Sucker for physical and mental torture. Building Spot AI, investing via The Explorer Fund, writing at https://xitter.cf/t.co/AZysGFLfVB
San Francisco, CA
Joined July 2007
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Evolution is a giant trial and error game, lots of bets placed and only few successful or lucky ones forwarded to next generation. It’s power law, scientific method, and market theory at insane scale. #evolution
I am sorry @adcock_brett - great promo - I was like let’s see how this promotions works and it tells me I am in luck and my favorite pizza from goop is available in promo - asks me to connect phone number and Gmail and then says sorry - it’s actually NOT available.
Bad user experience. Back to @bot and muse
We're giving away $1,000,000 of free pizza right now
Download and order from the Hark app: hark.com/download
Type "order a free pizza" in chat. It's first-come, first-served, delivered only in the U.S. (review details below)
I have never wanted to buy Tesla - it never appealed to the raw instincts of me but this - this one absolutely freaking hits me in the gut, you instantly want to feel that power in your hands, and you want to floor it
This might be the best graph of the day
Introducing The Cheeky Pint Benchmark.
We made our intern watch every episode of Cheeky Pint to bring you this breakdown of pints drank by guests to the nearest sixth.
Congratulations to @elonmusk who is currently in the lead with three full pints of Guinness.
Most men don't need more therapy-speak.
They need a problem hard enough that they forget to think about themselves for six months.
(why only men - I only have lived experience as a man, and therefore speaking as one)
Current AI thesis:
- data company
- inference company
- open weight model training
- hardware downstream of chips / robotics
- defense
What I am inspired by : cameras and how we can have more digital eyes than human eyes in the world - how to use that to build the best understanding of the world.
Happy to report that spot has two @spot_ai
1. We have 10,000 distributed NVIDIA gpus across the United States collecting and processing video data
2. 60+ million hours of data collected monthly of real world physical environments.
Excited to share in about a month what we have been cooking
This part of the post is not just about technology diversion but a far bigger social change that we are likely to witness this century.
Before machines in 19th and 20th century - farming and production were limited by how much labor you can gather. Big machines and factories made economies of scale favor rise of giant corporations.
Since intelligence ( general or super ) will have an inference cost, the companies / countries able to access large amounts of it - is going to create mega corporations.
We will see a $50 trillion company by 2050.
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
I have long believed this to be a ceos main job.
You have to constantly be expanding your TAM.
One thing I got wrong is TAM expansion means nothing if you can’t get yourself into dominant positions in your initial segments / markets
The importance of TAM expansion
Late night chat with @nakul led to a discussion about TAM expansion.
tldr Every great company needs to constantly and continuously expand their TAM and launch products / services that go after new customer behaviors and new addressable markets. In fact, you cannot be a generational company with just the same product / addressable market that you started with.
if Google had stayed search + ads + youtube only, we wouldn't have Chrome, GCP, Waymo, and many others.
if Facebook had only stayed Facebook and not done Insta or WhatsApp (or Muse!), the company would worth a fraction of what it is today.
Same for every other generational company
Seems obvious in retrospect but worth stating.
The year is 1965 - us economy is roaring and has grown 100x in 100 years.
The world economy is $2T and the American economy is $700 billion.
If you asked any economist that if 🇺🇸 will grow 100x again in next 100 years - the answer would be NO
Argument 1: we went from pigeons to telephone for communication, loudspeakers to radio/tv for entertainment, horses to cars and flights for travel, oil was discovered - energy and electricity become abundant, assembly line, big banks like J.P. Morgan etc etc. such rapid innovation won’t be repeated
Argument 2: world economy is $2T - for us to become $70T means we will be 35x world economy’s current size - a difficult thing for a linearly trained mind to understand.
Yet 60 years in - we are at 60x, we will grow faster than 100x.
Computers, internet, phone, self driving cars, ai that can talk, work and play complicated games, silicon chips that can compute a trillion times more, space and rockets, digital currency and prediction markets, biotech and so much more.
I met my very good friend’s godson yesterday. My friend is 66 and his godson is 18 - we discussed how we would live again if we were 18.
What are your best advice / reads for an 18 year old.
This is my heaven on earth.
No matter what is happening in the world, the country or the city or with me in my life.
Run through presidio to Chrissy fields and the most amazing views in the world and end it at this beautiful place.
Beautiful people. Good produce. Great views. Live music. Every Sunday
Sfo spoils you, I expect every airport to have
1) less than 5 mins through security / tsa nonsense
2) water fountains right after security
3) gates within 5 mins ( can be 7 worst case ) from security and a few healthy-ish eating options
4) airport which doesn’t look dated or too crowded
Silicon Valley is moving from technical talent wars to user retention wars.
And I think most people haven’t fully caught on to it yet
This is one of the top reasons (the top being your desire to will something in the existence) to do startups or invest aggressively in markets.
Test your beliefs against the world with no cushion and evolve yourself
I never understand why so many people have this take.
1) your behavior is not all consumer behavior
2) most importantly, behaviors evolve and it’s goes towards easier and faster.
I would rather tell instinct what I would like to eat - high protein, low sodium, gluten free or best breakfast burrito on Sunday morning if I went out Saturday night.
Example I quote is - people would have argued that a big part of appeal of shopping is the experience - the store, the staff, the trials, the touch n feel n fit - yet you make returns easier and we all shop online for majority of our purchase.
Behaviors change and we will have agents shopping for us.
