MC.2: Playdate x AI, a16z's Open-Source Love, Falcon's Rise, and the Magic of Midi Transformer 🎵

Work & Experiments

Playdate x AI: An Exciting Playground
It took two long years but we finally have our hands on these lovely yellow devices. It will be a great excuse to make games and use generative AI to discover new gamedev processes. PLAYDATE | READ IT

Coming next week: Project Grilling
I’m working on a system—a “grill”, to be precise—to evaluate how well a project aligns with our team’s core value and interests. Given the constraints of time and resources, especially within smaller teams, every decision carries weight.

Tech updates & tools

a16z Supports Open-Source AI Developers
Kudos to the renowned VC firm, a16z. They're funding open-source AI projects without any strings attached. The goal? Allow devs to work freely without the usual money pressures. This move could inspire more to hop into the open-source AI space. A16Z

The Fastest Math Typesetting Library for The Web
Ever wondered what ChatGPT uses to display those slick math expressions? It's KaTeX, claiming to be the quickest math formula renderer for the web. KATEX 

Falcon 180B: New State-of-the-art for Open Models
Meet the largest open language model around: Falcon 180B, trained on a whopping 3.5 trillion tokens. It set a record for the longest single-epoch pretraining. Expect performance somewhere between GPT 3.5 and GPT 4. HUGGINGFACE | DEMO

Automatic Prompt Evaluation Accross Models
Judging a model's performance based on popular benchmarks can be misleading; models might "cheat" by recognizing parts of those datasets. Instead, use this project to see how your own prompts work across different models and pick the top performer. They've got a cool example comparing an uncensored model with two others. GITHUB | Example

Music Generation with Midi Transformer
Generative AI could be a game-changer in the gaming world. For indie developers, it might mean more bandwidth to focus on core game elements, while AI handles a chunk of the work. Sure, some might churn out low-quality games, but we're used to sifting through noise. On a side note, using the Midi Transformer is pure fun! Writing a short sequence or using a well-known composition and seeing the model's take is thrilling. It's like a throwback to my days with Guitar Pro. GITHUB | Demo

Using Firecracker to run untrusted code execution jobs
A good read about creating sandboxed container for running untrusted code. In my view, an AI agent should execute code on user devices, but safely. I will give this a shot for one of my project. Stan's blog