A Generalist #1 | LLM Models' War, Majorana 1, Duolingo, Meat, Raycast
Foreword
It’s been a while since I first considered starting a newsletter, and today is the day. I’m kicking off with a monthly edition. Once I’ve set up a smooth writing process, I’ll shift to biweekly and maybe even weekly in the future. So, starting today, you can look forward to A Generalist delivering enjoyable reads to your inbox on the first Sunday of every month.
As you might guess from the name of this newsletter, even though I'm a computer engineer, I'm not always going to talk about technology or software development. My plan is to share things I'm doing, reading, or seeing during this period if I think they'll be valuable to you.
Before starting this first issue, I would like to share a video that motivates me a lot. I'm starting A Generalist today and I hope it will be consistent.
Tech & AI
Of course, I have to start with AI. LLM models' war is getting crazy day by day. Besides this war, cloud providers striving to maintain their share of computing power providers by holding large share of hosting LLMs. Microsoft gained a significant advantage with its investment in OpenAI, but AWS is still trying to find a way to keep up with. They feel more pressure as the leader of cloud computing so they plan to spend $100 billion on AWS infrastructure this year. (TechTarget)
China made quite an entrance to LLM world with high performance and open source model DeepSeek. But either they don't accept such interest or they don't have enough resources to meet hight demand, so they limited to API access for DeepSeek model. If you want to try DeepSeek thanks to being open source you can deploy to your own server to use it. You can watch the video about 'Running DeepSeek LLM on AWS EC2'. (Bloomberg, Video)
Elon Musk isn’t backing down in the LLM battle. xAI has launched Grok 3 Beta, claiming it to be the most advanced AI model yet. Grok 3 combines exceptional reasoning abilities with extensive pre-training knowledge, outperforming competitors on several benchmarks. Alongside Grok 3, xAI introduced Grok 3 Mini, a cost-effective model designed for tasks requiring less world knowledge, yet delivering impressive reasoning capabilities.
xAI also unveiled DeepSearch, an AI agent built to uncover truth across vast sources of information. I hadn’t been using Grok as part of my daily tools, but after hearing positive feedback from a friend, I decided to give it a try. I asked a zero-shot question about Apache Flink to various flagship models, and Grok 3 provided the best answer. It has since become a daily tool for me. (Grok 3 Beta)
The last decade sparked a huge demand for processing power. Recent AI breakthroughs have fueled a need for GPUs, while millions of applications have produced vast amounts of "big data," driving demand for data storage. All of this means we need more processing power every day. Quantum computing has raised our hopes on this front, but until last month, it was too costly and bulky to be practical. In February 2025, two major cloud providers and tech giants unveiled quantum chips the size of a hand’s palm. Microsoft introduced Majorana 1, and Amazon revealed Ocelot. These chips still aren’t ready for widespread use due to insufficient error correction, complex control systems, and other challenges. (Microsoft, Amazon)
Startup Spotlight
YC shared an article as "Requests for Startups", which is basically a list of idea categories that everyone should start a business with right now. The article covers a spectrum of innovative ideas that aim to take advantage of the latest advances in AI. Personally, I bookmarked this article and thought, should I do something about it? (Request for Startups)
Tools & Resources
Postman has introduced its AI Agent Builder, a new toolset that simplifies creating AI agents using large language models (LLMs) and APIs. Integrated with Postman’s vast API Network, it connects to models like ChatGPT and Claude, and offers a no-code editor, Postman Flows, for building workflows. (Postman)
Raycast, has released its AI Extensions feature. This update allows users to interact with extensions using natural language commands through the proprietary Ray-1 model. On the flip side, this feature enables developers to create features that can perform actions using natural language. Raycast AI features are mostly dependent on the Pro subscription and I didn't think it was worth it until now. (Raycast)
Product Development Insights
Duolingo has condensed 14 years of valuable learning into a beautifully illustrated handbook. The book give insightful information about how Product-Led company should be and how they operate it. The book even includes a mention of their Super Bowl ad, though I personally didn’t enjoy it. It’s worth noting that the book portrays the company as almost utopian. Still, it’s an enjoyable read and great to bookmark for future reference. (Duolingo)
Book, Article, Movie & Videos
I would love to share a series of books that reveal the history of gaming from every aspect, offering great quality in both printing and content. Bitmap Books has published a series of gaming books, but for now, I could only afford three of them. Their price tag is a bit high, but it’s totally worth it. Flipping through the pages of Metal Slug in ‘Run ‘n’ Gun’ takes me right back to my childhood. (Bitmap Books, Amazon)
I love Kurzgesagt videos; they are incredibly knowledgeable and have great illustrated content. I would like to mention their video on meat production. The illustrations make it more bearable - most people can't stomach to watch the real thing - but when you empathize with the "torture" and "prison" conditions of animal breeding, it's clear they're unacceptable. (YouTube Playlist)
The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: A Psychiatrist’s Stories of His Most Bizarre Cases — allows you to discover how small issues can affect your life without getting bogged down in the details of physiological theory. It is filled with real cases (with identities hidden) from Gary Small's lifetime of therapy. It's highly entertaining to see how these cases are resolved and how people recover through simple but effective diagnoses. (Amazon, Goodreads, My Goodreads Profile)
JOY - The Birth of IVF — is really enjoyable movie about founding story of IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) that led to the Nobel many years later. Unfortunately, it is only on Netflix but I guess for most of us, that’s essentially our TV now. (IMDb 7.1, Rotten Tomatoes 91%)
Quick Bits
Apple releases new ‘cheap’ iPhone. It's stupid and nobody cares. They still don't have a breakthrough in cutting-edge technology. (Apple)
Skype has reached the end of its life. (X @Skype)
Fal.ai, a dev-focused platform for AI-generated audio, video, and images, today revealed that it’s raised $23 million in funding. (TechCrunch)
Anthropic unveils Claude 3.7 Sonnet, their smartest model yet—a hybrid reasoning system delivering lightning-fast answers or detailed, step-by-step solutions. (X @AnthropicAI)
There was a news as ‘AI.com flips from ChatGPT to Elon Musk’s X.ai’ but now ai.com redirects to DeepSeek. So I can’t know where it redirects when you read this newsletter.
Last words
Thank you for reading my first newsletter to the end. It may not yet meet the quality I envisioned, but I’ll keep working on it. Your support means a lot—whether through reviewing it or sharing ‘A Generalist’ with your friends. I deeply value your feedback, so please don’t hesitate to reach out to me on X or via email.
Bonus
In this first issue, I'm very excited to give away some gifts. You can get a 40% discount on ThinkBuddy (TB) annual plans with the code AGENERALIST40. TB is my daily AI tool that I can access to most of the LLM models and a lot of extra features. (ThinkBuddy)
And the best gift I'm giving this month is a free one-year subscription to Setapp. I use at least 5 tools from Setapp and they're really helping me. I'll be sharing a video about productivity tools on my YouTube channel next week. So to get 1 free one-year subscription, just share this newsletter and mention me. I will draw from those who share at the end of March 2025. (Setapp)
İren Saltalı - March 2025
