AI Indies Part 1 - Times of Change $$$
Wizards versus muggles.
This issue emerges as we approach the culmination of long-standing commitments and ventures within the company. Moreover, it’s an exhilarating time in software engineering due to the democratization of Generative AI. Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), especially GPT-4, are shaking the foundations of our age-old perceptions about AI and tech adoption flow. Custom model-building continues to be a powerhouse in ML applications, and nowadays, arguably the only sustainable way to earn well! Not GPT-4, so that we’re clear. Nevertheless, the hype boosted all ML markets by raising awareness and popularity. And the zeal with which people are seeking ways to monetize and employ generators is remarkable, even if running the model in-house isn’t an option.
Meanwhile, the villains continue their nefarious deeds, enduring due punishment, while heroes bask in accolades and reap significant rewards. There’s a wealth of stories to tell, but I will publish them in four parts to keep it digestible. Here are the parts:
- Part 1 (We are here!)
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Independent developers in Canada are commanding an eye-popping $450/hr for GPT-4 integration on long contracts. When will this wave hit US? The world is capitalizing on a US product. But the USA pickup is painfully slow.
- Part 2: Expansion into war-coding
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In the aftermath, the lucrative commodification of war-coders emerges as an unanticipated industry windfall.
Yet the US coder is left in the dust again. Hacker capital of the world is Prague again. - Part 3: War in Europe spills to the U.S.
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A closer look at Russia’s cyber strategy: Is it a well-thought-out maneuver or a vindictive blitz on the US economy spurred by envy of failure? Who should be worried? If the goal is destabilization, then why hit the weakest links first?
Also, Ukraine has something new in the making. Something that can change everything. - Part 4: The U.S. loses the world-tech leadership
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The ripples across the Atlantic: How developments in Europe are impacting American lives.
Where is the internet Technologies (IT) market shifting? Are we over-hired in the U.S. IT?
Today, is part 1 or 4 (plus a followup in 2 years).
Context and Background
Every little bit helps.
Last year, many of us stood united with the Champion community - raising funds, coding combat firmware, and supporting Ukraine in any way possible. When resources ran thin, we turned to volunteering at donation centers. Then helping domestic customers, and raising more funds.
Prompting creativity in young minds are the best moments of my life @ ASE Junior Robotics Labs.
Fast-forward to the present day, and our engagement in the war effort has waned, mainly due to the joy of embracing parenthood again. We are overwhelmed with gratitude for this long-awaited precious gift. My spouse credits our good Karma for this blessing, while the analyst in me believes my contribution counts too.
Happy "Big Brother" has his prayers answered by the Grace of G*d!
Being a parent anew after 13 years, I find myself reveling in family time. This article is a tribute to the indomitable spirit of independent developers. These developers, who, through innovation and creativity, are rewriting the rulebook in technology. And not just by competence and creativity but also bravery, courage, grit, wit and will. Most impressively, all while carving out more time for which matters most - family and community. The people I’m writing about are community shaping a brighter future for us all. At the end of the day, it’s love, family, and community that make life worth living.
With my mother-in-law arriving from Europe tomorrow, this rejuvenated daddy is ready to dive back into code promising disruption! Soon it can be Daddy’s focus time too.
And now that you know us a little better, let me share a brave American peoples' story with you.
Part 1: The Surge in GPT-4 Integration; Where is the US?
So, GPT-4, in particular, has been turning heads. Indeed, the model is impressive. There’s been a significant increase in the rates charged by independent developers for GPT-4 API integration. And there are matching technical challenges. Case in point: a dynamic Canadian duo, our former colleagues and generous supporters of Ukraine, renowned for their market insight, secured contracts for GPT-4 integration at an astounding CAN $450/hr (about $360/hr US), renewed annually. Hm… They are part of a growing trend in Canada where businesses seek Generative AI to streamline operations. This development is supported by many independent developers and doesn’t come as a surprise. However, the eagerness of the conservative industry in adopting this technology is noteworthy. I still can’t get over this. We have never sustained rates like that for more than a few weeks. Neither did we ever before have laggards in droves jumping hard on an utterly unvetted trend.
Contrastingly, the landscape for independent developers in the US seems less vibrant compared to Canada. The Canadian political model nurtures small business growth, whereas the US appears more invested in an employer-employee framework, which proved to hinder the comprehensive growth of engineers and engineering as a disciplinary field. The market dynamics in terms of customers and vendors are akin to Canada, but American businesses seem willing to wait for large IT conglomerates to catch up and offer standardized tools. Will a technology that’s 3 years old be innovative enough for today’s challenges? Only time will tell. But I tell you a resounding NO!
A Closer Look at the Technical Aspects
Examining the Statements of Work (SoW) in Canada reveals a pattern in business demands. Many seasoned developers are offering Domain-Driven Design (DDD) Anti-Corruption Layer (ACL) APIs that focus on end-to-end solutions with composite UI, prompt engineering, context maps, response taxonomy, and versioning. The ACL often includes an object bag persisting responses to customer sentiments in various languages. It’s important to understand that an ACL is not a core logic service doing the business bidding. It is just a message translator that sits between two business-talking working bodies. Thus being a low-risk option, it is a perfect place to sell modifications against. Because high bang at a low risk is music to executives of slow companies ears! The ACL idea works even if the laggard has no domain model. Hackers just say "Adapter."
Basic solutions typically sit on top of an ACL, persist the prompt on their own, and respond with some post-processed messages. That’s the $100/hr rate from the viral New York Times article.
The Canadian duo went beyond by selling a vision. And that is what you expect all hackers to attempt! Their delivery starts with basic ACL integration to the customer’s taxonomy, bounded contexts intact. Which is always a slam-dunk selling to laggard. Conservative companies understand only tools and never evolutions. And then there’s future work on internal bounded contexts, NLP tokenizers, modern daughter-models, and expanding business taxonomy. This sells well too because laggards typically accept "future improvement" ideas without too much thinking about it. An example of a daughter-model is Microsoft’s Orca, which is compact yet demonstrates remarkable benchmarks. Such a model can be developed by forking any LLaMA OSS model (Meta) or even GPT-2 (OpenAI). That is muggles pay attention to brands and not solutions such as models. Microsoft is always acceptable because they’ve gotten the laggards by the throat through marketing. And OpenAI holds its own reputation rather well through all the market segments. This prospect gets me eagerly itching to develop my own solution. The simplicity of sale and then fielding cannot possibly be unattractive to any hacker.
The possibilities are endless with GPT-4 as the model tutor. In my book, that’s outright theft. But my book does not matter — it’s been done already! And there’s little OpenAI can do about it when an entire country is sitting behind "the man in the middle" (MITM).
Oh, my dearest reader, I hope that you too can find a powerful niche here around selling such ACLs! When you do, please kindly share your success with us.
But where is the US?
So, the Canadians and some Europeans are cashing in big on reselling an asset that isn’t even their own to sell.
The US, historically hailed as the bastion of hacker culture with MIT at its epicenter, was once synonymous with groundbreaking innovation. This spirit of innovation catalyzed the rose unicorns like Google and Netflix. However, the torch seems to have gone out in the US. Only over-hired overspecialized "role recruiting" stench remains behind. Silicon Valley tanked, and the competent independent developer, the hidden foundation of it all, is … not here. Somewhere else, away from the hostile US job market favoring complacent nodding micromanaged muggles to "figure it out by myself" attitude. Prague, Czech Republic, to be exact, is the place all the creative brains call home today. What’s not to love about Prague? Cost of living is low, crime nonexistent, amenities, social services, and food are incredible — all in a stunning European city to boot. The city is teeming with independent thinkers and burgeoning startups. The idea market and opportunity space are white-hot. Even Google, a company revered for its developer-friendly ethos, finds solace in Prague. Whenever Google launches something groundbreaking, a demoscene springs up downtown the following weekend. And Prague has sister cities all over Europe, in Ireland, Poland, even Ukraine. All of these cultural centers are far away from the petrified and judgemental biases of ignorant corporate-America middle managers.
Although in North America, Québec is very much a European city as well. Then a few months later, Québec might catch up, and if the stars align, even the US East Coast should follow suit by year-end. And notably, not the West Coast, which is just 'fake it until you make it' culture. It appears that the US has lost its pioneering spirit, its leadership prowess, and its competitive edge. Going like this, soon, we will all code for food, don’t you say?
Let me explain make-rank and why Canadians are so nimble, and we are a little behind? And how does one know? Well, there is a way hackers tell. Professionally, "J. Random Hacker Rank", or simply Hacker Rank (HR) is the Facebook of feisty hackers. Or, was one. The completely unrelated company HackerRank borrows from this historic concept. And it may actually have damaged the propagation of this manifest by taking its name, like media damaged the meaning of the hacker by using the word for criminals. Today the ranking is predominantly localized and HR is defunct. Sad, because it was a good way to get to know each other. A fun game. The signed file traveled from click to click, and people were searching the web for monikers of interest.
When I aggressively competed some decades ago, there was only ICPC with their private servers and random account deletions. A site registered coach was needed to add one to a team — one completely bogus and useless bleed-through of muggle culture into the scene. Alternatively, in the open space there was the UVa site with its own slew of sorry problems. First, the unstable Online Judge, then annual account migrations that often failed to migrate the history and score. That reshuffled the make-rank and angered countless hackers — most of whom simply quit on the community with each new migration. I ended up with dozens of accounts there simply trying to migrate. Countless emails to add my old scores. And a request to merge accounts was a non-starter, especially if one solves a problem in two different accounts. This was all conducive to my quitting shared space competition and creating my own archives or joining private servers operated by my friends.
Today the picture is very different! We have the nice and stable Codeforces with the same catalog as UVa. It’s beginner-friendly, immensely educational, and fun — I go there with my 13-year-old son, and we often have a blast. There’s the matter of the russian empire and the FSB goons crawling all over the organization. But that unfortunately comes with the territory as the most gifted engineers come from the Eastern block — not because they’re innately better somehow, but because we in the West don’t value STEM enough to know better. In fact, lately the most phenomenal strides that I find myself in are populated by young Chines programmers without a trace of an American save for myself.
For ML space learning and competing, there are kaggle and huggingface. I can tell you little about these, but perhaps kind readers can comment on various community qualities. Perhaps one day I will write about ML communities that I prefer to participate in. But for now, let me focus on core programming communities instead because the fundamentals are what makes a great hacker, not the buzzwords or fluff.
These communities that I’ve listed before should be a heaven for young hackers. And about 1/3 of the make-rank is pooled from community-specific activities within.
A Very Private Conclusion
This conclusion is published only in my personal repository and not in the public spaces like Medium and LinkedIn Newsletters. And the reason is that I need to tell you something important but not very well positive and polished. It is never my intention to upset people. Only to inform those who care to know the truth and actively seeking it. And the ones that seek will look things up and find my rambling. If I am lucky enough — maybe even comment on those for my benefit too.
Let’s ge to it.
Why Canada maker-ranks but the US does not?
Humans are social creatures, even the most introverted hackers are still an active part of the larger scene, albeit in their own guarded ways. The traditional 'maker-rank' was always a shared, copied, bootlegged and stashed around file that all hackers secretly read. Its versions propagated like wildfire to not just see who is who on the scene; frankly, hackers make no idols, that’s purely the poser fetish. Hackers despise fart-sniffers in their every form, and of course no hacker will ever be one. Most importantly, maker-ranks propagated PLACES! More precisely SCENES. Answering the question all hackers want to hear the answer to — "where is life, where is action, and why is it there?" Maker ranks was a simple BBS clogging text document that got most hackers to move the house. Introverted or not, hackers would pick up and go to the places where they’re better understood, are offered challenging enough opportunities to create, and simply, be more among their own kind. This is the document that filled California with hackers all of these years ago. This is the document that filled Prague a decade or so ago. And this is the document I hadn’t seen in the US for over a decade now.
When I go to Québec, to visit Northern, Fumbles, or any other local hacker community, I still come up on a very local and very personal copy of HR. In best cases, it is there on a table someplace, printed in the old text-only format — a monospaced 8-bit wonder that hits hard at the heart of an every old wizard. And rest assured, there will be people watching to see who will pick the document up and who will recognize what that really is. Canada sticks to the oldest and most profound traditions of the hacker world.
On one such occasion, I walked into the scene I didn’t know. There are many such nukes and crannies in Quebec City downtown open to all in the genuine hacker tradition. We have some large and global venues such as Hackerspaces designed to initiate new makers into our global community (see explaining video Hackerspaces). But this place was old school small with a handful of old school hackers tinkering with ancient hardware. And it is here where I was explained exactly why the Canadian scene is so different from the US.
- Core Federal Policy
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The USA was once all about family and family business. This sentiment is exactly what brought about the US Digital Revolution. "Yet the said revolution generated some massively powerful companies, such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc. And all of these companies came up grassroots. And all of these companies took active measures to make sure nobody does the same again." What the old hackers are describing here are events such as Sir Richard Branson starting Virgin Galactic in the late 1980s by giving some stranded travelers a ride. And then making sure that nobody can use the same loophole again by funding prohibitive legislation. The hackers here have cataloged, mapped, and ran analytics on every top disruptor. Then, culminating their argument with:
"In the U.S., the policy became favoring big business;
While Canada is steadfast on the side of small and family-owned business."
Wetware Augmentation: The Final Frontier
Hackerdom in free places, where policy is not demeaning the little guy, such as Canada, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and the Netherlands jumped hard into the LLM market. This is because the brilliant people on the scene clearly understand where the next value is coming from. When cellphones made us more effective, the entire industry took a hard turn. But nothing is as enabling as the direct support for our thinking and creativity output. The next frontier is the wetware augmentation by AI. And the next code for that is integration. This is something that big and slow companies will struggle heavily with. And the little guy has a decent chance to succeed with. As the LLMs become miniaturized, the speed boost such technology offers hackers will terraform our entire civilization. The future is finally in software. That is, software coupled to wetware.
The next frontier is NOT in the USA.
Also see editorial[1].
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