Week 2730
We had one day with all 5 of my EU team members in the office at once. It was a real treat for all 6 of us to sit in a room together for a crit and discuss work. (And of course drinking on the Hannekes Boom terrace.)
1 Note
The recent Dwarkesh Podcast episode about AI “learning on the job” has no news or discoveries but provokes some thoughts:
The true believers of AGI probably are also adherents to the Great Men of History view. Of course this view tends to correlate with seeing the PayPal Mafia boys as once-in-a-generation geniuses, meat-based AGI.
I find it more optimistic to see them as competent-enough nerds who happened into the right context to dent the universe. (For better or worse.) I could hold this POV because I’m just a less-advanced intelligence than them, but maybe it’s because I learned to appreciate the fundamental attribution error before my own ego was calcified against recognizing the value of context.
Anyway, context matters, perhaps more than anything! To animal and synthetic intelligence alike. For the foreseeable future, the efficacy of agents will be defined by our ability to give them the right context, not only wiring them to godlike artificial geniuses.
This is why I think the business model of firms like Asteroid is much more exciting than most wrappers. They have targeted a meaningful set of tools in a corner of industry that’s ripe to benefit, and put in the work to assemble and maintain the context needed for agents to become skilled users. Any firm in the healthcare/insurance space that puts in their own work bringing their data together can thus deploy those agents and meaningfully improve their operations today. Without waiting for some mythical god-like model that could “just figure it out” and save any of us from having to bother.