first generative AI application, Smart Summaries, which provides summaries of content such as earnings calls. We spoke to VP of Product Chris Ackerson, who previously worked … Read more

LangChain is a programming framework for using large language models (LLMs) in applications. Like everything in generative AI, things have moved incredibly fast for the project. It started out as a Python tool in October 2022, then in February added TypeScript support. By April, it supported multiple JavaScript environments, including Node.js, browsers, Cloudflare Workers, Vercel/Next.js, … Read more

We’re in a new golden age of decentralized versions of Twitter. Mastodon (an open source project built on the ActivityPub protocol), Bluesky (a company building the AT Protocol) and now Nostr (an open protocol project) are all attempting to fulfill the promise of Twitter in 2007, when it was erroneously called an open platform. Intriguingly, … Read more

No prizes for guessing the focus of this year’s Microsoft Build developer conference. Of course, it was AI — just as it had been at Google I/O earlier this month. But whereas Google’s AI announcements seemed disorganised and all over the map, Microsoft came up with a cohesive framework to entice developers: its new “Copilot … Read more

Developer tools are scrambling to integrate AI into their products, no matter which part of the developer workflow they cater to. One example is Gradle Build Tool, an open source build automation tool that has been around for fifteen years now. The company behind it, Gradle Inc, has been paying particular attention to AI, since … Read more

We first profiled Pinecone in early 2021, just after it launched its vector database solution. Since that time, the rise of generative AI has caused a massive increase in interest in vector databases — with Pinecone now viewed among the leading vendors. To find out how Pinecone’s business has evolved over the past couple of … Read more

Jyoti Bansal is the CEO of Harness, a DevOps company that has recently fine-tuned its tagline to “the industry’s first Software Delivery Platform to use AI to simplify your DevOps processes.” Harness isn’t the first company to pivot hard towards AI, of course, but given its focus on continuous delivery, I took the opportunity to … Read more

Today at Google I/O, the web giant’s annual developer conference, Google announced a bunch of new AI tools — including new tooling for the TensorFlow ecosystem, a new one-stop shop for developers called ML Hub, and upgrades to its cross-platform set of ML solutions called MediaPipe. Ahead of the announcements, I conducted an email interview … Read more