Happy 2024!!! We meet again! Whatever you’re up to this year, I hope amazing things happen.
My goals in 2024 include publishing my data modeling book, launching a game-changing data engineering course with deeplearning.ai, and building the foundations for some new endeavors I’m working on (details coming soon). Plus, I anticipate my travel schedule will be like last year or greater (toward the back part of the year), so if you wanna catch up with me in person, watch the Events section in this newsletter.
Also, my new project Practical Data Modeling is live. Expect lots of awesome content and early chapters of my new data modeling book. Check out the announcement here, and be sure to sign up!
Thanks,
Joe Reis
P.S. Would you like me to speak at your event? Submit a speaking request here.
Listen to the audio clip above on this topic, which is also my 5-Minute Friday on Spotify.
Cool Weekend Reads
Here are some cool things I read this week. Enjoy!
Tech, AI, Data
A New Kind of AI Copy Can Fully Replicate Famous People. The Law Is Powerless. (Politico)
LLM powered chatbots are cute, and I don’t find them very a massively transformative technology. I still need to talk and type the same way I’ve done since I was a child.
But I think stuff like what this article describes is the killer application for GenerativeAI that could also help stuff like VR/AR have a legit use case. Also creepy AF, but that’s another story.
Tech’s AI Hangover Might Just Be Getting Started (WSJ)
“We worry AI benefits may materialize later than many expect,” wrote Scotia Capital software analyst Patrick Colville in a note to clients before the holiday break. In his own report around the same time, Alex Zukin of Wolfe Research wrote that “we are at peak AI hype with a likely slide into the trough of disillusionment, as actual GenAI revenue dollars take longer to materialize yielding at most low single digit upside to CY24 revenue estimates.”
2023 was about the hype of AI. 2024 will be about where AI is a useful value-add.
The story of failing AI startup in 2023 (Alex Asmirnov)
Another quote that addresses my comment on chatbots above (much to the satisfaction of my fragile ego):
”While working on AskGuru, I’ve come to believe that the existence of chatbots for information and actions is more about poor UX/UI and the absence of a solid search engine like Algolia. The real value in a chat popup, in my view, is the live agent. They can do things and access info not readily available to users, like escalating technical bugs or handling complaints and disputes.”
Want to do an AI startup? Make sure you read this article. Just because you’re doing AI doesn’t mean you’re exempt from the age-old problems startups must overcome - solving legitimate business problems, a great customer experience, product-market fit, and getting paying customers. Nail that, and you’ve got a business.
Colliding Secure Hashes (Vid Buchanan)
Curious how you can crack a weakened version of SHA-256? Me too. Read on to find out. I swear, if I wasn’t nerding out on data, I’d be deep into security. The field is infinitely fascinating.
Biz, Culture, Other Randomness
Has Gratuity Culture Reached a Tipping Point? (New Yorker)
Really good study on the past and present of tipping in the USA (for those outside the US, it’s when you pay extra for service). Since then, tipping crossed over into a bunch of unforeseen places, like…everywhere. I personally feel like a tip is for great service. Otherwise, it’s a cost that’s passed on to the consumer, which should very arguably be paid by employers (US restaurant workers have been paid $2.13 since 1991!).
The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again (Rolling Stone)
“Going back to the more free-for-all nature of the Nineties internet could mean we see a proliferation of unexpected, strange new products and services. Back then, a lot of technology was created by local communities or people with a shared interest, and it was as likely that cool things would be invented by universities and non-profits and eccentric lone creators as they were to be made by giant corporations.”
As a teenager in the early 1990s growing up in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, the internet and bulletin board services (comment if you remember those!) were my lifeline to a bigger world. A new world is yet to be developed. There weren’t even websites yet. That was still my favorite version of the internet, and I hope we get back to a version of that innocent, weird, and exciting time.
38% of VCs disappeared from dealmaking in 2023 (Pitchbook)
“The decline of active investors has been acutely felt at the later stages, where crossover capital is necessary to close the large check sizes needed for growth," said PitchBook lead analyst Kyle Stanford.”
Pouring one out for my VC friends. Hope 2024 is better than last year.
New Content, Events, and Upcoming Stuff
Monday Morning Data Chat
Coming up…
Alex Gallego - Alex Gallego - The Streaming Data Renaissance, Open Formats, More (YouTube)
In case you missed it…
Mike Ferguson - Top Key Trends in Data Management and Analytics (Spotify, YouTube)
Tristan Handy - Data Engineering Ecosystems, Moats, Semantic Layers (Spotify, YouTube)
Sol Rashidi - Getting Business Value From Data, the CXO Playbook (Spotify, YouTube)
Sarah Nagy - Automating Analytics w/ Generative AI (Spotify, YouTube)
The Joe Reis Show
Coming up…
Steve Nouri, Jordan Morrow, and more…
This week…
Sol Rashidi - The Rogue Data Executive (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - Practical Data Modeling (Spotify)
In case you missed it…
5 Minute Friday - My Thoughts on 2024 Predictions and Resolutions (Spotify)
Will Gaviria Rojas - Using AI to Bring Structure to Unstructured Data (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - The Internet of Bullsh*t (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - AI Underpants Gnomes, C-Suite Edition (Spotify)
Eleanor Thompson - Partnerships Deep Dive (Spotify)
Bill Inmon - History Lessons of the Data Industry. This is a real treat and a very rare conversation with the godfather himself (Spotify) - PINNED HERE.
Events
CES (Las Vegas), 1/8-1/9
Data Day Texas (Austin), 1/27 - Register here
Chill Data Summit (NYC) - Tuesday 2/6 - Register here
Data Modeling Zone (Arizona), 2/28 - Register here
Skiers in Data (Switzerland), March 1-3 - Register here
Deepfest (Saudi Arabia) - March 4-7, TBA
GenAI Conference (London) - May, TBA
On the Beach (Malaga, Spain) - May, TBA
Berlin, Germany - May, TBA
Morocco - May, TBA
Vancouver, BC - June, TBA
South Africa - TBA
Dubai - TBA
Australia - TBA
Asia - TBA
Would you like me to speak at your event? Submit a speaking request here.
Thanks! If you want to help out…
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You can also find me here:
Monday Morning Data Chat (YouTube / Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). Matt Housely and I interview the top people in the field. Live and unscripted. Zero shilling tolerated.
The Joe Reis Show (Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). My other show. I interview guests, and it’s unscripted with no shilling.
Fundamentals of Data Engineering (Amazon, O’Reilly, and wherever you get your books)
Be sure to leave a lovely review if you like the content.
Thanks! - Joe Reis
Exciting and timely. Semantically and logically sound models include so many wider benefits, I hope this will be instrumental in bringing them to projects and orgs that may not yet be in the market for fundamental transformation, but still lean in the right direction.
Re: Asmirnov - I’ve been watching some Andrej Karpathy videos on training GPTs, it seems to me like being able to train a LLM for a specific domain would be pretty powerful but it’s just too expensive unless it’s really widely applicable. The customer service thing is probably pretty well solved with existing tech.
Tipping culture- yeah I just got back from 10 days in France and Spain what a concept, customers pay enough to cover the labor costs. I was talking to a waiter who was shocked to her that waiting tables in the Us is a hourly job and pays less than minimum. Tipping is so unsustainable it defies economic sense that it’s survived like it has