Daniel Gross
Compute Lead, Meta · 1 appearance on the record.
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Gross co-founded the search engine Cue, directed AI efforts at Apple, and led AI programs as a partner at Y Combinator before launching Pioneer. He co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc., co-authored the book Talent with Tyler Cowen, and serves as Compute Lead at Meta.
33statements → 4claims → 1claims resolved → 3.39/5average certainty → 2.58/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →
1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
3 predictions · 1 assertion · 6 opinions · 22 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Daniel argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Gross: SpaceX was originally a stunt to land a plant on Mars
“SpaceX, I believe, was conceived as the Green Mars Oasis Project, where the idea was it's a very Los Angeles idea we're gonna go buy a bunch of rockets from the Russians, and we're gonna try to launch a bunch of stuff onto Mars, and we're gonna take a photo of…”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Daniel Gross on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Daniel Gross said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Gross: YouTube is more important to Google than web search
“I actually believe YouTube is more important to Google than web search if they're thinking about it properly, but that's an acquired asset.”
Gross: Global problems stem from capitalism's short-term outlook
“I think you can trace almost Every major problem that we have in the world today to the fact that capitalism has a very short term outlook. So it maximizes for what is good today, not what is great 10 years from now.”
Gross: Both Marxist communism and Bitcoin are awful things
“Whether it's awful things, in my opinion, like say, you know, Marxist communism or Bitcoin, it always goes through this world.”
Gross: Google will always beat Apple in services, but lose in hardware
“And I think this will always be the case. They will try to always fix this, but it will always be the case that Google will be amazing at services because ads requires a service business model, and Apple will be amazing at kind of user experience and hardware.…”
Gross: The written word was a temporary historical blip
“You could kind of view the written word as a temporary blip, actually, in human communication, where we did not have a way to transmit the spoken and seen words of people globally. So what we did is we minified everything. We compressed everything to this form…”
Gross: YouTube's algorithm will produce many more leaders like Jordan Peterson
“Jordan Peterson is, you can imagine the world basically has, YouTube is a massive fuzzer where people are trying every possible permutation in terms of communication style, oration, content language, and what emerges is the best and the most addictive and the …”
Gross: Outsized success is catalyzed by scarce feedback from micro-influencers
“The thing that's scarce today are people who are kind of micro influencers to others Giving them positive feedback and catalyzing this loop that ends up creating everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Elon Musk to, you know, Ramanujan or Albert Einstein.”
Gross: Tech success is driven by inordinate luck rather than intellect
“What led to my success wasn't really my intellect, ambition, or talent. It was really luck. I just happened to bump into someone who knew someone who, you know, knew our first engineer. I, you know, one of our Major investors literally overheard me pitching at…”
Gross: Increasing problem-solvers 10x offers more leverage than direct solutions
“I think it's much more leverage to work on creating a planet that has 10 X the amount of people working on, you know flying cars or global warming or curfew. On the meta layer of the problem. And due to the amount of luck involved, I actually believe the world…”
Gross: Over-reliance on A/B testing traps companies in local maxima
“I actually think companies more often than not tend to be over data driven because it's the easiest way to kill the conversation is to say, let's just A-B AB test both options. And that gets them stuck in a local maximum.”
Gross: Breakthrough products come from intuition, not metric optimization
“Doing one thing Apple was, is legendary at, which is saying, let's, let's take a break from the current metrics. And let's just try to envision some type of blue sky idea. Let's not even collect data about how it's going to be. Let's use our intuition and tast…”
Gross: Core Google will fail to reinvent ads due to innovator's dilemma
“So, so the core Google unit, I think, will not be able to reinvent kind of the next ad model because of traditional innovators dilemma”
Gross: YouTube drives intent proactively while Google Search reacts
“YouTube is proactive and Google is reactive. So when you go to Google, you come with an intent, and they have to satisfy that intent. I mean, since they made this fix in 2012, where they tweak the algorithm a little bit, we can talk about that in a minute. You…”
Gross: Apple chose privacy over beating Google to market in ML
“While I was at Apple, this was before the whole Cambridge Analytica Facebook debacle I noticed this very strong organizational tilt towards privacy, towards customer and user privacy. And I gotta tell you, I was in the room, I was a little bit of the devil her…”
Gross: Companies cannot successfully reinvent themselves without founder involvement
“Unless you have the founding team, maybe the founder involved, you're not going to be successful there.”
Gross: The potency of books comes from length and narrative repetition
“Many people talk about the length of books and the fact that the content is repetitive and books should be shorter. That way people would read more, but I actually think the potency of it is that it's long and the narrative is repeated over and over and over a…”
Gross: Bill Gates's rule to always finish a book is terrible advice
“I always demanded Myself to finish books, and I actually heard Bill Gates actually say something similar recently. He always finishes a book. I could not think of worse advice. I think the main goal is to be reading a lot and if you find that yourself caught i…”
Gross: Fiction shapes mental models and worldviews more potently than nonfiction
“I actually think fiction has a more potent effect on your mind that's just a little bit harder to track in terms of how you think, mental models, how you kind of view the world.”
Gross: All actors, even evil figures, are locally rational
“All actors are locally rational, even terrible ones like Adolf Hitler. So it made sense to them what they were doing at the time, and it's an easy thing to just call them evil, but I think the more interesting and important thing, if you really want to suppres…”
Gross: Gmail optimizes for engagement metrics over user productivity goals
“Gmail is a product suited for communication, but ultimately when you open up a session of Gmail, there are like things you want to accomplish.
and I do not think Gmail works for you to accomplish that goal.
I think it works to accomplish the organizational im…”
Gross: Humans ultimately seek flow rather than meaning or fulfillment
“Happiness to me is flow. I actually think the thing all humans are seeking in life, and this is kind of a weird way to say it, because we usually use different words. You know, we usually use words like meaning, fulfillment, but I think it's flow.”
Gross: Understanding hyper-success requires finding the catalyzing feedback loop
“The most interesting thing to me is when kind of looking at people that are hyper successful is not trying to kind of reverse engineer, you know, their current daily patterns or what they currently do day to day. And it's not even to reverse engineer how they …”
Gross: Humans are terrible at reverse-engineering their own mental wiring
“I think we as humans are quite terrible at reverse engineering the neural net in our head. Much like it's actually quite hard within modern machine learning techniques for you to figure out that that individual thing you fed the neural net led to that specific…”
Gross: Increasing luck requires actively seeking opportunities and acting on them
“The trick to basically becoming more lucky, and there was a cool study about this a while ago, is you can actually increase your odds of luck in the world. You know, you don't even really need pioneer. You just have to do this interesting, hard, psychologicall…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| #56 Daniel Gross: Catalyzing Success | Apr 16, 2019 | 1h 8m |