The Wisdom Wall

“They are startups in one really important way. And that is like, yes, the numbers are as big as any enterprise company most, right? But one of the things that defines a startup is Um, you're not fully set on your product. You know, you become an established, like people like the, the old question, well, what's a…”

“The product now matters more than the model because previously when I was on team model, we were seeing real gains, uh, when the models got better and when the models got better, they could just do more stuff.”

“The thing is, what, all these chatbots have a, often hidden, system prompt, and they have an ideology, one way or the other. Sometimes, most of the times, not as overt as this, And that to me is the risk about these things becoming the last website is that you're not a hundred percent sure where they're going to steer…”

“It's an excellence that, uh, makes products work very well with their custom silicon and the fact that their operating system is closed and they control it. That's a great innovation and it works well, uh, with their operating system. But, uh, that type of excellence is not a type of excellence that transfers well to…”

“if, if it can solve arc AGI and it's not necessarily crushing on these economic factors, uh, and, and these just kind of general rote work things that we would like it to do, um, it shows that instead of being general, it's very spiky intelligence and hence much less useful.”

“what we have now is that the reinforcement learning type of, uh, AI technology has been put on top of the self supervised learning to get these AI models working better, which has added a level of ruthlessness to them. Because one of the things we know about RL is that there's a level of ruthlessness that the AIs will…”

“there's no such thing as social networks anymore in this world that you're hoping for, where there's no reverse chronological order, or there's no, there's no algorithmic feed. Uh, it, it, it's long past, uh, the point in time where that was even a possibility, and I think that You know, social media was a moment, but…”

“Now if intelligence is abundant and available to be accessed through multiple providers, it will come down to who builds the best product. And so, it goes from a two-person race, right, or a two-company or a three-company race, OpenAI, Anthropic, maybe Google, to like, now, you, in order to expect OpenAI and Anthropic…”

“if you're trying to Hit that Goldilocks zone of building out enough to keep growing, um, without mortgaging the company or without going bankrupt, you actually underbuilt if you're profitable.”

“And I think because the machines are human-like and don't have feelings, We can potentially create this pattern that has us start, you know, kind of being nasty to the machines, and potentially that spills over to our person-to-person interactions.”

“the second you come inside a company, you're now that company's content marketing arm. You're not doing what you did. You're doing something completely different.”

“there's no way you can have a prediction market without insider information. It's even harder to keep that, um, free of insider trading than it is the stock market. And there are, Fewer regulations.”

“The agentic stuff flips the everything store completely on its head, because instead of the everything store, you just type one more query in, and now the entire web is the everything store inside of the Comet browser.”

“the phone it's reached, it's reached its final or its ultimate form factor, right? The phone is the phone. The air looks like the iPhone six, like, Full circle. It's the same thing. Um, is it going to fold? Yes. Is that very different? No.”

“And when models commoditize, what you really need is hits. You're in the hits business. And I think open AI knows this better than everyone else.”

“I think that these companies cannot compete with tech companies by being more tech. And maybe that limits their growth over time. The only way to possibly compete with big tech and to compete with AI is to be more human, right? It's to make people feel good. Like that's something that technology has a really tough time…”

“They ingest so much of the experience that the app developers are effectively R and D for the eventual big tech products.”

“it's impossible for platforms to pick this up because everything is done behind the scenes, the recruiting, the payments, the editorial direction, usually in discords or in text messages or on WhatsApp signal. And it's very, very difficult to pick up.”

“AI job loss is something that we're seeing from companies that are weak anyway. They're gonna have to do layoffs anyway. And they go to the market and they say, listen, we have to do these job cuts and we're replacing our employees with their, with AI. Oftentimes, no, they're not. They're just trying to get positive…”

“the more you enable the conversation to be there versus building your audience and having, you know, your own properties that people go to, the more power you're actually going to lose in aggregate.”

“there's a Goldilocks zone between going all in too late, uh, and all in too early, and, uh, and there's, there's real risk in going in all in too early because of the human side of things, and the bumps, and the fact that there is some turbulence along the way, inevitably.”

“oftentimes skeptics can ask, like, what happens if it doesn't work? But sometimes you ask that so often you, um, you forget to ask what happens if it does work.”

“I think real leaders need to understand that this is a technology that as of now is being driven by the enthusiastic adopters and the champions within organization. And what I would do is really lean on these people and highlight them in front of the company, incentivize them.”

“People have processes. They like their processes, and it takes an unbelievably better process and system to be able to get them to switch off, and that's probably the biggest Thing that will hold this technology back over time is just the fact that like people like the processes.”

“AI technology just takes the average, tends to take the average of averages, and it minimizes the difference between its output and the average human-generated work, so that its AI images, video, and text will often appear uniform, and really that uniformity can only be broken with really deliberate prompting, and even…”

“unlike the dot-com boom's fiber cables, the latest AI chips rapidly depreciate in value as technology approves, much like an older model car. So yeah, that's actually a big point all this money on the depreciating asset.”

“the demo in the first couple weeks of these, uh, AI content creation apps are awesome, and then people just sort of get used to them and bored of them. Like, Studio Ghibli, whatever it was, was this amazing moment on, uh, really on Twitter over a weekend, and then no one does it anymore.”

“organizing on social media, um, and the ability of social media to, To cause change in the world. That has, has certainly not gone away even as it's faded from the headlines.”

“I think that when you integrate something into performance reviews, that's when it gets done. Right. I think that like performance management is what drives a lot of the tech industry comp. I mean, as you might imagine, money matters. And if your pay is contingent upon you spending a couple hours or, you know, building…”

“that investment leads to lock in because the bot that you talk to the most is the one that is going to want to, is going to be the most useful to you because it knows you best.”

“the address bar I would say is the most valuable real estate on the entire desktop computer. If you own the address bar in the browser, you get to control what the default is.”

“there's no standard accounting practice for how to amortize The value of a large language model because it's so different in the past. You build software, you have like essentially zero marginal cost. It can go forever. That's it. This is a much more cost intensive, like marginal cost intensive way of doing technology.”

“ultimately everything that we see in the business world is downstream of culture.”

“The most important thing about being a company on your first day is that you can come in and build what the market needs without any regard for your legacy business.”

“there's this misconception that Bezos is this visionary that's come up with every idea that Amazon has and that his, you know, underlings have just gone ahead and executed for it. Actually, what he's done is built a culture that is meant to circulate the ideas through the company, and no matter where they come from,…”

“The thing about writing something down as opposed to putting it on a slide is you need to think things through, and I'll, I'll say this. I write for a living. It's the most painful thing. Uh, you know, it's a terrible decision as a career because it hurts. And the reason why it hurts is you really need to figure out…”

“And that's why you see a lot of employees who are there for, you know, a year and, and leave and a lot of employees who are there for 1015 years and not a lot of employees in the middle, because either you wash out or you become, you fall in love with it and you say the sacrifice is worth it.”

“Facebook gets there through feedback, and Google gets there through collaboration.”