DevToolsDigest: Issue #299
This week's digest includes news and resources from Hacking Open Source Business, Cohere, Tobiko, and more.
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Heavybit's DevToolsDigest is a weekly curated selection of the best resources, product updates, jobs, and discussions in the developer tools industry.
The Week in Developer Tools
Why Open Source Companies Struggle
In this episode of Hacking Open Source Business, co-hosts Avi Press and Matt Yonkovit are joined by Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and co-founder of Chef. Adam shares insights into building a successful open source business, balancing the ideals of open source with business needs, and his vision for System Initiative.
5 Common Mistakes Teams Make When Building with LLMs
When Humanloop started out in 2020, they were working on a better way to train the state-of-the-art language models of that time. These models needed lots of manually annotated data to work best; Humanloop’s first product made it easier for anyone to do this annotation work, while drastically reducing the overall amount of manual work required. But they sensed a shifting tide.
Industry Research
The Evolution of Software
Last week Chris Paik published a Google Doc titled, The End of Software, where he articulates the lowering cost of software development and potential implications. He ends the piece with a provocative statement: "Majoring in computer science today will be like majoring in journalism in the late 90’s." This resonated for many. But also, expectedly, inspired pushback from many in tech.
How Long Can OpenAI's First-Mover Advantage Last?
As companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta Platforms race to leapfrog each other with marginally faster, cheaper or more accurate LLMs, a number of developers are beginning to say that these LLMs are beginning to reach parity when it comes to performance.
Developer Venture News
Cohere Raises $450 Million
Foundation model AI companies have been racing to raise capital to fund the expensive development of AI models that require huge amounts of computing power and top industry talent. Founded in 2019, Cohere builds large language models and makes money by selling its models and applications to enterprises with a emphasis on data privacy. Unlike OpenAI's tie-up with Microsoft, it has steered clear of exclusive deals with cloud providers, despite being backed by Oracle.
With $21.8M in Funding, Tobiko Aims to Build a Modern Data Platform
Tobiko aims to reimagine how teams work with data by offering a dbt-compatible data transformation platform, with the popular SQLMesh and SQLGlot open source projects at its core and an intuitive low-code user interface to build data pipelines and transformations.