Top 100 GenAI Web Apps, NVIDIA's Blackwell GPU, and Bitcoin's Layer 2 AI
A few links to click, read, and think about.
Morning y’all!
I had a wonderful comment the other day from one of our community of readers and it made me so happy! Thanks Tom so much for sharing!
I will add that although my image is definitely altered by generative AI, the base image that I use is most-definitely real! These emojis I shared recently are not as altered as I probably should have made them since I like to protect my privacy and not have my real face everywhere on the internet.
Thanks again and if you’ve liked what you’ve read over the last few months then please share the newsletter with others! Y’all are the best!
※\(^o^)/※
— Summer
Today I’ve got a smattering of news and resources that should keep Wednesday short and sweet. There’s a lot going on but not all of the things that cross my desk are super useful or pragmatic. Let’s go!
Jensen Huang shared the news of their new chip, the Blackwell B200 GPU, designed specifically for AI performance, offering 20 petaflops of FP4 horsepower. This is billed at being 30 times the performance for LLM inference and 25 times more efficient than the H100. If you’ve invested in NVIDIA then you’re doing pretty well these days.
Bitcoin Virtual Machine, a layer 2 project, has launched Truly Open AI, a platform for AI models on the blockchain. They partnered with Filecoin, Near, Polygon, Avail, and Syscoin on this design to allow users monetization tools.
Oh, really. 2 of the 3 cofounders of Pi (Inflection) are leaving:
Today we are also announcing that two of our three co-founders, Mustafa and Karén, will be leaving Inflection to start Microsoft AI, a new division at Microsoft that will bring together their consumer AI efforts, as well as Copilot, Bing and Edge.
The buried this way south on the post but that’s kind of a big deal, if you ask me.
a16z shares the top 100 gen AI web products based on unique monthly visits. I haven’t heard of a handful of them so this was fun to review what people are really checking out with their most valuable asset — time.
An interesting statistic: 22 newcomers to the list in the last 6 months. If you take a small step back that’s staggering growth to go from launch to top product in less than a single year. Yikes.
Google and Fitbit are developing a Gemini-based large language model to offer personalized health recommendations and advice in the Fitbit app.
Despite the flubs of Gemini, organizations are still trying to partner with them. I have never used a Fitbit (and will never use one) but many of you might. Love to know your thoughts on this if you have any.
A really good post about what’s really going down with Devin, the coding platform that will “replace” software engineers. I loved this particular remark:
AI dev tool startups need outlandish claims to grab attention. The “AI coding buddy” space feels already saturated. For organizations hosting source code on GitHub, Copilot is a no-brainer. For companies using Sourcegraph for code search, Cody is the clear choice. Those using Replit for development, the Replit AI tool is the one to go with. The only major source control platforms that don't have AI assistants yet are GitLab and Bitbucket, and this is surely just a matter of time.
This means, one of the few ways to launch an AI dev tools startup is to claim you will fully replace software engineers. Anything less, and there’s no reason why developers should swap their existing coding assistant, and open up their codebase for a brand new tool to crawl and contribute to.
Nope, Devin won’t be replacing anyone but will definitely be replacing tools and the workflows developers use to write code. Remember, people have been saying this since the 1960’s:
In the late 1950s, computer users and manufacturers were becoming concerned about the rising cost of programming. A 1959 survey had found that in any data processing installation, the programming cost US$800,000 on average and that translating programs to run on new hardware would cost $600,000. At a time when new programming languages were proliferating, the same survey suggested that if a common business-oriented language were used, conversion would be far cheaper and faster.
Go figure. Last one:
Pretty neat tool for those that are building products:
Analyze customer research quickly, generate journey templates, and improve productivity with TheyDo. Simplify the journey mapping process and gain valuable insights from vast amounts of data.
And that’s it folks! Have a great day!
※\(^o^)/※
— Summer