i was having dinner with someone recently who asked why i spend so much time reading & posting on x. she had a pretty negative perception of the platform mostly shaped by the mainstream narrative around it. my answer was simple. x is where the future gets beta tested. you basically get to watch ppl build things, talk through ideas, show off stuff, & argue about where everything is going, way way before it reaches anyone else. there really isn’t another surface on the internet quite like it.

gotta give credit where credit is due. openai has probably done more than any lab to drive down the cost of high quality intelligence. open source obviously matters, but if you look at the full package from model ~quality, availability, latency, reliability, choice across intelligence levels, ease of access, & cost nobody has a better overall offering as a service. we’ve been enjoying use these models quite a bit.

trump: “first of all, i want to welcome everyone to the first supreme intelligence summit. we used to call it artificial intelligence. terrible name. artificial means fake. why would we want fake intelligence? we want supreme intelligence.” sam altman: “mr. president, under your leadership, openai has made tremendous progress toward supreme intelligence.” trump: “tremendous.” dario amodei: “anthropic believes supreme intelligence must be developed safely, responsibly, & in accordance with..” trump: “see, he said it. supreme intelligence. very smart guy.” dario: “yes sir.” demis hassabis: “google deepmind has spent decades working toward general intelligence, but we now recognize that the technically correct term is supreme intelligence.” trump: “google finally learned something.” sundar pichai: “absolutely, mr. president. gemini is becoming more capable every day thanks to america’s leadership in supreme intelligence.” trump: gemini. “beautiful name. two people. double intelligence.” sundar: “yes. exactly.” elon musk: “i’ve actually been calling it supreme intelligence privately for years.” sam: “no you haven’t.” elon: “you wouldn’t know because you stole a charity.” mark zuckerberg: “mr president, meta is committed to making supreme intelligence available to everyone for free.” trump: “mark, you look much stronger now.” zuck: “thank you.” trump: “something happened.” zuck: “jiu-jitsu.” trump: “supreme jiu-jitsu.” satya nadella: “mr president, microsoft is proud to provide the infrastructure powering the supreme intelligence revolution.” reporter: “mr. president, what exactly is supreme intelligence?” trump: “it’s even better intelligence, very high IQ like my uncle who went to MIT.”

it’s a tragedy that most podcasts turned into pr infomercials for the guest or their company. the whole thing is obviously transactional now. i.e. host gets access & also paid, guest gets distribution, & the audience gets the ad disguised as organic content.

it’s pretty remarkable that meta is effectively bundling a growing number of ai utilities into its products & giving them away for ~free. this is how social media became completely free. you can imagine the same thing happening across ai. entire categories that currently support billion dollar companies could get bundled into muse. meta is structurally incentivized to do this cuz the product doesn’t need to monetize directly if it increases engagement, retention, or the value of the network + creates entirely new business opportunities like agentic commerce. in some sense, zuck is commodifying the product layer of ai way more than the model layer. that’s pretty hefty competition for a lot of product companies. i suspect muse for business (not just consumers) will be built at some point too.

the most interesting part of social media now is that you’re watching ads from both the creators + the platforms themselves at scale. that basically makes like 50%+ of content on insta just pure ads. you got sponsorships, partnerships, affiliate links, product placements, content that is basically an ad but disguised as organic, etc. that futurama / south park episode where everything is advertising was never even satire. at this point you can assume that everything on social media is an ad until proven otherwise. like this post itself could be an ad & you would never even know.

the biggest winners in the personal agent space are data providers like plaid. i am curious how much facebook pays plaid, it's gotta be an enormous increase in ARR for the entire business. there are no real other alternatives either.

to build a cool product now, you really only need two ppl: one dude with exceptional vision & taste who knows what should exist & can provide the right feedback loops for iteration. & one dude who is absolutely relentless about making it real no matter what. that’s it. & sometimes these two are the same.

the iphone action button is my most frequented entry point into ai. it’s wonderful even though its placement is extremely cumbersome. wish it was on the right side where the camera control button is.

in the whole optimism as performative mantra many ppl often forget a very very simple truth which is that to understand the future you first have to be brutally realistic about the present (i.e. you cannot be optimistic about the present!) to be good at this you need to understand the world as it actually exists, why it became this way, which incentives sustain it, & which forces are beginning to break it apart or cause it to change. then you need optimism about tomorrow. i’m not talking blind optimism (that’s foolish), but the ability to see what could exist once all of these forces fully play out. this is why great investors for example are unusually good at holding both of these complex realities at once. clear realism about today & optimism about tomorrow. it’s more important than ever to dissect the present without sentimentality so you could place bets for tomorrow.

the reason why you see this type of behavior is that social media industrialized status competition at a global level. e.g. beauty, vacations, homes, weddings, partners, careers, & motherhood are now measured against thousands of unusually successful or attractive people rather than ~50 ppl in your actual community. this causes ppl to behave in very very strange ways esp the ones who are obsessed with growing their followings (in fact that obsession is now linked to trying to be an influencer, travel full time, & escape the daily grind).

each assistant is optimizing locally for helpfulness so they all independently decide that surfacing one more thing is useful. so globally you get notification tragedy of the commons. the actual personal agent probably has to do the opposite which is ingesting notifications from everything suppress ~95% of them, rank the remainder against your current context, & decide when not to interrupt you.

it’s amazing how much modern therapy language escaped therapy settings. i.e. concepts created for genuinely dysfunctional relationships like boundaries, trauma, triggers, toxicity, narcissism etc became simple ordinary vocabulary esp on social media. also this type of language completely removed one of civilization’s oldest error correction mechanisms where someone you respected told you that you were being a dickhead. now they just send you to therapy.

the amount of deeply personal, & actually actionable ai training data fb is likely generating right now through muse is likely insane. even if peripheral. stuff like what ppl see, want, ask, choose, buy, ignore, & act on. esp through the connectors. it’s basically onavo built in house. & the compounding effects of that data flywheel are only the beginning. muse is basically fb 2.0 as a company which is why zuck needed to go all out.

a huge class of jobs built around organizing, structuring, & coordinating esp with ppl involved is about to be somewhat obsolete. modern agents (you can see early elements of this in personal agents) are almost perfectly designed for this. this includes stuff like event planning, coordinating across a set of ppl, & taking real world action (like ordering or having things ready in time, etc). your next event could be entirely planned & executed by agents.