2025-08-15T21:09:55.104Z https://plugaru.org/ Alex Plugaru Hexo https://plugaru.org/2024/11/02/sasstr-2024-ai-agent-talk/ 2024-11-02T11:20:00.000Z 2025-08-15T21:09:55.104Z

<p>My talk about rolling out the <a href="https://www.gorgias.com/">Gorgias</a> AI Agent at SaaStr Annual 2024 in the San Francisco. I’m

https://plugaru.org/2023/08/17/unblocked-podcast/ 2023-08-17T11:20:00.000Z 2025-08-15T21:09:55.104Z

<p>A talk about how we scaled our engineering team at Gorgias, cognitive load theory for organizing teams, when to split a team, what to

https://plugaru.org/2023/03/29/big-things-small-begginings/ 2023-03-29T11:33:25.000Z 2025-08-15T21:09:55.104Z

<p><img src="/images/bigsmall/first-line-of-code.jpg" alt="first commit gorgias" title="first line of code at Gorgias"></p> <p>Ten years

https://plugaru.org/2022/07/28/dtc-pod-podcast/ 2022-07-28T11:20:00.000Z 2025-08-15T21:09:55.104Z

<p>Big thanks Ramon Berrios &amp; Blaine Bolus for inviting me to talk about Gorgias’s history, it’s mission and what is coming next.

https://plugaru.org/2022/04/30/engineering-management-books/ 2022-04-30T11:20:00.000Z 2025-08-15T21:09:55.104Z

<p>If you’re like me (first time manager in a <a href="https://www.gorgias.com/">fast growing software company</a>) you’re likely facing a

https://plugaru.org/2021/03/10/a-thousand-brains/ 2021-03-10T12:20:00.000Z 2025-08-15T21:09:55.104Z

<p>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocortex">neocortex</a>: the organ that occupies ~80% volume of the brain while consuming

https://plugaru.org/2018/09/27/kuku/ 2018-09-27T21:54:02.000Z 2025-08-15T21:09:55.104Z

<p>At <a href="https://gorgias.io/">Gorgias</a> we’re using <a href="https://kubernetes.io/">k8s</a> on <a

https://plugaru.org/2016/04/24/future-of-humanity-and-strong-AI/ 2016-04-24T23:06:08.000Z 2025-08-15T21:09:55.104Z

<p>The fascination with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence">AGI</a> has been mainstream for a long time, but it started having more even more momentum in the recent years. Even hollywood has become less naive with movies like <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709">Her</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/">Ex Machina</a>.</p> <p>On the R&amp;D side there is of course Deep Learning which is a machine learning technique that uses neural networks with 1 hidden layer :P It has changed I believe forever the way people are doing research today. The hype is real because of the state of the art results achieved with it and the way the skills translate across different fields of ML. AlphaGo beats the best player in the world, translation and image&#x2F;voice recognition is becoming better, artistic style stealing, attention models, etc.. The best part is that it’s more or less the same RNN with different neuron architectures, backprop and gradient decent that works with a broad range of problems. Now people are looking to for nails because they have a damn mighty hammer.</p> <p>Of course hooking up a bunch of NVidia Pascals is not gonna give us AGI and the Moore’s law is not what it used to be. I could not agree more, but if we overcome the hardware issues (and I have high hopes that AR and VR is gonna push this) then it’s reasonable to assume that we’ll have the hardware to achieve at least weak AI soonish…</p> <p>What about software? That maybe a bigger problem. But.. I’m also optimistic here with things like torch and recently tensorflow are given ton of attention from one of the best minds in the AI world today. What’s really cool about these frameworks is that they are used everyday in production on real products by startups and big corp alike. They are here to stay. It’s not enough, but I’m hopeful that things will improve.</p> <p>Ok, so I want to say something that has been bugging me a long time, bare with me, I believe it’s important for the arguments that follow. </p> <blockquote><p>… is the intelligence of a (hypothetical) machine that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can…</p> <footer><strong>Wikipedia</strong><cite><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence">Artificial General Intelligence</a></cite></footer></blockquote> <p>Now I have a problem with this definition because I would argue that in a cosmic sense we, the humans, haven’t achieved what I would call general intelligence. We’re kind of good at surviving in the Earth’s atmosphere. We can do many things that are amazing and not accessible to most animals, but we’re still bound to our environment. We’re still I would argue narrow in our intelligence and can only grasp a small fraction of what’s out there. There exists true AGI which is AIXI. It will seek to maximize its future reward in any computable environment (survive and expand), but there is this tiny little problem of requiring infinite memory and computing power in order for it to function. It’s useful just like the Turing machine is useful in the real world. For any intelligent agent to be practical, it’s required a favourable environment and a narrow specialisation for that environment. This is why I think that we’re really after is strongish AI which translates to being pretty cool in your neighbourhood.</p>

https://plugaru.org/2015/07/21/100-software-company/ 2015-07-21T23:47:06.000Z 2025-08-15T21:09:55.104Z

<p>If you know <a href="https://stripe.com/">Stripe</a>, <a href="https://www.mailgun.com/">Mailgun</a>, or <a

https://plugaru.org/2015/01/02/near-future-human-computer-hybrids/ 2015-01-02T18:45:20.000Z 2025-08-15T21:09:55.104Z

<p><img src="/images/magician.jpg" alt="customer support oracle" title="customer support oracle"> </p> <p>Most of tech startups today try

https://plugaru.org/2014/11/26/energy-needed-to-write-an-e-mail/ 2014-11-26T00:43:06.000Z 2025-08-15T21:09:55.104Z

<p><strong>TL;DR;</strong> </p> <p>In 2013 we sent <strong><a href="http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Email_Market_2013-2017_Executive_Summary.pdf">182.9B</a></strong> emails, consuming <code>26PJ</code> (Peta Joules). Equivalent of yearly electricity consumed in Mongolia and 1kg of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass-energy">matter-energy</a>.</p> <p>Every time an e-mail is written, or any sort of human-computer interaction, some amount of energy is expended. Given that in 2013 an estimate of <strong><a href="http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Email_Market_2013-2017_Executive_Summary.pdf">182.9 billion</a></strong> e-mails written world wide an interesting question pops up: </p> <h3 id="How-much-energy-is-needed-to-write-an-e-mail"><a href="#How-much-energy-is-needed-to-write-an-e-mail" class="headerlink" title="How much energy is needed to write an e-mail?"></a>How much energy is needed to write an e-mail?</h3><p>By <strong>energy</strong> I mean how many <code>Joules</code> and by <strong>needed</strong> I mean needed by the human who writes the e-mail and the computer used to write the respective e-mail. For our calculations we’ll take an <strong>e-mail</strong> length of a 100 words. I don’t know the average e-mail size, but perhaps I should ask NSA, FSB or MSS some time to get a more accurate idea.</p> <blockquote><p>Sending an e-mail involves e-mail servers, routers, switches and other network devices which require energy in order to function, but given that the topology of the internet is rather hard to take into account, we’ll not bother with these details. However I suspect that the infrastructure itself that is required to send a single e-mail consumes far more energy that opening up your computer and sending the e-mail. </p> </blockquote> <p>At this moment I’m not sure if it’s even possible to calculate this accurately, but let’s try anyway and please if you find any mistakes feel free to point them out. </p>