Erik Dunteman 🍌 @erikdunteman Twitter profile

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

7 days

Current project is building internet-over-laser, also known as free space optics More things ought to be speed of light First milestone was to transmit *any* data across modulated laser. Next milestone is to serve a website.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

@bchesky Global membership for nomads. I’d pay y’all a 12 month lease to keep me housed around the world.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

Doing our YC application now Feels like a HAAAARD flex dropping these growth numbers: 51x MRR 95x API call volume since our last interview in February Probably will be our last application. Not because we expect to get in, but because we won't need them soon.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

If I were an ML founder starting today, here's my stack: MVP: - Backend: ML APIs @OpenAI @CohereAI - Frontend: Next.js on @vercel @Zeet_Co @Railway Beyond: - Finding Code: @huggingface - Training: @GoogleColab @roboflow - GPU Dev Envs: @brevdev - Backend: @BananaDev_

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

4 years

Fallen into a bad work-life balance recently. Need advice. The problem: 1) I do unfocused work during the day. 2) I feel guilty for lack of output. 3) I stay on my laptop till bedtime, doing guilt work. Anyone fix this in themselves before? What hard rules/habits did you set?

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

@bchesky I set my monthly budget and pay that to you on contract. I'm shown long-term friendly stays by default, and the prices I see are discounted beyond the normal monthly discount, due to my year-long commitment. Unused $$ per month rolls into the next month.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

"Sorry I'm 5 minutes late, last call running over" - me, emailing from toilet

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

Just closed my preseed round! I made this visual for other founders to see what a process can actually look like.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

9 days

Ok time to come out of my serverless GPU closet: @modal_labs is the best, and it’s not even close. We had many competitors at Banana, with users notorious for always shopping around. The one exception was Modal. A black hole of user retention in an otherwise commodity market.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Shark Tank style university pitch competitions are a great way to teach your students how to waste multiple years of their startup career

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

4 years

@braddwyer You never sleep the same after accidentally leaving an instance on.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 months

Announcement: One month ago, I decided to stop working on @BananaDev_ I realized I was out of ideas, and forcing something I didn't have my heart behind. I'm now focused on reconnecting with what brings me joy.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

16 days

We’ll look back in the future and realize that this was the most important feature of the year This is the moment “AI apps” become more than just chatbots. They become data processing machines.

Sam Altman

@sama

16 days

by very popular demand, structured outputs in the API:

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Introducing @BananaDev_ GPU TurboBoot 🔥🥾 Get 1 second cold boots for large ML models.🤯 yes, REALLY. (we spent months on this) Here's a clip of Stable Diffusion cold boot AND inference in <4.5s. TurboBoot beta access here👇

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

Changelog:

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

6 months

I've written a blog about the Banana pivot. On my personal blog, because it gets a bit emotional. I share our revenue graph since launch, my experience as a founder watching PMF slip away... and then I share what we're working on next

Banana Pivot: Unpeeled

Erik Dunteman

blog.erikdunteman.com

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Ever meet someone so sharp that you need to sit down for an hour after and recalibrate your definition of what's possible?

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

8 months

People shocked by the AI girlfriend startup have clearly never seen the prompts the average consumer sends into AI models.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

9 months

🇲🇽 MY WIFE GOT HER GREEN CARD 🇺🇸

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

9 months

We help teams host their own LLMs for inference @BananaDev_ Since the @OpenAI drama starting Friday, we've seen a 15x increase in teams signing up to deploy their own models Teams want to own their API

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

9 months

Announcement✨ @BananaDev_ now takes ZERO margin on GPU time. After working with thousands of teams running AI inference in production, it’s become clear that platform margins are misaligned. Our incentives are to help you scale, not to take a cut.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 month

I've fallen into the classic 2nd-time founder trap of being incredibly picky about ideas.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

Having runway has been a gamechanger on my emotional health

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

✨ Announcing ✨ My wife

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

We've ran serverless GPUs at @BananaDev_ for more than a year now. It feels like I've aged five years running it. This shit is hard. We shipped V1 fast and saw overwhelming demand... TBH, we got decimated by outages. We're now rolling out our V2 to fix that. Lessons learned:

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

Three years ago I met a dude in an Uber Pool in SF. Just now signed a SAFE with that same person. Life is cool like that.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

If you’re an uncredentialed founder feeling overlooked, be patient. You’ll be ignoring ivy-grad associate vc cold emails soon enough.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

7 months

Some bittersweet news to share: We've decided to sunset the @BananaDev_ serverless GPU product The platform will remain up for two months to allow our users to find alternatives. Users were informed of this yesterday, and we've received nothing but love and support.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

@thesamparr The stamina to work long hours is a necessary skill, IMO. @kylejohnmorris and I can and do work 12 hr days if it’s obvious what to do. If less clarity, better to head to the gym or disappear on a run to find clarity rather than grind in the wrong direction

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

Wrapping APIs Self Hosting

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

5 months

I must become technically cracked. I'm learning that it's *really* easy to wrap some APIs and make a quick buck off of novelty, but *really* fucking hard to build something that lasts longer than a few months. I want to build something foundational, so I must become cracked.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Web2 gang ✊

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

We're shipping the Forever Free API! (on a Friday, no less) Unlimited calls and GPU backed: - GPTJ - CLIP - more soon I founded Banana to bring ML to the masses. Our killer eng team has since driven down costs, and now we can finally make it happen:

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

I’m extremely proud of the hard work we’ve been quietly putting into this. We present to you a 1.5T parameter model, open sourced on @huggingface

Banana

@BananaDev_

1 year

Introducing, GPTrillion. 🎉🍌 the world’s first open-source 1.5T parameter model. developed by the research team at Plantain Labs. They've been heads down for the past 6 months developing this model. 👀 read the announcement:

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

You’re a real piece of shit for falling behind on AI, and should feel bad Here’s my 8 tips on how to stay up to speed on AI 🧵👇

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

While raising I bragged about 8k API calls per week Now we're fielding 18k API calls per day

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

I've iterated on a dozen startup ideas since 2018. Most made zero dollars. Now, @BananaDev_ is rocketing toward Series A. The demand has been insane, it's clearly a $100B+ problem, and even with a world-class team, we can't keep up. We're hiring! 🍌

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Signed my first lease in years. I’m moving back to SF! Very excited to join Genesis House

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

While investors are offline for Burning Man, here’s an update for y’all fellow builders: We’ve grown 67% MoM for 5 months! Heads down focus pays off. Just keep iterating, find the niche, double down. Block out the rest.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Marketing expense

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

5 years

Hands down, as a broke bootstrapping college grad, the deals offered via @startupschool have made my startup possible. Do YC Startup School.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

Come out to @fdotinc AISF

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Finally got the entire @BananaDev_ team together this last week 😊 10/10, would offsite again

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Technical founders: how do you get productive coding hours in when juggling 10 other things? With all the context-switching I do as a CEO it's hard to emotionally commit to coding knowing I may not have time to finish it. But then I end up getting nothing done. Any tips?

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

6 months

Over the past month while exploring our pivot, we've crowdsourced 1604 startup ideas to pick from. Here's how we sifted through all the ideas, validated them with quick experiments, and ultimately chose our new direction 👇

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 months

Explaining to a friend why I love San Francisco so much: “Nobody is here by accident”

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

11 months

One BIG lesson I've learned serving LLMs: Ditch the async worker queue - GPU scale-up is unreliable; you can't guarantee a worker on the other end - Streaming is very hard through a task queue. You can't afford to wait for the whole job to finish; your users will bounce

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Banana team culture is developing into something special. - $500 monthly fitness stipend for gyms, equipment, race entry fees - $500 monthly mental health stipend for therapy Both of which are regularly used by all team members We are physically jacked and emotionally yolked.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

my GF just pretended to be me by sitting stressed at her computer and saying the word "production"

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

great success

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

Excited to announce @kylejohnmorris is joining as a cofounder at Booste! Kyle is going to be our resident AI nerd and a total force multiplier. Read about it on our blog:

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

@D_Twitt3r @bchesky Definitely, good point. I imagine Airbnb would need to adjust their take rates so the hosts don't feel the change

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

Big ship day at @BananaDev_ ! Lots of MVPs coming your way, hope you like them! Ship #1 : Bananalytics We're adding call-level, model-level, and account-wide analytics for latency, GPU time, and dollars spent. You'll see more graphs roll out over the next few weeks!

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

IT HAS HAPPENED. Excited to announce the Booste rebrand:

Booste.io

@booste_io

3 years

. @booste_io has ripened and ready to be picked! We've officially grown into Banana!

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Our cofounder photos >

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

5 months

moving to SF was the single most important decision I've made in my career, and it's not even close

Garry Tan

@garrytan

5 months

Where is the REAL Cerebral Valley? San Francisco Like Lazarus, we are so back. Today on the Lightcone Pod —

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

Not to flex, but... 👀

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

@andrew_n_carr This tweet better get appreciated for how fantastic it is

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

7 months

Soft launching new @BananaDev_ tomorrow. Surprise: it's a dev tool. Reply here with: "I promise to give banger feedback" if you want to try it (and subsequently give banger feedback).

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 months

My first three years as a tech founder, I felt like an outsider. I feared that without pedigree, I’d never get my shot. Then I took matters into my own hands and entered the Pioneer Tournament. They found me. They funded me. They gave me my shot.

Pioneer

@pioneerdotapp

3 months

We founded Pioneer in 2018 on a mission to find & fund the world’s creative, ambitious outsiders. Earlier this year, we made our final investment.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Inference latency is critical for AI-first products. Having worked with hundreds of AI startups, I’ve seen that most quickly learn that their user retention is directly tied to speed. If you can, deploy on-device. If you can’t, find a way to make your unit econ cover A100s.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Run + Run() is Saturday 🔥 What: a 26 hr marathon and hackathon. We run a single mile every hour on the hour, for 26 hours. Hack between. Where: @madscisf , run in panhandle Why: why not?

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

4 years

. @MainStreet does this weird thing where they're all like: "hey do you want money?" and I'm all like "yes please" and then they just straight-up send you money. 🤯

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

AI folks moving to Hayes Valley is inevitable, as it’s simply gradient descent

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

7 days

Beaming “Hello, World!” bit-by-bit over the laser at up to 50hz

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

Due to recent events, turns out this was an actual flex

Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

Not to flex, but... 👀

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

5 months

Banana deliveries take you to the weirdest places

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

I sometimes see founders whose hearts don’t seem to be in it, as if they view their startup as a resume item. A stepping stone. I don’t get it. There is no “plan” after my startup. This is the end destination. How is there anything more important than this?

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Decided in 2019 to stop identifying as a “non-technical founder”, and then life became a hell of a lot more fun

Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

4 years

Excited to announce that Booste was chosen as a winner of the Pioneer Tournament, and will be participating in the February accelerator batch! 🥳

Pioneer

@pioneerdotapp

4 years

Netflix for doctoral education. ML Model Marketplace. Roam Research for Real Estate. 7 Pioneer teams from 6 countries quietly humming away at the tools and platforms that'll shape the future. Meet our December Tournament winners: .

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

4 years

Very excited to announce what we're doing at Booste: A no-code machine learning platform to train, deploy, and run custom models ML superpowers for any developer :)

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

9 months

My face when I'm in calls creating shareholder value

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Signed a 12 month lease on an apartment, my first stable home since 2018.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

This graph made me realize: Just as engines have horsepower, we’ll likely be measuring AI models in multiples of human capability. Humanpower

Science Is Strategic

@scienceisstrat1

1 year

AI models have recently surpassed human capabilities in key areas, driving the possibility of significant labor market disruptions (3/4)

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

28 days

Turns out the key to finding startup ideas was giving myself the permission to think more ambitiously

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

📸 Thanks to @JacobCarter5550 for the photography, and @automationism for the practice run

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Run + Run() is in full swing! 3 miles in

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Revenue is going up, burn is going down, and profitability is in sight

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

7 days

Can’t reliably push past 100hz because cheap photo sensor takes 10ms to respond to changes, so bits start getting lost Internet over laser would need 1Mhz+ to be viable, so long way to go

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

In San Francisco you can raise millions of dollars, but you cannot find a hacker home where people wash their goddamn dishes

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

8 months

I've been in this shit grinding. Lived in bunkbeds. Bartended nights and weekends. Credit card debt. Sold my shit and moved to Mexico. Erik four years ago would be proud of me.

Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

8 months

Just realized I'm fully vested at Banana. Four years fly by!

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 month

When a friend visits you in SF, what’s your go-to restaurant for showing them what’s great in the city? Mine is Hinodeya ramen in Japantown

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

5 months

Announcing ✨Adequately General Intelligence✨ LLMs are overrated. You can now use our Fructose LLM client to swap out your LLM with (mostly) intelligent humans to answer your queries! Just use the @human decorator instead of @ai

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

People are often surprised that Banana's engineering team is only three people. We're inspired by @Replit 's small but mighty philosophy. Massive shoutout to @csahil28 for being an all-star Founding Engineer with @kylejohnmorris and I. Would not be possible without him.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

9 days

This is where Modal has their black hole effect. I view them as the way programming ought to be. A refreshing and bold take on cloud. You write your application code and the infra just shows up underneath it. To steal a @swyx term, “Self-Provisioning Infra”

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

9 finishers, 9 champions

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

3 years

Submitted 👀

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

6 months

successful day, managed to stay front page for all of it till now goodbye sweet prince, may you rest well below the fold

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

For the first time in a long time, the Banana Eng team has looked at our cluster and thought “holy shit it’s not breaking” We’re at an all-time high for throughput, and yet we’ll sleep easy tonight

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Likely our biggest launch yet, we're excited to share with you... Community Templates. Our one-click deploys have always been a hit, but it was bottlenecked by our team publishing them. Now, community members can publish their own APIs to Banana (and make some money doing so!)

Banana

@BananaDev_

2 years

introducing Community Templates! 🎇🍌 ✅ publish ML model templates to 1000s of users ✅ earn 10% 💸 revenue on your template usage ✅ access to library of popular models that deploy on serverless GPUs in seconds (no build times) check it out!

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

4 months

Today, we're doing Run x Run() A 26-hour marathon hackathon, where we run one mile per hour, on the hour, for 26 hrs, and hack in the time between. Mile 1 was at 9AM Mile 5 upcoming

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

There's not a single shred of doubt for product direction at @BananaDev_ - cold boots down - latency down - GPU utilization up - ergonomics up This is the most clear a product has ever been for me. Just some damn hard engineering problems to solve. (we're hiring, DM me)

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Built an app that roasts you with AI "You're a dev who's too lazy to get a real job, so you decided to become a digital nomad. Now you run long distances because you have nothing better to do with your time." Savage. Shoot your shot, @kylejohnmorris

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

i want a chrome extension that replaces impression count on twitter with like-to-impression ratio

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Launching today: Free trial on Banana! All new users now receive one hour of free hosting on our serverless A100 GPUs. This has been highly requested 🙂 Check it out at

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

1. Stop reading grifter threads and just go build

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

7 months

Banana, the startup, will live on. This is a curve in the road, but not the end of the line! We're pivoting. To what, I'm not sure yet. But one thing is for certain: Within two weeks, we'll launch the next thing. Grab some popcorn, and get ready for the next episode 🍌

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

2 years

Broken Arrow 52k ultramarathon in Tahoe. Crushed it.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

We're starting a major open-source project at @BananaDev_ , set to ship Friday. Tomorrow, at 11AM Pacific, our eng team is meeting to discuss and commit to a few key design points ahead of the launch. In the spirit of open source, the meeting will be public in our discord.

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Erik Dunteman 🍌

@erikdunteman

1 year

Exciting week at Banana; many longer-term projects all nearing the finish line. Friday will be a mega-ship day.

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