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Karthik Kannan Profile
Karthik Kannan

@meTheKarthik

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Founder & CTO, @letsenvision | Building AI-powered glasses that help blind people “see” | using twttr like the notes app on my phone

🇺🇸 & 🇳🇱
Joined February 2013
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Pinned Tweet
@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
Everyone's losing their mind over the "new" Meta "Multimodal AI Glasses". I'm here to say it's already been out and round for 3 years. We, @LetsEnvision have been building an AI-powered glasses for blind & low vision people since 2020. Check this profile by @BusinessInsider
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
10 months
@mrinininininini Push back, ask them to speak in English. I’ve noticed these Hindi folks don’t respect language diversity all that much in the workplace 🙄
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@ChrisJBakke Lol. The management might be crying in joy thinking their little AI Chatbot idea is huge hit. Little do they know a bunch of nerds are gaming it for free cars 😂
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
4 months
@dieworkwear we're also extremely desensitised to seeing suffering that when we DO see the sweatshop that shein is, we simply say "that sucks" and go back to ordering that $10 sweater on limited-time discount smh.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 months
@BenGeskin I can see divorce rates skyrocket
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@paulg and to think these are the folks building/funding the future of humanity...
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
6 months
@paulg did they replace all their devs with devin or something? how do you cut costs 2/3rds overnight. asking for a friend.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
3 years
@elonmusk @FedorovMykhailo @SpaceX @SpaceXStarlink @Honda @ChampionGen @westinghouse @DuroMaxPower Fuck. Imagine getting insane internet speeds from the cigarette lighter in your car. The future is beyond exciting.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
10 months
@raiann77 @mrinininininini I'd rather talk in a language that allows everyone to participate. To most south indians like me, Hindi is a much more "foreign" than English.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
8 months
@paulg Maybe if you made some Desi moms YC partners you’ll have more unicorns…
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
2 months
@paraschopra Tushita in Dharmshala. Tibetan Mahayana tradition. When i went for the retreat, in 2012, they offered it for free to Indians because the Tibetans were grateful to India for giving them the space to build the monastery.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
8 months
@SatinTweety Sometimes life expands or shrinks in proportion to how vulnerable you’re willing to be.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 months
@Casey This is your sign to make more videos. Bring back the daily vlogs! I miss that off-the-cuff storytelling on youtube today.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
6 months
omg @arrahman dropped the most 🔥🔥 divine soundtrack in a loooooong time! chamkila is such a beautiful album. You've got to start from the top and listen to it in exactly that order. it's absolutely moving.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
4 years
@ZachWeiner @codinghorror StumbleUpon. I yearn for the days when my web surfing wasn’t limited to just 4-5 websites. StumbleUpon was like hitchhiking across the web.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
6 months
Periyone has been my companion in my most liminal moments this past week. @arrahman 's music is the concrete proof that god exists.
@arrahman
A.R.Rahman
6 months
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
6 months
Being to tease out great music consistently from @arrahman is such a rare skillset. Only a dozen such ppl exist. Imitiaz Ali is almost at the top of that list. I was always skeptical about Chamkila but I'm very pleasantly surprised. I might not shut up about it for a while...
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 months
@MKBHD that’s crazy! i can totally see a future where companies can use you likeness to generate a fake but very real-sounding video of you giving their product a very positive review. totally possible.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
5 months
@bindureddy open ai's marketing team is just the 10 most popular anons on ai twitter. that's what keeps the hype flywheel going for them.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@ashleevance your post hits on a few very valid points. having spent 6 years building an ambitious AI + Accessibility startup in EU, i can attest to how inane the EU scene is. ofcourse, there are two sides to things. i will highlight the good at the end(cause it's obvious). 1. most EU VCs
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
8 months
@willdepue He most likely has an agency or an intern do this. All for an exorbitant fee. Apparently it’s a thing tech founders do to “build an audience”. The real Brett is somewhere in a coffee shop in Mission district answering his emails…
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
5 years
@paulg This is assuming that SF has the best tech people. That might have been true 10 years ago but it's not true now, IMHO. Not being IN SF but having access to SF capital might mean a better use of $$.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 months
@Suhail Do you think that's just the twitter echo chamber talking this way? I think so. I mean, according to folks here ChatGPT is stone-age technology whereas folks IRL haven't even heard of it yet. Twitter is a bit ahead of the curve but not always right.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@AravSrinivas It’s OpenAI’s product team trying to validate the pricing.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
6 months
Not just Delhi-6 the album, Delhi-6 the score was equally legendary. The versatility from @arrahman is astounding and it was only 2.6k views 🫠
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 months
@anuatluru pondering the same questions but about nature might lead to less overall misery. but not that much money.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
6 months
@anuatluru not being neurotic is a big one for me. nervous energy is extremely contagious.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 months
Here to catch #Viduthalai part 1 & 2 at @IFFR ! Extremely excited to watch both parts back to back and catch the Q n A with the cast!
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
Hotter take: no one cares about UX with music apps. It’s all about the variety of songs you can stream. YT Music wins hands down.
@SnazzyLabs
Quinn Nelson
9 months
Hot take: TIDAL has the best recommendations engine and UX of any music streaming service and it isn’t close.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@subasrikanth_ Sundar Chol hahahah. Fuck. This is unbelievable 🤣🤣🤣🤣 I’m curious about Kundavai/Ilaya Piratti
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 months
@anuatluru goodreads has occupied this fantastic niche of too unprofitable to go after BUT low hanging enough to not fantasise building an alternative. i suspect of all things on the web Goodreads will probably will remain untouched till the end of time 🤣
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
4 years
One of the best newsletters I've found in recent times -- Flow State. They send you really nice music to work to, every weekday morning, to your inbox. Links for Spotify, YT Music. Definitely worth subscribing -
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
10 months
@timsneath Unnecessary alarmist nonsense. It sent me off scrambling worried about what’s going on with flutter.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
6 months
Apple is going all out with MLX. a few days ago they rereleased MLX with Swift so you can run LLMs locally. now they’re onto MLXServer so you can build APIs around them more easily. solid TF/Pytorch competitor in the making.
@awnihannun
Awni Hannun
6 months
Exciting new project: MLXServer An easy way to get started with LLMs locally. HTTP endpoints for text generation, chat, converting models, and more. Setup: pip install mlxserver Docs: Example:
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
8 months
@karpathy My vote is for Clippy!
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
5 months
@isabelunraveled being really good readers of people. the women closest to me have a strong sense of intuition about the world and the characters in it. the times i've listened to that intuition, i've benefitted immensely. saved me a few times from making horrible life choices.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
10 months
@sidraqasim it's infuriating and extremely depressing to think that i'm inhabiting the same piece of rock that such tragedies are happening. that these heinous crimes are committed every single day, the folks committing them are going entirely unpunished.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 months
Unfiltered: Viduthalai is easily Vetrimaran’s most intense, political movie. My favorite movie of his. The movie is largely dialogue-driven and that’s probably the best part about it. There were about 7-8 places that the audience hooted for the dialogues because they were on
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@skalskip92 @Hine__Po This used to be the hottest startup idea to fund in CV a 3-4 years ago. Now it’s a GitHub repo. The pace at which things move is 🤯
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 months
@scienceisstrat1 @paulg But income inequality is also growing at an extraordinary rate
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 months
a lot of folks are creeped out by it but this kind of tech is insanely great for accessibility. In the short term, anyone with any level of motor impairment, can pair a @neuralink with an AI agent that can them get some amount of independence back.
@elonmusk
Elon Musk
8 months
The first human received an implant from @Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well. Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
8 months
On the day of its launch, we will introduce @LetsEnvision designed just for the 🍎 Vision Pro. This app will be the first to fully utilize both the AI and accessibility features on the Vision Pro. Over the past few months, we have collaborated closely with the Vision Pro and
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@saffrontrail Smart Watches are a big distraction. They shove metrics in your face and they're often incorrect. Until this year, I leaned very heavily into the more data is good philosophy. It was overwhelming. In January, I stopped using the 🍎 Watch and I got into the best shape of my life
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
4 months
@abacaj they’re trying to steal google’s thunder even today
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
4 months
@arrahman @iccadxb_iccaauh fathers cooking, daughter’s baking! 🔥
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
8 months
@paulg Not to mention how little time you’ll spend dealing with corporate politics. And meetings where no real decision is made.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
4 months
my favourite yearly ritual is to go to some coastal village in italy before peak season, bunk there for a full week in a b n b, and spend whole days at the beach alternating between swimming and reading. i’m extremely grateful i can make space for it this year, in Sicily. the
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@8teAPi “What did Ilya see” will some day be an iconic line in the David Fincher bio of OpenAI.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
5 months
@nishanth_who honestly it sounds yummy enough to try atleast once
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 months
@karpathy every new macbook is a chance to redeem yourself from shoddily setup past dev environments…until it happens again 🤣
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
4 months
@abacaj Wait. If your Rabbit calls are going to open ai how are they working out the unit economics of the device? I thought they would atleast have their own VLMs as a backup. Are going to introduce a subscription later and currently burning VC $ to keep things afloat?
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
8 months
@OfficialLoganK @OpenAI We’re changing the way AI helps accessibility. We’re heavily using GPT-4 and GPT-4V on the Google glass hardware to help thousands of blind and low vision people to live more independently. Check out this profile that @BusinessInsider made of us
@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
Everyone's losing their mind over the "new" Meta "Multimodal AI Glasses". I'm here to say it's already been out and round for 3 years. We, @LetsEnvision have been building an AI-powered glasses for blind & low vision people since 2020. Check this profile by @BusinessInsider
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
4 months
Excited to announce that @LetsEnvision has been working with the awesome folks at @GoogleDeepMind to build a realtime accessibility ally for blind people using an early access version of Gemini Flash 1.5. On Smartglasses. we just got a shoutout at #GoogleIO keynote, more demos
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
5 months
@jessechenglyu it's still a bug tho it says the music has been paused. need to better hook up those gpt-4 calls
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
5 months
@giuliofagiolini @Spotify you should just make a winamp-style player that lets people make open skins. spotify’s one chance to become part of tech lore forever.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
2 months
@NickADobos it’s way too eager to serve you clickbait. you like one racy picture the next refresh is 10x racier, one biden meme and my TL is teeming with alt-right shit. whatever you like gets amplified into some extreme caricature, you’ve to fight hard to bring some normalcy to your feed.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@paulg @OED Google’s Search Index has been so gamed that it’s not even worth fixing. Instead somethjng radically new comes to replace it.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
10 months
@LinusEkenstam I built a little chrome extension that adds alt text to the main images on websites.
@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
10 months
GPT-V has the potential to revolutionize accessibility, specifically writing alt-texts for images. Here's a simple chrome extension I built that uses @OpenAI 's GPT-V to caption the main images on a webpage 🤯 Time to build that @LetsEnvision desktop extension
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 years
@samim @jeremyphoward Today I've picked up steam enough to confidently work on my own CV startup and the seed for it was sowed by fast.ai with Pt1. and Pt.2
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
cramped corner seat, snoring, spreading-their-legs co-passengers, 10 hr transatlantic flight with the worst food… @arrahman ’s music is the only thing stopping me from the breaking the window and jumping off the plane. divine, sonic blessing 🙏🏾
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 months
@bhavintu Just get a Vision Pro already @bhavintu !
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@gregisenberg In America, you had Big Tech, Big Pharma...now it's Big Love. Just a handful companies controlling romantic desire in America.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
5 months
@MKBHD i'm curious if the reactions to your humane review will hold you back in some way with the r1...
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
8 months
@abacaj There needs to be a neat primer on using gen AI tools to create synthetic datasets for text/image tasks. Maybe there's one already and I'vent encountered it yet.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
8 months
@anuatluru Also never aspire to work in a team where you have to “manage” others. The work should stop with just aligning people.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@OfirPress @JiaweiLiu_ @steven_xia_ Most of these models have heavily gamed the leaderboard. I've been building stuff on top of Gemini Pro and it's definitely > 3.5 / < 4. The OCR on this is really good.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
8 months
@OfficialLoganK Everybody should add alt-text to their images on social media. What with mutlimodal ChatGPT there's ZERO excuse to not make their work accessible to blind and low vision folks. We built this nifty Alt Text Assistant that creates alt-texts for images.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@abacaj Don’t you think these LLM benchmarks are starting to sound like BS?
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
3 years
@morganhousel was my one of my favorite finds from the last couple of years. His writing had a noticeable impact about the way I think about my personal finance. Lovely podcast by @tferriss 👇
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
10 months
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@fortelabs This is like taking a sword to a pen fight. GPT Vision still hallucinates a lot for OCR. I’ve used Google Cloud OCR for this stuff and it works wonders.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
5 months
there's a certain, sinister group of Silicon Valley insiders who absolutely look down upon every founder who hasn't 1/ done yc 2/ been to stanford/mit/princeton 3/ worked at FAANG 4/ subscribed to extreme libertarian views about biz and life 5/ b2b SaaS 🤷‍♂️
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
6 months
@arrahman @Shibasishsarkar @mocho05 @NetflixIndia @CastingChhabra @saregamaglobal @rajnishkhanuja Vida Karo is some of the purest bits of music I've heard in a while. Thanks @arrahman for keeping it fresh forever.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
6 days
@mervenoyann Here's what we use @LetsEnvision : we've built our own document layout detection engine(headlines, tables, figures, images) + proprietary OCR(Goog/Azure) pipeline. we noticed it does so much better than using SOTA VLMs like GPT-4o/Claude 3.5 for this. Tesseract is a very poor
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
10 months
GPT-V has the potential to revolutionize accessibility, specifically writing alt-texts for images. Here's a simple chrome extension I built that uses @OpenAI 's GPT-V to caption the main images on a webpage 🤯 Time to build that @LetsEnvision desktop extension
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@bindureddy There’s no saying what a heartbroken superintelligence can do
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
5 months
@markgurman didn’t know wordpress had a $125 million CSR budget 🤣
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
8 months
@sashachapin For me, I’ve noticed psilocybin tends to surface the mundane but dialed upto a 11. It’s not an altered state but more pronounced 🙂
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
11 months
Wow. Loving this new feature in the @arcinternet browser where I can hover over links and see the summary of it. Neat use of AI!
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
1 year
🚀 Spent an unforgettable day with @sama and other devs from across EU. Highlight was showcasing how tech like the @LetsEnvision Glasses, using GPT-4, can revolutionize independence for the blind and low-vision community. Some exciting stuff in the works...
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
8 months
@__NameNo__ I love this boy’s energy.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 months
An assistant becomes truly conversational only when you can go below >200-millisecond latency. We managed to that today @LetsEnvision 👀. From query, to routing to response. Will work across both text, image & video inputs. More demos to follow!
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
6 months
@paulg assuming it is just a cloud provider move i’m assuming what compute providers that people are moving to.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
2 months
folks who introduce you to new books, music, movies, fashion or any form of creative expression should always hold a special place in life.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
8 months
@Chinmayi Maya maya please from Sarvam Thala Mayam 🙏🏾
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
8 months
@abacaj I started building a complex RAG feature for my app a couple of months ago. The SOTA and frameworks have moved so fast even from back then they make my current setup look outdated. Yet, it works well for my customers needs I feel no compulsion to change things. Fomo exists tho.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
5 months
@sighswoon 100% be curious not judgmental is more than just a cute aphorism, i believe. it’s the only sane way to navigate the fuzziest aspects of life.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
5 months
@jessechenglyu how are you guys going to "further reduce LLM hallucinations"? asking for a friend.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
6 months
@dieworkwear what’s with this strange ass fit. the oversized trend’s gone too far
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 months
@Suhail Alibaba’s new VLM can actually solve captchas even those new age recaptcha ones where u have to id objects.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@noampomsky Lol. In my grandma’s hometown in India there was a cow that was extremely charismatic. Everyone believed it was a good omen to pet it. The owner of the cow turned around into a cult. Built a little shrine for it. Made enough from selling the milk and offerings at the shrine.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
4 months
@jessechenglyu how did you make it 5x better in less than a week? asking for a friend.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
5 months
older i get the more i've started see the vanity metrics of life more clearly. as i turn 32, perhaps my most important metric from here on would be vitality: to freeze my current energy levels for the next decade and if i'm lucky, beyond. that alone would be my biggest success
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@julien_c I’m already using local LLMs on high end phones. One UX hurdle I’ve noticed is the size of the models putting off people. Plus after 5 minutes of usage phones tend to heat up quite a bit. All of them solvable next year.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
8 months
@sdw Teenage me fell so hard in love with that UI I ended installing a Mac OS skin that rekt my poor windows vista PC. Turns out skins on the internet were loaded with malware. Lost PC privileges for a few weeks over this but totally worth it. The UI now is just bland.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
2 months
i bought an authentic kuzhi paniyaram maker when i went to chennai last month. made this and spicy paprika chutney for friends. 10/10 sunday 😇
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 months
@BenGeskin Maybe they won't do it to discourage users from using it outside, precisely in situations like these.
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
9 months
@ClementDelangue It takes a village to raise a child
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@meTheKarthik
Karthik Kannan
7 years
Here's an early Thanksgiving gift from team @LetsEnvision ! A new update is ready and now you can: - Read text LIVE. In over 10 different languages. - You can scan documents and read text in 63 languages. - And a new UI! Happy Holidays!
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