AI Cognitive Load

I have recently seen a lot of rhetoric about this study that shows that developers take longer to code with AI compared to without AI. However, speed isn’t the whole story. The real benefit is that AI finishes your thoughts. You start writing or coding and it carries the thread to completion. That means less mental juggling, less half-baked ideas, less cognitive strain. AI is not just an accelerator, it is a way to reduce the cost of thinking....

July 30, 2025 · 1 min · Lucas Pauker

Newber

Recently, when I was at the airport looking to get a ride share back home I checked the price of both Uber and Lyft. I noticed that an Uber was 25$ and a Lyft was 39$…that is a price difference of 14$, or more than half the price of the Uber! The Lyft ride was 56% more expensive… How can two multibillion publicly traded companies have such different pricing? Both companies have entire teams devoted to determining pricing, yet they are still so off....

May 3, 2025 · 9 min · Lucas Pauker

Why Gambling is (more) Rational (than you think)

I remember watching a video a while ago where a pro card counter answers questions about gambling. In one of his answers, he said that what makes someone a true gambler is that the joy of winning a bet is more than the sadness from losing a bet. This has stuck with me since I watched the video over a year ago. Since then, I sometimes think about why people gamble and what makes some people more prone to gambling....

January 25, 2025 · 8 min · Lucas Pauker

Charity Calculator

With holiday season in full swing, people may be more enticed to give to charity. However, there is a question of how to optimize your charitable donations. Specifically, I would like to optimize charitable donations for maximum impact. It seems to me that there are two parts to this equation: Which charity(ies)/cause(s) should I give to How much should I give? The answer to the first question is deeply personal, so I want to focus on the second question....

December 23, 2024 · 8 min · Lucas Pauker

Home Run Modeling

Why home runs? Some of the best moments in baseball games are home runs. Something about hitting the ball out of the park is satisfying. Since baseball season just started, I wanted to model a part of the game. I decided to model home runs since they are pretty rare events but should still be able to be accurately predicted. When I say accurately predicted, I mean that we can accurately predict the probability of a player hitting a home run....

February 28, 2024 · 10 min · Lucas Pauker

OpenAI Model Timing

Introduction The goal of this article is to explore the latency of different OpenAI models. When using AI models in production, latency is an important factor to consider. Comparing Model Architectures First, I test the latency for different OpenAI models. I test the following models: gpt-4, gpt-4-0613, gpt-3.5-turbo, gpt-3.5-turbo-0613, gpt-3.5-turbo-16k, gpt-3.5-turbo-16k-0613, text-davinci-003, text-davinci-002, text-davinci-001, text-curie-001, text-babbage-001, text-ada-001, davinci-002, babbage-002, davinci, curie, babbage, and ada. These are all the OpenAI models that are available for inference through the chat and completions endpoints....

October 15, 2023 · 4 min · Lucas Pauker

LLMs Unleashed: The Power of Fine-Tuning

Disclaimer: This article mentions https://terra-cotta.ai/, an LLM experimentation platform I am building Introduction ChatGPT, Bard, and other large language models (LLMs) are very useful for a wide variety of tasks from writing code to answering complex questions to aiding with education. However, these models are ultimately limited by the data that they are trained on. Also, these models are trained to be able to answer a wide variety of questions which may not be sufficient for domain-specific questions....

July 23, 2023 · 5 min · Lucas Pauker

50 AI Applications

Advancements in artificial intelligence and language models have made significant impacts in various fields from healthcare to finance to entertainment. Here are 50 practical applications of AI that are currently in use or have the potential to be implemented in various industries. Let me know if any of these ideas inspire you or if you build any of them! Text Analysis Automatically generate outlines or summaries of news articles. Find fake news and provide a citation with the real source....

April 4, 2023 · 3 min · Lucas Pauker

Challenges facing H-2A Farmers and Workers

Below are reflections of our startup journey participating in the Floodgate Reactor Program. We have strong opinions, loosely held and while these opinions reflect our current state of mind and understanding of the world might change as we continue our entrepreneurial journeys. Introduction H-2A is a US government program that allows farmers to bring foreign seasonal agricultural labor to the US. To learn more about the H-2A program, check out our other blog posts or the link here....

August 22, 2022 · 6 min · Lucas Pauker and Shreyas Parab

Navigating the Idea Maze

At the beginning of 2022, we began the Floodgate Reactor program with the hopes of finding a successful startup idea and learning how to build a successful company. We started the program with an idea in cybersecurity related to vulnerability patch management. By the end of the summer, we were working on an idea that focused on solving farmer labor shortages and building a global talent marketplace. In this blog post, we will discuss our journey and how our ideas changed over time....

August 22, 2022 · 8 min · Lucas Pauker and Shreyas Parab