cursor VS ml-ane-transformers

Dumb weekend project made entirely with AI.

Code: [cursor.so](https://cursor.so)

AI investment is actually down recently, looks like the hype is wearing off since most of the companies funded were just wrapping OpenAI APIs. I will copy paste a post I submitted before regarding a similar issue.

https://twitter.com/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512

Nitter: https://nitter.net/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512#m

---

6 months ago it looked like AI / LLMs were going to bring a much needed revival to the venture startup ecosystem after a few tough years.

With companies like Jasper starting to slow down, it’s looking like this may not be the case.

Right now there are 2 clear winners, a handful of losers, and a small group of moonshots that seem promising.

Let’s start with the losers.

Companies like Jasper and the VCs that back them are the biggest losers right now. Jasper raised >$100M at a 10-figure valuation for what is essentially a generic, thin wrapper around OpenAI. Their UX and brand are good, but not great, and competition from companies building differentiated products specifically for high-value niches are making it very hard to grow with such a generic product. I’m not sure how this pans out but VC’s will likely lose their money.

The other category of losers are the VC-backed teams building at the application layer that raised $250K-25M in Dec - March on the back of the chatbot craze with the expectation that they would be able to sell to later-stage and enterprise companies. These startups typically have products that are more focused than something very generic like Jasper, but still don't have a real technology moat; the products are easy to copy.

Executives at enterprise companies are excited about AI, and have been vocal about this from the beginning. This led a lot of founders and VC's to believe these companies would make good first customers. What the startups building for these companies failed to realize is just how aligned and savvy executives and the engineers they manage would be at quickly getting AI into production using open-source tools. An engineering leader would rather spin up their own @LangChainAI and @trychroma infrastructure for free and build tech themselves than buy something from a new, unproven startup (and maybe pick up a promotion along the way).

In short, large companies are opting to write their own AI success stories rather than being a part of the growth metrics a new AI startup needs to raise their next round.

(This is part of an ongoing shift in the way technology is adopted; I'll discuss this in a post next week.)

This brings us to our first group of winners — established companies and market incumbents. Most of them had little trouble adding AI into their products or hacking together some sort of "chat-your-docs" application internally for employee use. This came as a surprise to me. Most of these companies seemed to be asleep at the wheel for years. They somehow woke up and have been able to successfully navigate the LLM craze with ample dexterity.

There are two causes for this:

1. Getting AI right is a life or death proposition for many of these companies and their executives; failure here would mean a slow death over the next several years. They can't risk putting their future in the hands of a new startup that could fail and would rather lead projects internally to make absolutely sure things go as intended.

2. There is a certain amount of kick-ass wafting through halls of the C-Suite right now. Ambitious projects are being green-lit and supported in ways they weren't a few years ago. I think we owe this in part to @elonmusk reminding us of what is possible when a small group of smart people are highly motivated to get things done. Reduce red-tape, increase personal responsibility, and watch the magic happen.

Our second group of winners live on the opposite side of this spectrum; indie devs and solopreneurs. These small, often one-man outfits do not raise outside capital or build big teams. They're advantage is their small size and ability to move very quickly with low overhead. They build niche products for niche markets, which they often dominate. The goal is build a saas product (or multiple) that generates ~$10k/mo in relatively passive income. This is sometimes called "mirco-saas."

These are the @levelsio's and @dannypostmaa's of the world. They are part software devs, part content marketers, and full-time modern internet businessmen. They answer to no one except the markets and their own intuition.

This is the biggest group of winners right now. Unconstrained by the need for a $1B+ exit or the goal of $100MM ARR, they build and launch products in rapid-fire fashion, iterating until PMF and cashflow, and moving on to the next. They ruthlessly shutdown products that are not performing.

LLMs and text-to-image models a la Stable Diffusion have been a boon for these entrepreneurs, and I personally know of dozens of successful (keeping in mind their definition of successful) apps that were started less than 6 months ago. The lifestyle and freedom these endeavors afford to those that perform well is also quite enticing.

I think we will continue to see the number of successful micro-saas AI apps grow in the next 12 months. This could possibly become one of the biggest cohorts creating real value with this technology.

The last group I want to talk about are the AI Moonshots — companies that are fundamentally re-imagining an entire industry from the ground up. Generally, these companies are VC-backed and building products that have the potential to redefine how a small group of highly-skilled humans interact with and are assisted by technology. It's too early to tell if they'll be successful or not; early prototypes have been compelling. This is certainly the most exciting segment to watch.

A few companies I would put in this group are:

1. https://cursor.so - an AI-first code editor that could very well change how software is written.

2. https://harvey.ai - AI for legal practices

3. https://runwayml.com - an AI-powered video editor

This is an incomplete list, but overall I think the Moonshot category needs to grow massively if we're going to see the AI-powered future we've all been hoping for.

If you're a founder in the $250K-25M raised category and are having a hard time finding PMF for your chatbot or LLMOps company, it may be time to consider pivoting to something more ambitious.

Lets recap:

1. VC-backed companies are having a hard time. The more money a company raised, the more pain they're feeling.

2. Incumbents and market leaders are quickly become adept at deploying cutting-edge AI using internal teams and open-source, off-the-shelf technology, cutting out what seemed to be good opportunities for VC-backed startups.

3. Indie devs are building small, cash-flowing businesses by quickly shipping niche AI-powered products in niche markets.

4. A small number of promising Moonshot companies with unproven technology hold the most potential for VC-sized returns.

It's still early. This landscape will continue to change as new foundational models are released and toolchains improve. I'm sure you can find counter examples to everything I've written about here. Put them in the comments for others to see.

And just to be upfront about this, I fall squarely into the "raised $250K-25M without PMF" category.

I'm gonna copy paste a post I submitted before regarding a similar issue.

https://twitter.com/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512

Nitter: https://nitter.net/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512#m

---

6 months ago it looked like AI / LLMs were going to bring a much needed revival to the venture startup ecosystem after a few tough years.

With companies like Jasper starting to slow down, it’s looking like this may not be the case.

Right now there are 2 clear winners, a handful of losers, and a small group of moonshots that seem promising.

Let’s start with the losers.

Companies like Jasper and the VCs that back them are the biggest losers right now. Jasper raised >$100M at a 10-figure valuation for what is essentially a generic, thin wrapper around OpenAI. Their UX and brand are good, but not great, and competition from companies building differentiated products specifically for high-value niches are making it very hard to grow with such a generic product. I’m not sure how this pans out but VC’s will likely lose their money.

The other category of losers are the VC-backed teams building at the application layer that raised $250K-25M in Dec - March on the back of the chatbot craze with the expectation that they would be able to sell to later-stage and enterprise companies. These startups typically have products that are more focused than something very generic like Jasper, but still don't have a real technology moat; the products are easy to copy.

Executives at enterprise companies are excited about AI, and have been vocal about this from the beginning. This led a lot of founders and VC's to believe these companies would make good first customers. What the startups building for these companies failed to realize is just how aligned and savvy executives and the engineers they manage would be at quickly getting AI into production using open-source tools. An engineering leader would rather spin up their own @LangChainAI and @trychroma infrastructure for free and build tech themselves than buy something from a new, unproven startup (and maybe pick up a promotion along the way).

In short, large companies are opting to write their own AI success stories rather than being a part of the growth metrics a new AI startup needs to raise their next round.

(This is part of an ongoing shift in the way technology is adopted; I'll discuss this in a post next week.)

This brings us to our first group of winners — established companies and market incumbents. Most of them had little trouble adding AI into their products or hacking together some sort of "chat-your-docs" application internally for employee use. This came as a surprise to me. Most of these companies seemed to be asleep at the wheel for years. They somehow woke up and have been able to successfully navigate the LLM craze with ample dexterity.

There are two causes for this:

1. Getting AI right is a life or death proposition for many of these companies and their executives; failure here would mean a slow death over the next several years. They can't risk putting their future in the hands of a new startup that could fail and would rather lead projects internally to make absolutely sure things go as intended.

2. There is a certain amount of kick-ass wafting through halls of the C-Suite right now. Ambitious projects are being green-lit and supported in ways they weren't a few years ago. I think we owe this in part to @elonmusk reminding us of what is possible when a small group of smart people are highly motivated to get things done. Reduce red-tape, increase personal responsibility, and watch the magic happen.

Our second group of winners live on the opposite side of this spectrum; indie devs and solopreneurs. These small, often one-man outfits do not raise outside capital or build big teams. They're advantage is their small size and ability to move very quickly with low overhead. They build niche products for niche markets, which they often dominate. The goal is build a saas product (or multiple) that generates ~$10k/mo in relatively passive income. This is sometimes called "mirco-saas."

These are the @levelsio's and @dannypostmaa's of the world. They are part software devs, part content marketers, and full-time modern internet businessmen. They answer to no one except the markets and their own intuition.

This is the biggest group of winners right now. Unconstrained by the need for a $1B+ exit or the goal of $100MM ARR, they build and launch products in rapid-fire fashion, iterating until PMF and cashflow, and moving on to the next. They ruthlessly shutdown products that are not performing.

LLMs and text-to-image models a la Stable Diffusion have been a boon for these entrepreneurs, and I personally know of dozens of successful (keeping in mind their definition of successful) apps that were started less than 6 months ago. The lifestyle and freedom these endeavors afford to those that perform well is also quite enticing.

I think we will continue to see the number of successful micro-saas AI apps grow in the next 12 months. This could possibly become one of the biggest cohorts creating real value with this technology.

The last group I want to talk about are the AI Moonshots — companies that are fundamentally re-imagining an entire industry from the ground up. Generally, these companies are VC-backed and building products that have the potential to redefine how a small group of highly-skilled humans interact with and are assisted by technology. It's too early to tell if they'll be successful or not; early prototypes have been compelling. This is certainly the most exciting segment to watch.

A few companies I would put in this group are:

1. https://cursor.so - an AI-first code editor that could very well change how software is written.

2. https://harvey.ai - AI for legal practices

3. https://runwayml.com - an AI-powered video editor

This is an incomplete list, but overall I think the Moonshot category needs to grow massively if we're going to see the AI-powered future we've all been hoping for.

If you're a founder in the $250K-25M raised category and are having a hard time finding PMF for your chatbot or LLMOps company, it may be time to consider pivoting to something more ambitious.

Lets recap:

1. VC-backed companies are having a hard time. The more money a company raised, the more pain they're feeling.

2. Incumbents and market leaders are quickly become adept at deploying cutting-edge AI using internal teams and open-source, off-the-shelf technology, cutting out what seemed to be good opportunities for VC-backed startups.

3. Indie devs are building small, cash-flowing businesses by quickly shipping niche AI-powered products in niche markets.

4. A small number of promising Moonshot companies with unproven technology hold the most potential for VC-sized returns.

It's still early. This landscape will continue to change as new foundational models are released and toolchains improve. I'm sure you can find counter examples to everything I've written about here. Put them in the comments for others to see.

And just to be upfront about this, I fall squarely into the "raised $250K-25M without PMF" category. If you're a founder in the same boat, I'd love to talk. My DMs are open.

If you enjoyed this post, don't forget to follow me, Sam Hogan. I share one long-form post per week covering AI, startups, open-source, and more.

That's all folks! Thanks for reading. See you next week.

This feels scammy and low quality. Compare this site with something like https://cursor.so that targets a similar idea.

You seem to have a word, "closed source fork" https://github.com/getcursor/cursor#oss

I don't know what kind of world you live in, but submitting a closed source editor to HN with a comment in the readme of "send us email if you want the source opened" is some ... welcome, I hope you enjoy your stay here

Just stumbled upon cursor.so and I think y'all might like it - check https://cursor.so

the new https://cursor.so editor demonstrates how editing with AI is the future, and real powerful. Now I love neovim, but only because it makes me productive. I don't want to leave neovim, but without solid AI integration like cursor, it looks obvious editors without strong AI integration will never be as productive as those with. So, I went out to scour the current neovim AI plugin landscape, and to hear what others have found the best AI integration.

Article: Deploying Transformers on the Apple Neural Engine Code: Apple Neural Engine (ANE) Transformers

Apple ML team released a paper and repo last year ( Ane_transformers )that shows how to optimize transformer architecture for ANE use prior to converting a PyTorch model to CoreML.

Apple: Transformer architecture optimized for Apple Silicon (https://github.com/apple/ml-ane-transformers)

22-Mar-2023 Adobe unveils creative generative AI model, Firefly, to aid content creation Google has begun rolling out early access to its Bard chatbot in the US and UK Data Breach At ChatGPT? Users Report Seeing Unknown Conversations On Their Screens GPT-4 is available in preview in Azure OpenAI Service AI-powered coding assistance REPL that pairs GPT-4 (https://github.com/jiggy-ai/pair) Open source alternative to ChatGPT (https://github.com/nichtdax/awesome-totally-open-chatgpt) Run 100B+ language models at home, BitTorrent‑style (https://petals.ml/) Find the most relevant piece of code context. Hover and highlight blocks of code, the tool will point you to the most relevant pieces of information on git, messaging, and ticketing systems. Finally, it provide a summary with the power of GPT.(https://www.watermelontools.com/) Why AI Won't Replace Software Engineers (https://softwarecomplexity.com/why-ai-wont-replace-software-engineers) 23-Mar-2023 'The iPhone Moment of AI' Nvidia to Rent Out Supercomputers Behind ChatGPT to Businesses for $37,000 a Month Bill Gates calls AI revolutionary, says it can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities AI pics of Donald Trump's arrest by 'cop' Joe Biden go viral. Will we no longer be able to tell what’s real vs what’s fake?” - Eluna AI New research shows we can only accurately identify AI writers about 50% of the time. (https://hai.stanford.edu/news/was-written-human-or-ai-tsu) FauxPilot - an open-source GitHub Copilot server(https://github.com/fauxpilot/fauxpilot) Flower , an open-source framework for training AI on distributed data. We move the model to the data instead of moving the data to the model. (https://flower.dev/) OpenAI-Integrated Microsoft Bing Outperforms Google in Page Visits (https://www.gadgets360.com/internet/news/openai-integrated-microsoft-bing-outperforms-google-page-visits-growth-3885069) GitHub Copilot X: GitHub Copilot is evolving to bring chat and voice interfaces, support pull requests, answer questions on docs, and adopt OpenAI’s GPT-4 for a more personalized developer experience. (https://github.blog/2023-03-22-github-copilot-x-the-ai-powered-developer-experience/) Moonshine – open-source, pretrained ML models for satellite (https://github.com/moonshinelabs-ai/moonshine) Mozilla.ai: A startup — and a community — that will build a trustworthy and independent open-source AI ecosystem. Mozilla.ai’s initial focus? Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being. (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-mozilla-ai-investing-in-trustworthy-ai/) OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models (https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/openais-policies-hinder-reproducible) 24-Mar-2023 Adobe has added AI features to Photoshop and Illustrator, while Nvidia has unveiled ‘Picasso’ AI image generation service. ChatGPT-owner OpenAI fixes 'significant issue' exposing user chat titles.A bug in an open-source library caused ChatGPT to leak user conversation titles. Graphic design platform Canva introduces new generative AI tools Gmail for Android, Google Messages to Soon Get Features for AI-Generated Texts Apple: Transformer architecture optimized for Apple Silicon (https://github.com/apple/ml-ane-transformers) ChatGPT plugins, join waitlist (https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins) Microsoft's paper on OpenAI's GPT-4 had hidden information (https://twitter.com/DV2559106965076/status/1638769434763608064) how to use LoRA to fine-tune LLaMA using Alpaca training data (https://replicate.com/blog/fine-tune-alpaca-with-lora) Helicone: one-line integration logs the prompts, completions, latencies, and costs of your OpenAI requests (https://github.com/Helicone/helicone) RWKV is an RNN with Transformer-level LLM performance, which can also be directly trained like a GPT transformer (parallelizable). (https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM) open-source retrieval plugin The open-source retrieval plugin enables ChatGPT to access personal or organizational information sources (with permission). It allows users to obtain the most relevant document snippets from their data sources, such as files, notes, emails or public documentation, by asking questions or expressing needs in natural language. Security considerations The retrieval plugin allows ChatGPT to search a vector database of content, and add the best results into the ChatGPT session. This means it doesn’t have any external effects, and the main risk is data authorization and privacy. Developers should only add content into their retrieval plugin that they are authorized to use and can share in users’ ChatGPT sessions. https://github.com/openai/chatgpt-retrieval-plugin 27-Mar-2023 Autodoc: Toolkit for auto-generating codebase documentation using LLMs (https://github.com/context-labs/autodoc) March 20 ChatGPT outage: Here’s what happened (https://openai.com/blog/march-20-chatgpt-outage) Facebook is going after LLaMA repos with DMCA's (https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1638925249709240322) ChatGPT + Wolfram is INSANE! (https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1205omc/chatgpt\_wolfram\_is\_insane/) Reproducing the Stanford Alpaca results using low-rank adaptation (LoRA) (https://github.com/chris-alexiuk/alpaca-lora) GOAT, a decentralized way to publish and download AI models.Powered by BitTorrent and Bitcoin.(https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmYyucgBQVfs9JXZ2MtmkGPAhgUjNgyGE6rcJT1KybQHhp/index.html) Dolly from databricks (https://www.databricks.com/blog/2023/03/24/hello-dolly-democratizing-magic-chatgpt-open-models.html) AI powered Developer Tools 2.0. https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ai-powered-developer-tools/ Turn your designs into production-ready front-end code for mobile apps and the web (https://www.locofy.ai/) Using ChatGPT Plugins with LLaMA (https://blog.lastmileai.dev/using-openais-retrieval-plugin-with-llama-d2e0b6732f14) 28-Mar-2023 Bing AI now allows 20 prompts per session and can make images for you ChatGPT Outperforms Crowd-Workers for Text-Annotation Tasks (https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15056) ChatGPT or Grammarly? Evaluating ChatGPT on Grammatical Error Correction Benchmark (https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.13648) AI-controlled Linux Containers (https://github.com/fafrd/aquarium) Microsoft reportedly orders AI chatbot rivals to stop using Bing’s search data (https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/25/23656336/microsoft-chatbot-rivals-stop-using-bing-search-index) 29-Mar-2023 Text2Video-Zero Code and Weights Released by Picsart AI Research (12G VRAM).(https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/Text2Video-Zero) Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter. Huggingface's SF Open-Source AI Meetup officially has 2000 people registered. Cerebras open sources seven GPT-3 models from 111 million to 13 billion parameters. Trained using the Chinchilla formula, these models set new benchmarks for accuracy and compute efficiency.(https://www.cerebras.net/blog/cerebras-gpt-a-family-of-open-compute-efficient-large-language-models/) Independent implementation of LLaMA that is fully open source under the Apache 2.0 license (https://github.com/Lightning-AI/lit-llama) Bootstrap knowledge of LLMs (https://gist.github.com/rain-1/eebd5e5eb2784feecf450324e3341c8d) OPENFLAMINGO: AN OPEN-SOURCE FRAMEWORK FOR TRAINING VISION-LANGUAGE MODELS WITH IN-CONTEXT LEARNING (https://laion.ai/blog/open-flamingo/) gpt4all: a chatbot trained on a massive collection of clean assistant data including code, stories and dialogue (https://github.com/nomic-ai/gpt4all) 30-Mar-2022 Microsoft Security Copilot is a new GPT-4 AI assistant for cybersecurity (https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23659711/microsoft-security-copilot-gpt-4-ai-tool-features) UK details ‘pro-innovation’ approach to AI regulation (https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/2023/03/29/uk-details-pro-innovation-approach-ai-regulation/) Employees Are Feeding Sensitive Biz Data to ChatGPT, Raising Security Fears (https://www.darkreading.com/risk/employees-feeding-sensitive-business-data-chatgpt-raising-security-fears) In the Age of AI, Don't Let Your Skills Atrophy (https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/03/29/age-of-ai-skill-atrophy.html) Now ChatGPT is being (mis)used to do #PeerReview (https://mstdn.science/@ukrio/110100752908161183) Bing Chat now has Ads! (https://twitter.com/debarghya\_das/status/1640892791923572737) Cerebras-GPT vs LLaMA AI Model Comparison (https://www.lunasec.io/docs/blog/cerebras-gpt-vs-llama-ai-model-comparison/) Arthur C. Clarke about the future of AI. — 21 September 1964 (https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1640016339011076097) ColossalChat: An Open-Source Solution for Cloning ChatGPT With a Complete RLHF Pipeline (https://medium.com/@yangyou\_berkeley/colossalchat-an-open-source-solution-for-cloning-chatgpt-with-a-complete-rlhf-pipeline-5edf08fb538b) Create and Embed Custom AI Assistants with Libraria (https://libraria.dev/) 31-Mar-2023 Deranged New AI Has No Guardrails Whatsoever, Proudly Praises Hitler (https://futurism.com/deranged-ai-no-guardrails) Midjourney Kills Free AI Image Generator Access After Explosion of Deep Fakes (https://decrypt.co/124972/midjourney-free-ai-image-generation-stopped-over-deepfakes) Judge asks ChatGPT to decide bail in murder trial (https://nypost.com/2023/03/29/judge-asks-chatgpt-for-decision-in-murder-trial/) Should you use OpenAI's embeddings? Probably not, and here's why. (https://iamnotarobot.substack.com/p/should-you-use-openais-embeddings) Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot (https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2023/03/30/vscode-copilot) Llama Hub (https://llamahub.ai/) Finetuning LLMs on a Single GPU Using Gradient Accumulation (https://lightning.ai/pages/blog/gradient-accumulation/) Open source ETL framework for retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Sync data from your SaaS tools to a vector store, where they can be easily queried by GPT apps (https://github.com/ai-sidekick/sidekick) HALTT4LLM - Hallucination Trivia Test for Large Language Models (https://github.com/manyoso/haltt4llm) Vicuna: An Open-Source Chatbot Impressing GPT-4 with 90%* ChatGPT Quality (https://vicuna.lmsys.org/) Iterate.ai Brings Generative AI Capabilities to Interplay, the Low-Code Platform Accelerating Customers’ Digital Innovation (https://www.indianweb2.com/2023/03/iterateai-brings-generative-ai.html) RFdiffusion is an open source method for structure generation, with or without conditional information (a motif, target etc). (https://github.com/RosettaCommons/RFdiffusion) Google denies training Bard on ChatGPT chats from ShareGPT

Have you seen this?

https://github.com/apple/ml-ane-transformers

I can't wait until people use it for AI and publicize this more, as well as the Neural Engine with its 16 cores and trillions of operations per second.

I'm also looking into converting these models from PyTorch to CoreML format, and seeing how well they run when given access to the GPU and Neural Engine. There's even an optimized library Apple has specifically for this type of model.