SF Ai Hackathon Circuit; Thoughts on building a Legacy
11/03/2023 - 12/01/2023
contents
AGI House in Twin Peaks Hackathon research tool
Gen Lab Hackathon - blog generator
AGI House Hillsborough - Web search powered blog generator
DevDay hackathon - brownstone pods platform
Buildspace coworking day
Trip to Chicago and Zion
AGI House in Twin Peaks Researchers x Builders Hackathon
At the AGI House research hackathon on November 11th, the theme was to build tools around research. I really wanted to talk to researchers find out how they use Ai tools and how I can help by creating tools specifically for them. At the start we had the opportunity to pitch our ideas in front of the room. I took that opportunity to introduce myself, what I am working on and who I wanted to find in this group.
Afterwards there was time to mingle and I found a researcher that was interested in collaborating. In the next six hours, I interviewed her to find out her current workflow, what tools she was using (a few Ai applications for searching papers, storing clippings and note taking software). I decided to work on prototyping a tool that searched all of Arxiv papers for a topic, then pulled in the paper PDF and then generated a summary and comparison of three papers. From my interviews this is a most needed tool. The outcome was very good. I was able to build this in a few hours and demo it in front of the whole room of people at the top of the field of research and Ai engineering. The generated summary was not that great, it needs a lot of iterative improvements, but the UI and the work flow itself was a really good exercise and I walked away with a lot of new insights about the needs of researchers.
It was remarkable to sit next to and talk with a researcher, one of group of people that are pushing the frontier of science forward. This category of people is really valuable for human kind. In history it has always been those at the forefront of knowledge and technology that need to have the best tools, and that develop the best tools, because they are the ones that create our whole technological world. Since WWII it has been the American educational and industrial complex that has come out on top of the forefront. This I believe is justifiable, because this system of democracy is structured and designed to be supportive for flourishing of all human kind. It is an enlightened system that all people of the world are attracted to because it is not dependent on a dictator who is essentially unpredictable and there is no predictable succession for his rule. This is why people from all over the world want to pour their life energy into democratic and just societies, such that their life’s work does not lead to some evil end.
The same goes for me. I would not feel moved to create businesses and enterprises in a mono ethnic, nationalistic, or oppressive states run by a dictator. I would want to escape and innovate lasting distributed systems of human organization. I would not want my legacy on this Earth to be supportive of a unjust project or system.
Back to the idea of building tools for those in academia and doing scientific research. Observing how the system of reading research papers, finding supportive evidence, constructing an experiment, performing the experiment and writing the results in a paper the basis of all science. Being here and observing this process and working with this person was eye opening and inspiring.
The internet was developed as a military tool, then it was given to the university system to increase communication and distribute their knowledge. This was because it was recognized that it was the scientists in WWII that really won the war and that the future peace and freedom of the world will be secured by the continued excellence of the scientific and academic systems. This requires keeping an environment where science, education and technology can continue flourishing and in which the democratic system of America is at the forefront of the world. Therefore the military research arm gave the early internet, ARPANET to the universities.
Another example of researchers being at the forefront of innovation is, the episode when Steve Jobs designed and developed the Next computer. Then Tim Burners Lee developed the whole World Wide Web on a Next work station in the CERN particle accelerator. In the time of Da Vinci, around 1500’s, the university and the craftsmen were innovating things like the printing press and the notebook. These were tools that were brand new and which Da Vinci used extensively and which transformed the world. The notebook is a “second brain”. He wrote down all this thoughts, idea sketches in his notebooks, even shopping lists. They are preserved to this day and show a mind at work. He pursued finding and tracking down books from far away countries, like one from an Astrologer from an university in Krakow, Poland. Today, developers and entrepreneurs like myself can make a big impact on the world by focusing on this use case to build custom software that helps push the scientific research forward. This is what was my aim at the hackathon.
I observed that the most important parts of the research process are:
Finding a research topic to focus on. This requires searching and reading papers quickly. It means finding out if a paper is reliable. If the author is not using a lot of general subjective terms like ‘this is the most interesting topic’ versus quantified and supported claims, like ‘this topic has 500 papers written on it.’
Once you have a topic selected, you need to find supportive and opposing evidence and related literature. This means doing a lot of research on Arxiv and finding what the data is. Then you can formulate your new hypothesis.
You have to clip and collect the segments that you want to reference in your paper. These will be cited.
There are a few related tools that were listed: pandaPDF, semantic scholar, getliner.com.
In the short time of the hackathon I built an application that allows you to search across all of Arxiv papers, then you select a few of them, then a pop up appears displaying the selected papers, on the side a chatbot that is able to answer questions on the papers, and a summary is generated that compares them.
Here is the demo from the hackathon:
The key things that this tool seeks to solve are:
To help quickly judge how trustworthy is a paper
Other problems for which there is a demand for research tools to solve:
Summarizing large number of related papers, e.g. 40 abstracts, into a one paragraph summary.
Compare multiple papers, similar to how you can compare products in Amazon.
The holy grail is automated hypothesis generation.
Some tools already exist, but nothing feels like it can do everything flawlessly, there is a need for a product out there like that.
Gen Lab Hackathon - blog generator
On Wednesday 11/16 through Thursday I went to the Gen AI Hack II: Increasing Human Capabilities & Enhancing Society. It was hosted at the digital garage, an incubator on Market street, just a few minutes walk from my home. There I built an auto blog generator. I spent a whole day and a half on this and the outcome was really impressive. On the user interface, the user inputs the URL of their business website, then a description, then there are a few optional fields, like style, keywords, links, title. Then the blog is generated, along with images. It uses GPT-4-turbo and Dalle-3 for the images.
View the demo recording here.
The blog can be exported to HTML, Markdown or Text. The code is and lessons learned here are used in the future iterations of the platform. The conclusion of the hackathon was that there were around 10 teams selected to present in front of the whole crowd, then the top 3 were selected with up to 5k in prizes. I walked away with really good interactions, meetings, experiences and code.
Buildspace coworking day
On the next day I attended the buildspace coworking day in their space in Fort Mason. It was awesome to just talk to all the founders around me. I met one that is building a developer tool, another that is building an iOS budget app, plus many more friends new and old in this space.
Later, I and a few others from this event went to a celebration of an artists milestone in the Mission Bay area. It was cool to join one Ai and Crypto founder that I actually met two years ago in a cafe, plus a new friend that is a developer and traveller, and all three of us went on this adventure to go to this rooftop celebration. There an animation artist, who was also a participant in the buildspace online program, hosted an event to celebrate his milestone of having one of his videos projected on the Salesforce tower. This is a several stories high screen that wraps the top of the tower, visible from the entire city. It was great to be there and meet many other interesting people related in some way to the buildspace community not only.
House Hillsborough - Web search powered blog generator
On a rainy Saturday morning, fighting lack of sleep and general tiredness from the busy week, I made it in time to catch a carpool full of technologists making their way from San Francisco to Hillsborough to the renown AGI House for a hackathon sponsored by You.com. The selection process to this hackathon is quite strict, as there is a high volume of applicants, which are filtered out for only those most qualified and experienced in fields of scientific research, engineering and entrepreneurship. Some of the worlds most successful entrepreneurs, e.g. the founder of Quora and Google, come to speak and participate in these series of hackathons. They take place in a big mansion, where some startup founders live in the bedrooms, and for which the large commons paces are open on Saturdays for the hackathon. Many of them are from the nearby universities of Stanford or Berkeley. Here the speakers were Richard Socher, the founder of you.com and Ion Stoica, the founder of data bricks.
Here I really fought and defeated my tiredness and pull through to create a new iteration of the blog writer, that does an API request to You.com and updates the generated blog post with latest related information from the web. The UI for this was very nice, I got many compliments on the UI. One startup founder offered me a job as UI developer, instead I connected him with a very good developer friend that is looking for a job. I had some good conversations with the you.com team about their product, and with the founder Richard about feedback on my app. He said it has a lot of potential, that he is interested in talking more, having updates and he gave me his email. I spoke with a lot of people here and got very good feedback. One professional recommended to connect me with enterprise companies that would need this. I got her linkedIn and promised to take her up on her offer. I returned in an Uber car feeling happily exhausted and optimistic about continuing this project.
DevDay hackathon - brownstone pods platform
On the next day, Sunday November 19th, I attended the final day of the DevDay hackathon in Shack15. There I quickly built a platform that allows users to create subdomains on a website, it has a chatbot using Polyfire on the home page, and it is built on the vercel platforms starter template. This is a project that is the start of the Brownstone Pods platform, where residents and admins can log in to manage their communities of Pods shared housing spaces. See the details here:
https://devpost.com/software/brownstonepods-com
I am continuing this project to full completion.
At this hackathon I was impressed with my friends hack of an Ai agent that is able to a search on Amazon for a product and make a purchase.
Trip to Chicago and Zion
On Tuesday November 21st, I hopped on a flight to Chicago via Las Vegas. The mission was to do maintenance on my home in Zion and to spend Thanksgiving with my parents in Chicago.
I enjoy so much being in Zion, it is a historic township on the border of Northern Illinois with Wisconsin. That is the town that I bought a beautiful 3 bedroom home in two years ago. This is my home base that i rent out while I am away on platforms like AirBnB. Driving through the countryside in that area always fills my heart and mind with hope and dreams of building up this area, the communities, and creating drone and programming schools and other industries that can propel the area into a boundlessly plentiful future.
This is the place where I have my VR PC setup and my FPV drones. These are tools that extend our mind and are really just amazing in terms of what good they can do for the world. I dream of building startups that allow us to make the most of these gifts of science. I had some of the most amazing times here exploring VRChat worlds, flying FPV drones and making connections with people around here and visiting friends.
I did many home improvement tasks, like replacing a broken sump pump, raking the leaves, installing winter window insulation, installing new floor lamps with Alexa smart home integration, cleaning the whole house, and more. These little improvements add up to be a lot of work, in the end it is a labor of love as I deeply love this area, the forest around the house and feel that it is a long term investment for my entire life and hopefully for my kids and grandkids to come. It is a joy when you know you are building something that is lasting and that will be your legacy.
On thanksgiving we all had a good time over the traditional Turkey dinner. Afterwards I gravitated to the TV to show off all my recent Drone films from all over the world. I showed the video of my Zion home made just a few days before, a beautiful film from Wuhan China, over San Francisco, from Bali, Vietnam and over our childhood home in Mielec, Poland. It was a joy to share this with my parents, two sisters.
conclusion
It has been a very busy and active November. I have made a lot of progress on building an Ai startup, I have met dozens of really interesting people that are relevant to my journey, I have accomplished much. In the next month of December, my main focus is now on getting the product synducer.com to a complete state and to publicizing it online and getting my first paying clients. Thanks for reading and I offer you this playlist from this month which I deeply love.