Richard MacManus

Tecton, a machine learning (ML) “feature platform” company founded by the creators of Uber’s Michelangelo ML platform, today announced version 0.6 of its product. The update allows users to “build production-ready features directly in their notebooks, and deploy them to production in a matter of minutes,” said Mike Del Balso, co-founder and CEO of Tecton. … Read more

AI21 Labs, an Israeli generative AI company, today announced its latest large language model (LLM), called Jurassic-2. Up till now, the base model of AI21 Labs has been Jurassic-1, the largest version of which has 178 billion parameters. That made it among the largest LLMs on the market — slightly bigger than OpenAI’s 175B parameter … Read more

Last month, Cloudflare launched a new service called Wildebeest, allowing Mastodon users to set up and run their own instances on its infrastructure. Wildebeest uses a laundry list of Cloudflare services, including Supercloud, Workers, Pages, Durable Objects, and Queues. It’s very much about showcasing Cloudflare’s own products, but (as with Fastly) it is also encouraging … Read more

OpenAI has just announced an enterprise version of its popular generative AI product, ChatGPT. But in this case, OpenAI is a fast follower — not the first-to-market. Cohere, a Toronto-based company with close ties to Google, is already bringing generative AI to businesses. I spoke with Cohere’s President and COO, Martin Kon, about how its … Read more

At the end of last week, news hit that Adobe’s $20 billion acquisition of Figma might not go through, as the U.S. Justice Department is reportedly preparing an antitrust suit to block the deal. This news came in just a couple of days after I spoke with Figma’s CTO, Kris Rasmussen. He wasn’t willing to … Read more

This month Matt Welsh, a former professor of computer science at Harvard, spoke at a virtual meetup of the Chicago Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), explaining his thesis that ChatGPI and GitHub Copilot represent the beginning of the end of programming. Welsh thinks programming is on the cusp of changing from a job that humans … Read more

In a documentary two years ago about the JavaScript framework Vue.js, it was described as a kind of indie alternative in the JavaScript ecosystem, compared to the two leading frameworks — Facebook’s React and Google’s Angular. “It just feels less corporate […] more grassroots,” is how one of the talking heads described it. In comparison … Read more

The last time I wrote about Foursquare was over ten years ago, when it was just a location check-in app for consumers. At that point, July 2012, it was trying to take on Yelp in the consumer recommendations market. Several pivots later and Foursquare is now squarely an enterprise service. It markets itself as “the … Read more

TensorFlow.js is a JavaScript library for training and deploying Machine Learning (ML) models in the browser and on Node.js. It was launched by Google nearly five years ago, but its popularity has increased in recent years thanks to the practice of using ML in programming — part of the generative AI trend engulfing the technology industry … Read more

Netlify is acquiring one of its main competitors, the Jamstack framework and platform company Gatsby. I spoke to Netlify’s co-founder and CEO Matt Biilmann about the deal, why he was interested in the struggling Gatsby, and what it means for the future of Jamstack — the web development trend his own company pioneered and Gatsby … Read more

Anil Dash is someone I’ve known for a long time, to paraphrase Kara Swisher’s line at the beginning of almost all of her podcasts. I remember sitting down with him at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, in 2007, to get his advice on growing my tech blogging business, ReadWriteWeb. At the time, Dash … Read more

Robert Nishihara is the co-founder and CEO of Anyscale, the company behind the open source platform, Ray — the distributed machine learning framework being used by ChatGPT and other highly-scaled products, such as Uber. I spoke to Nishihara to find out how ordinary companies can take advantage of AI technology and how Ray fits into … Read more

Last January, there were over 18,000 monthly active developers in the Web3 ecosystem, according to the crypto VC firm Electric Capital. The firm has just released a follow-up report, which states there are 23,343 monthly developers as of December 2022. That number had gone over the 26,000 mark during June of 2022, but the “70%+ … Read more

According to Ion Stoica, co-founder of Databricks and Anyscale, and also a senior professor of computer science at Berkeley, 2023 will be the year of “distributed AI frameworks.” Needless to say, he has already had a hand in creating such a tool, in the form of Anyscale’s open source Ray platform. Among other uses, Ray … Read more

When Figma sold itself to Adobe last year, in one sense it was a triumph for web standards. Figma was built on WebGL, JavaScript and (latterly) WebAssembly. It was another sign of the continued strength of web technologies, which in many cases are now just as powerful as native apps. However, there are still several … Read more