Brad Green

Apple’s shift away from the annual release cycle toward multiple, smaller launches throughout the year feels long overdue—especially in today’s world where AI and machine learning are reshaping how we interact with tech at lightning speed. For those familiar with SaaS, rapid, frequent releases are nothing new. Apple had the perfect ecosystem to pioneer this shift earlier but missed the mark, leaving valuable opportunities on the table with their delayed entry into AI-driven capabilities. At the pace GenAI and LLMs are evolving, a single year is practically a lifetime. By embracing more frequent, timely releases, Apple can course-correct and stay agile, catching up with innovation that’s moving faster than ever. #Apple #AI #TechInnovation #Agility

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That awkward silence is coming from your robotaxi. Waymo has had its share of bumpy roads, but its parent Alphabet believes the self-driving technology is on the right path to the yellow brick road, investing another $5 billion. The self-driving company is making the right turns. Drive around San Francisco on any given day, and chances are good the vehicle that comes up right next to you will have you doing a double take. Robotaxis are commonplace in the city by the bay. Whether it's the traffic-filled streets in the downtown or the narrow streets of Golden Gate Park, Waymo vehicles are dodging traffic and avoiding pedestrians. It's full speed ahead. Waymo delivers 50,000 paid rides per week, offering a fully driverless ride-hail service in San Francisco and Phoenix, and recently expanded to Los Angeles and Austin. And soon, the service will be available for airport rides to and from the San Francisco International Airport. The road well traveled doesn't mean everyone is so accepting. While Waymo has received compliments from some, it hasn't been welcomed by others. In San Francisco, vehicles have been vandalized and destroyed along with many who question the safety of self-driving vehicles. Whichever side you fall on, self-driving can be a highly polarizing issue, and only time will tell if the perception will ever change. Alphabet is betting that the sky's the limit. While the $5 billion commitment is nothing to shake your windshield wipers at, Waymo's partnership with Chinese electric automaker Zeekr is both symbolic and substantial. Waymo's deployment of a custom-built, roomier robotaxi made by Zeekr marks a significant step forward in the company's autonomous vehicle development. Zoom, zoom, just not too much zoom. Robotaxis aren't going way. Waymo is expanding if not slowly here in the states, while other countries such as China have companies such as Baidu taking the lead in major cities. And Elon Musk is gearing up with his own line of robotaxis in the near future. For Alphabet, the challenge is not only making them more acceptable to the masses, but also addressing safety concerns. The technology isn't perfect, but $5 billion will certainly help get it there https://lnkd.in/gn3TZcPx #alphabet #waymo #zeekr #robotaxi #culture #autonomousvehicles #automotiveindustry #transportation

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Engineers are experiencing a seismic shift driven by market volatility, the rise of GenAI, and new approaches to quantifying engineering impact. But there's a disconnect between business leaders and the engineers building their products. 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆 𝗯𝘆 Jellyfish 🔗 https://bit.ly/3Vt3lcO 📉 71% of execs at large enterprises believe productivity decreased, while only 40% of engineers agree. 🤷‍♂️ 43% of engineers feel that leadership at their company is out of the loop regarding engineering challenges, compared to 92% of executives 😩 46% of engineers report their teams are experiencing burnout, compared to 34% of executives. This chasm between perception and reality can breed mistrust, misalignment, and missed opportunities. 𝗪𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗿𝘂𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹, 𝗲𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗰𝗮𝗻: ✨ Foster psychological safety for open dialogue 🤝 Build trust through active listening and empathy 💡 Inspire teams by painting a compelling vision 🧭 Provide clarity amidst ambiguity and change By complementing hard metrics with soft skills, leaders can create an environment where engineers thrive and innovation flourishes. 𝗛𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗼𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻? #Leadership #EmotionalIntelligence #Engineering

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Ever wonder how teams at Airbnb & directors like Spielberg turn big ideas into unforgettable experiences? ✨ It all starts with storyboarding - it’s like sketching out your project with a comic strip to visualize each step before you begin. We’re launching a "Multimodal Storyboarding Starter Kit" for developers, enabling you to unlock GenAI storyboarding in your apps. Check out StoryFlow, a demo app built on VideoDB: 1. Enter your app description. 2. List user steps. 3. Hit Generate & watch your user journey come to life! Want early access? Reply or like this post! :)

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🍜Anybody up for some ramen? I am excited to share that I am back in the garage, building again (it’s actually a house in the Berkeley Hills). We are taking the wraps off of Supercog AI, a new startup focused on solving Application Integration using LLM powered agents. My co-founder in this new venture is a great friend of mine (and a former co-founder partner), Alex Osborne. Alex and I have worked around the application integration space for a long time, and we are unrealistically excited about applying the GenAI stack to this problem. Not many people relish the task to get some bits to move from system A to system B. But it’s a critical job to be done, and that’s led to a lot of brittle scripts, a myriad of inflexible “no code” tools, and a lot of hand crafted SQL. But the power of the Large Language Model, trained on a huge corpus of information, offers a remarkable tool to solve this problem. The LLM you use today already knows the APIs of hundreds of popular systems. It knows the SQL dialects of every major database. It understands the semantics and data schemas of many popular SaaS systems. It understands much of the specific domain in which your business operates. I like to call the AI revolution “the last platform shift”. That may turn out to be hyperbole, but I definitely believe we are in the very early stages of seeing what this new stack can enable. I know we are hardly the first folks to claim that “amazing stuff is coming!”. But this is why Alex and I have decided to focus on a real and hard problem. If we can prove that LLMs can power a new way to solve this problem, it will be the first successful *new* approach in 15 years.. We will have much more to share about this new platform soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in getting a peek - or even better if you have application or data integration tasks that you would like some help with - please reach out because we want to help. #genai #startups #backinthegarage

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Join Chloe He at #BerlinBuzzwords to discuss using Python for stream processing and more!

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👉 Howdy LinkedIn! Tomorrow, on "Building Products with Generative AI" - I will be hosting 🚘 Nitin Kartik at 11:30AM CST/12:30 PM EST! We're going to be digging into the intersection of Product Marketing & Generative AI, as well as other topics that will branch from Nitin's experience in the space. I'm excited for another interesting episode with a great thought leader in the space - we hope to see you join for tomorrow's episode! #GenerativeAI #AI #ProductMarketing

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Every startup CEO should be using this. Meet your new AI SDR.

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We're thrilled to announce that Meta's Llama 3 models are now available in Amazon Bedrock. These models are designed to empower you in building, experimenting, and responsibly scaling your generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications, offering enhanced capabilities across various use cases. Pre-trained and instruction-tuned, you can now simply and easily add new capabilities into your Gen AI projects. Because these models have been meticulously trained on a massive dataset of over 15 trillion tokens, you will have much more capacity for nuance, analysis, dialogue and more. Check out these use cases and be inspired: ·      Llama 3 8B: Ideal for scenarios with limited computational power and resources, as well as edge devices. This model excels in tasks such as text summarization, classification, sentiment analysis, and language translation. ·      Llama 3 70B: Tailored for content creation, conversational AI, language understanding, research development, and enterprise applications. This powerhouse model shines in various tasks including text summarization, accuracy, classification, sentiment analysis, language modeling, dialogue systems, code generation, and instruction-following. Ready to elevate your AI game with Amazon Bedrock? There is more detail in our blog post by my AWS colleague Channy Yun linkedin.com/in/channy #Meta #Llama3 #AmazonBedrock #AIInnovation #EmpoweringTech

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Our team just release a new benchmark for Hand and Object Tracking called Hot3D: https://lnkd.in/gBT2bF5H. HOT3D is a new dataset to explore vision-based methods for hand-object interaction. And we believe it will unlock new opportunities within this research area, such as transferring manual skills from experts to less experienced users or robots, helping an AI assistant to understand user's actions, or enabling new input capabilities for AR/VR users, such as turning any physical surface to a virtual keyboard or any pencil to a multi-functional magic wand. To learn more about the dataset, read the HOT3D paper (https://lnkd.in/gqp34kZa) and visit https://lnkd.in/gUy4RUYX. HOT3D will be part of the BOP challenge (https://bop.felk.cvut.cz/) and the HANDS challenge (https://lnkd.in/gQnbSBih) at ECCV-2024. Check out the respective websites for more details on the challenges. #CVPR2024 #ComputerVision #AI

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Meet the Dropbox Ventures startup that’s building an AI-powered tool to take the drudgery out of visual storytelling. "Augie uses generative AI to turn your words into videos: Just type in a prompt or upload a voice memo and Augie will analyze the context, search for matching licensed content from Getty Images, and create storyboards for you. (You also have the option to use AI-generated images or upload your own photos, videos, and scripts if you prefer.)" Read more on the Dropbox blog!

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🚀 **Embracing Continuous Discovery at ServiceChannel** 🚀 I recently watched the insightful "Product in Practice" video featuring Stephanie Leue's journey in transforming Doodle's product approach. It truly resonated with our mission at ServiceChannel to embrace continuous discovery and build products that matter. 🌟 Stephanie's story is a testament to the power of empowering teams and fostering a culture of continuous learning. At Doodle, she navigated challenges, aligned her teams, and emphasized the importance of proper discovery to build amazing products. Her experience highlights a crucial lesson: success in product management isn't just about delivering features but about understanding and solving real customer problems. 🛠️ This aligns perfectly with our ongoing efforts at ServiceChannel. We strive to create an environment where our product managers, designers, and technical program managers collaborate seamlessly, continuously validating and refining our understanding of customer needs. 🔄 Stephanie’s insights on mapping the problem space, fostering transparency, and building strong cross-functional teams are invaluable. They remind us that while the journey may be challenging, the rewards of a well-aligned and empowered team are immeasurable. 🌐 I’m proud of our team’s commitment to this approach, and I’m excited about the innovative solutions we’ll deliver to our customers. Let’s continue to push the boundaries, embrace continuous discovery, and build products that truly make a difference! 💡 #ProductManagement #ContinuousDiscovery #TeamEmpowerment #Innovation #CustomerCentricity #ServiceChannel #Leadership #ProductInPractice

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✨ Friday Links Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers – I’m really enjoying reading through this talk-turned-essay from Maggie Appleton about how AI could lead to more DIY software. https://lnkd.in/g-e8QGap Alt text selfies – Is an experiment into thinking about alt text can be used for more than just describing the subject of images, plus it has a cosy small web design. https://alttextselfies.net The iA Dictionary – The folks at iA Inc. (makers of iA Writer), have a dictionary of terms which is a really nice thing to browse, plus I really like the custom glyphs for each letter: https://ia.net/dictionary

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Taking a break from LLMs and SLRs, I’ve been reflecting on AR and robotics with the release of Snap's new Spectacles. AR is the window through which humans and machines perceive and interact with the world together. In my latest blog, I write about the challenges that still exist after a decade and the way forward for future human-machine collaboration. Check it out! https://lnkd.in/g95x5wCp #AR #Robotics #HumanMachineCollaboration #GoogleGlass #SnapSpectacles

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I’m fortunate that Graphite is doing well. As we grow, I’m focusing on helping teammates transition from individual contributors to leaders. This shift requires moving from asking questions in the audience to fielding answers on the stage. An early Google engineering director once advised me: “Shift your perspective from being in the audience to being on the stage.” In our small team, it’s been okay to ask audience-style questions: • Are we worried about customer response times? • Should we hire faster? Are we hiring too fast? • Is now the right time to create tech leads? • Are our engineering interviews fair enough? • Should we add an on-call rotation? My co-founders and I have been happy to answer these. They’re often polite pleas to adjust priorities. But as we grow, I need leads to elevate their thinking. Imagine being at an all-hands meeting and stepping onto the stage to answer these questions. What would change? First, you’d ask fewer open-ended questions. Instead, you’d align with the company’s strategy and provide answers: • “Customer response times are important. We’re planning to staff up next cycle to improve them.” • “We need more smart, kind people ASAP. Given our runway, hiring now is the right call.” • “We’ll need tech leads eventually, but they don’t address a current problem, so adding that process now would be a distraction.” These answers might not be perfect, but they’re attempts to translate the company’s needs into action. Being on stage doesn’t mean you stop asking deep questions. It means coupling them with proposed alternatives and understanding the tradeoffs involved. Don’t ask, “Are we selling too top-down?” Instead, propose, “I’ve thought about our sales strategies. Given our growth needs, how about running a bottoms-up experiment? We could destaff our integrations project temporarily—we can handle some pain there.” The key shift is founding decisions on “what will keep the startup alive and growing” rather than “what is good craft, what is fair, what is my preference.” The best leads adopt this “on stage” mindset. They stop asking leading questions without solutions. They understand the business’s needs and make conscious tradeoffs to keep the company thriving. Not every individual contributor needs to make this shift. But for those eager to explore leadership, this is the path. -- Shortened for LN -> longer reflection here: https://lnkd.in/evfCv_RZ

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My bets where AI won't replace humans: 1) Human connection: Like the one that many of us just had at Config. 2) Shared human experience: When you look at another person's eye and you know you've been through a similar joyful and painful journey. 3) Real stories behind art and culture: I listen to music, and I like paintings not just because they feel good, but because there's a real human story behind it that speaks back to 2. 4) Ingenious net new creative fields: AI can use past things to create something new by mixing them, but it's mostly always can't really create something completely new and unseen. 5) What's your bet?

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Some great Roblox insights on this recent Deconstructor of Fun podcast: https://lnkd.in/gjMvFPUQ A few key points surfaced when talking to Voldex CPO Andrew Rose: 1) Genre innovation hits different on Roblox: we're inherently social, and genre mashups that lean into social interactions tend to retain players better. 2) The power of Roblox's community driven development to help any creator get started. 3) Roblox is multi-platform by design, and games that can easily be experienced across mobile, pc, console (and even VR) thrive. Great podcast if you're curious what's driving success on Roblox. #roblox #gamedevelopment

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Want to run #llama models on #arm devices? Check out the latest in llm’s on arm devices. #xnnpack #android #chatbot #meta #exucutorch #pytorch

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You know there's some momentum happening if Marty Cagan decides to write about a product topic you've been at work trying to enable for years. Love to see it, and BIG shout out to Stacey Langer for providing her expertise in this article! 🧘‍♀️ Here are a few other pros that came to mind for the product model: 1. The government product model makes product (public) value and risk management possible. Product risks—such as value, desirability, viability, and feasibility—are not risks that traditional project management models can effectively manage. Government agencies interact with the public through the services they offer, but government digital experiences are not always inherently valuable. It’s what these digital services do for users that create individual and public value. Building tech alone ≠ value. 2. Evidence-driven decision-making uses discovery, iterative delivery, and testing with actual end users, where you continuously learn. This enables many things, mainly building with your users while validating the solution direction. It can also enable an incremental funding option specifically for products/services (traditionally called ‘projects’) that are especially complex, high priority, and/or contain many unknowns. 3. Driving technology from a place of vision and strategy measured in outcomes that can align and even influence policy changes. 🤸‍♀️ Some realities in trying to adopt a product model in gov: 1. The word ‘product’ often can be confusing, especially when it doesn’t fully represent what is being built and managed. A lot, if not most, of the technology work happening in government often involves solving service design challenges. So, in gov products, you focus on solving for the end-to-end experience, which can mean processes and non-tech things. 2. Conway’s Law and government systems replicate the organizational structures in agencies, which are often siloed and isolated. This is often represented as 'legacy tech.' Much of the work in 'product' in government is modernizing legacy systems, which requires the same principles as the product model but often a different emphasis on its varied approaches. Not all products or digital services start from the same place; many are not greenfield. 3. Traditional ATO structures can stop the product operating model in its tracks. To overcome this, it is important to integrate the ATO into the product model, utilizing a ‘continuous ATO’ operating model. But see point 2 above. At the end of the day, the product model isn’t a process you learn to implement and then just implement. It’s not just ‘Agile’ or Scrum or DevOps. Those methods can (or sometimes can’t) enable the product model. It's a mentality and discipline for continuously using new inputs to deliver value throughout a product's LIFE. It's a cultural change as much as an operating change, and there is no 'single way' to do it. However, operating from product thinking principles can help us start from the right place.

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