🏠 Did Airbnb kill the PM role?

🏠 Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky Puts Designers in the Driver's Seat

Airbnb had done away with the product manager function.

But don’t worry, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky quickly clarified that product managers are still valued at Airbnb. In fact, they’re hiring for the position!

So what did Brian mean? He wants designers to take charge of the user flow, like architects of a building.

Brian revealed that product managers at Airbnb are now also product marketers. They have to tell a compelling story about the product and its users, not just define its features.

That’s because Brian believes marketing should drive product direction, not the other way around.

Brian is not your typical CEO. He’s the only designer CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and he wants to make Airbnb a design-led company. He thinks design is not just about making things look pretty, but about solving customer problems.

💡GPT-4's Leak Reveals Massive Scale and Impressive Architecture

Why is OpenAI hiding GPT-4 from the world?

“It’s not being kept closed because of some existential risk to humanity, but because it’s replicable.”

This is concluded by a new report from SemiAnalysis that reveals more details about OpenAI's GPT-4.

The training cost for GPT-4 was around $63 million, with 1.8 trillion parameters, which is like 10 GPT-3s stacked together.

To train GPT-4, OpenAI used a clever trick called Mixture of Experts (MoE).

This means they split the model into 16 smaller models, each good at something different. Then they let a gatekeeper decide which ones to use for each input. This way, they saved time and money on training.

MoE is a powerful technique for building large models and could potentially be used by the open-source community to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI even further.

💀 Dark Web's Shadowy Figure: Variety Jones Sentenced to 20 Years for Silk Road Involvement

If you ever bought drugs online from Silk Road, you might remember Variety Jones.

He was the right-hand man of the site’s founder, Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts. Well, today he got 20 years in the slammer for his role in the dark web’s biggest drug bazaar.

Variety Jones, whose real name is Roger Thomas Clark, was Ulbricht’s mentor and advisor. He helped him run the site, dodge the cops, and even hired a hitman to kill someone for $80,000.

Clark was caught in Thailand in 2015 and spent almost three years in jail there before being sent to the US. He pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute massive quantities of narcotics and gave up more than $1.6 million.

Ulbricht, who called Clark a “real mentor,” is also behind bars for life. He was convicted of running Silk Road, which sold drugs, fake IDs, hacking tools, and other illegal stuff from 2011 to 2013.

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