Nick_Davidov Profile Banner
Nick Davidov Profile
Nick Davidov

@Nick_Davidov

Followers
16K
Following
12K
Statuses
6K

investor and serial founder in AI/ML/CV space. co-founder DVC - backing repeat founders. e/acc, go OSS

Los Altos Hills, CA
Joined November 2009
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
7 months
AI Rabbit Hole conf was just three months ago but it feels like there's so much new to discuss already. Who's down for another event this fall?
1
3
32
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
2 days
RT @annarmonaco: if you are a pathological, obsessive person that takes a liking to llms, optimization problems, and evals please come find…
0
6
0
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
3 days
@MaddyDono @surmenok @Austen I identify talent for a living and I’d give every single one of them my money to manage even though I know they have 0 investment experience. Their background indicates they have IQ and grit to figure it out.
1
0
2
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
3 days
Started a VC firm as the founding employee at 22. Led the investment team, returned top 10% of all funds wordwide. Don’t be an ageist. Later one of my portfolio companies was acquired by Meta for 9 figures just 3 months after starting. The founders and the team was 22 year olds. Then again, the fastest growing app 0-100MM users in 9 months, massive business, started by a bunch of 22-24 year olds.
0
0
0
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
3 days
RT @garrytan: I'm proud to announce YC's first AI Startup School— June 16 and 17th in San Francisco. It's a totally free conference bringin…
0
295
0
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
4 days
@TurnerNovak I want a list of your beard products
1
0
2
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
4 days
@_alex_kirillov_ Godspeed!
0
0
2
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
4 days
As AI is taking over "beginner" jobs that were introduced during the Industrialization, we might see humanity returning to the Master/Apprentice model. There's a good book "the Last Days of Night" where Paul Kravath, a young lawyer is fascinated by how Edison and Westinghouse have industrialized the process of innovation, breaking it into phases and streamlining all the processes by introducing specialist jobs akin to manufacturing. He then proceeds to apply similar principles to his law firm, introducing the Partner->Associate->Paralegal model for the first time, which now exists in hundreds of variations across pretty much every knowledge-work industry. In software development, the popular Agile model with "two pizza teams" fully equipped to ship a feature to prod is an evolution of the industrialized process of sorts. AI agents will likely change that, and we might see us going back to a Master/Apprentice model, where a Master is fully embracing their craftsmanship, automating all of the supporting jobs with agents, and an Apprentice/Shadow is helping and learning.
4
2
20
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
4 days
RT @ai_for_success: @sama Nothing beats perplexity.
0
7
0
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
5 days
Christmas is early this year
@karpathy
Andrej Karpathy
5 days
New 3h31m video on YouTube: "Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT" This is a general audience deep dive into the Large Language Model (LLM) AI technology that powers ChatGPT and related products. It is covers the full training stack of how the models are developed, along with mental models of how to think about their "psychology", and how to get the best use them in practical applications. We cover all the major stages: 1. pretraining: data, tokenization, Transformer neural network I/O and internals, inference, GPT-2 training example, Llama 3.1 base inference examples 2. supervised finetuning: conversations data, "LLM Psychology": hallucinations, tool use, knowledge/working memory, knowledge of self, models need tokens to think, spelling, jagged intelligence 3. reinforcement learning: practice makes perfect, DeepSeek-R1, AlphaGo, RLHF. I designed this video for the "general audience" track of my videos, which I believe are accessible to most people, even without technical background. It should give you an intuitive understanding of the full training pipeline of LLMs like ChatGPT, with many examples along the way, and maybe some ways of thinking around current capabilities, where we are, and what's coming. (Also, I have one "Intro to LLMs" video already from ~year ago, but that is just a re-recording of a random talk, so I wanted to loop around and do a lot more comprehensive version of this topic. They can still be combined, as the talk goes a lot deeper into other topics, e.g. LLM OS and LLM Security) Hope it's fun & useful!
Tweet media one
2
0
7
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
5 days
RT @AravSrinivas: We’re making Gemini 2.0 Flash available to all Perplexity Pro users. This is the first time we’re bringing a Gemini model…
0
65
0
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
5 days
@Tuzoff @CandlesSarah dude you're being toxic bc you don't like musk? The whole investment team was 22-25 and put together all of the portfolio and worked with the founders 100% of the time before everyone quit in 2015-16
1
0
0
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
5 days
@Tuzoff @CandlesSarah Solonin and Romanenko founded iTech in 2010, Gleb joined in 2011
2
0
0
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
5 days
@Tuzoff @elonmusk you can like or dislike his behavior, but I do like what he's doing
2
0
1
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
5 days
@Tuzoff @CandlesSarah he joined 2 years in
1
0
0
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
5 days
CFA has most of the skills you need to be an accountant in its first and easiest year, it’s harder than basic CPA certification and that’s why I used it as an illustration that this shit is easy. I’m an economist with training in accounting and this was literally the easiest subject I’ve studied. In 2025 you only need to spend like 10 hours on basic principles and then have Perplexity to find you references of specific rules, standards and laws. What we want these people to do is to look at the data with algorithms and identify anomalies and inconsistencies, or anything that might flag systemic inefficiencies. The guy who figured out a technique to build a probabilistic machine able to (in its mind) unwrap and read a destroyed ancient scroll based on a CT scan of its fibers, can 100% do that.
1
0
1
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
5 days
@CandlesSarah @Tuzoff I do teach in a business school, you know?
1
0
1
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
5 days
@Simeon_Cps Because it’s what it would always say if you optimize it that way. It’s a probabilistic machine that is trying to reduce error
0
0
1
@Nick_Davidov
Nick Davidov
5 days
@miolini @Tuzoff The courts will decide whether their activities violate anything. I don’t imply it does not work well, I say that this audit work can not be done by government insiders
1
0
0