geordee

The AI Spring

We are living in the AI Spring.

All the big players were holding back their research due to the experimental nature and rough edges of current implementations. OpenAI led one of the earliest moves, along with Stability.ai. Meta released LLaMA, a foundation model for natural language processing, under an open-source license. Stanford fine-tuned LLaMA and built Alpaca, which led to many other fine-tuning initiatives. IBM has released Watsonx. Baidu, Alibaba are testing their large language models. And probably Tencent too.

ChatGPT and Midjourney’s Discord interface made AI accessible to the public. The ecosystem is also getting a boost. Vector databases...

The Curse of Agile Product Management

I was involved in building a large enterprise solution - composed of many products and libraries providing features and capabilities such UI, API, authentication, ledger, databases, enterprise search, microservice runtimes and so on. Almost all the components are product-managed, built and released in an Agile fashion - with fast iterations and frequent releases. This in itself is noble and good (for marketing) but poses a few challenges to large-scale solutions. We need to find that narrow space where all the component products and versions work together. Occasionally the products have dependencies on platforms or libraries which are moving at a...

Prompting the AI

Recently I came across a problem, typically solved by machine learning. A standard problem, addressed through multiple research papers, of capturing the image of an object and figuring out the HS Code - an international classification maintained by the World Customs Organization for traded products.

A typical solution consists of a computer vision solution translating the image to a set of labels and list of objects identified. These object names and labels are then passed into a classification algorithm to arrive at from over five thousand product groups or classes. The challenge is to get a reliable match since the...

Contract First

Digital as a capability has climbed up and down the hype curve and is now seen as an established practice across enterprises. One of the common patterns is to build microservices to solve business problems. There are a few reasons why microservices might be a good choice. Consider these reasons as different facets or dimensions of an application. If an architectural choice is recommended from multiple perspectives or dimensions, it might be worth considering as the dominant alternative.

From the business perspective, a service-based architecture brings in modularity. Traditionally, ERPs tend to be comprehensive one-stop solutions for businesses. This helped...

Trustworthy AI

In 2014, I conceptualized a product to assist legal professionals in India. Central and state governments are responsible for legislations in India. But, when the laws are pronounced and declared by the judiciary, it becomes part of the wider legal framework that includes judgments, and this is known as judicial legislation. This improves the understanding and applicability of laws and aids to interpret in a variety of circumstances. However, it comes with its own complexity - such as hierarchy of courts, applicability in the region, similarity in the nature of cases and so on.

The product idea was not quite...

Decentralized Data

Data mesh became too popular too quickly. I was listening to the recent ThoughtWorks podcast on revisiting Data Mesh.

The essence of data mesh is decentralized management and value generation using data.

The essence of data mesh is decentralized management and value generation using data. This is an important differentiation. It affects how we describe data using analogies.

One of the commonly used analogies is that “data is the new oil”. This might help to describe large AI-driven initiatives, where large-scale data is mined, sourced, transported, stored and consumed constantly to build AI engines capable of producing...

What is Digital?

How long does it take to fuel your car? It usually takes 4-5 minutes to fill the gas, and depending on how busy the gas station is, there would be some wait time too. Is it possible to bring digital experiences during the time spent at a gas station? That depends on what digital really means.

I often refer to the 2015 McKinsey article by Karel Dörner and David Edelman to describe the characteristics and capabilities of a digital product or solution. The authors list four core capabilities to describe a digital business - Journey-focused Innovation, Contextual Interactivity, Proactive...

Shape Up

A while back I read an article about poverty in The Conversation. There was a hypothesis that poverty is the result of lack of self-control. The author refutes it by adding more context to poverty. Poor people live in a “permanent now”, one day at a time. We often describe self-control as choosing long-term over short-term outcomes, or delayed gratifications. Worrying about tomorrow is a luxury if you don’t know how you’ll survive today!

That got me thinking about organizational poverty. It is a good thing to have self-control, discipline, predictive timelines, and product quality. But what if we are...

Jobs to be Done in Digital Transformations

The Apple iPhone was released in June 2007. I bought a Nokia E71 in October 2008. It was one of the best Nokia phones ever! It served my needs perfectly. It was solid, compact, durable, and fast. It had a comfortable keyboard and integrated with Microsoft Exchange seamlessly. It had the best maps in my opinion, and decent features for Internet and VOIP calls. That’s all I wanted in the late 2010s. If you had asked me to improve it, I would have asked for better VOIP apps, and a better integration with Google ecosystem. They did deliver a better...

Zero UI

“And it improved the effectiveness of decision-making”, quipped my friend. He was talking about how a few event-based notifications improved the speed of data-driven decisions. The program monitors patterns and deviations in various business metrics (such as lead times and stock-levels), and proactively informs the concerned party.

“We have seen it before”, I mentioned. The whole premise of business events and business activity monitoring in 2000s were built on this concept.

“With newer and better capabilities in technology, we re-invent parts of the car, or even change its field of engineering!” Business activity monitoring was part of application integration and...