Happy 4th of July The best holiday… and always enjoy the MZ antics and more antics.
More or Less / The Meta-Yankees & AI Researcher Spring Training
How could it not be the topic of the week? Set aside all the hard work and execution of delivering actual products, who doesn’t love a good old fashioned talent raid game of capture the flag at extreme scale. People keep joking that Tops need playing cards of these AI researchers (and I do think there might be some kids reconsidering if they really want to be ‘YouTube stars’ when they grow up, or perhaps pay attention in math?)… but to me the really fun part is watching Meta take on the role of the Yankees, but without those pesky salary caps. You got the big-market team, you got the brand and the cashflow… of course you pay up to assemble the super-star team and out-spend in ways others can’t structurally match…. More here… IMHO baseball isn’t the best sport, but it is BY FAR the best representation of how the USA works / real life (a ‘team sport’ of individual actions and pressure, mostly boring with moments that matter, etc.) — and if you take that, you gotta appreciate the front-office moves
Hot Takes :
- If AI Researchers are Sports Stars, that makes Meta the Yankees…. But who is Billy Bean? per above — this is just fun to think about. Who is the Oakland-As? … the company with no business competing with the ‘big market’ teams but assembling a crew of misfit cheap players others miss because they ‘don’t look like AI researchers’ / have won zero olympiads.
- The AI Researcher Spring Training Arc … in most sports movies when you assemble the killer team, they go to spring training.. and fail. The egos get in the way, they fight, etc… and only after they go play beach volleyball together do they learn how to work together and win… I always love that montage…. I look forward to it again here.
- The Will of The People is the Will of Elon?… you gotta love this guy — and it is very funny to see people pointing out the original source of this ‘quote’ over social media.
- Fin’s Proto-AI strikes again… Having spent many years on Fin a decade ago / figuring out the form factor for AI-assistants, etc. with humans in the loop I know far too much (and am far too biased) on what does and doesn’t work… but one thing we spent a lot of time on was reminders and when the ‘AI reaches back out’ vs. just order takes… this was a funny reminder of a fact Fin prompted me with at the start of July 9 years ago.
- How bad really is adding a few ‘Trilly’ to the national debt… it was funny to see headlines about NVIDIA approaching a $4T market cap, next to other headlines freaking about about a few T that this ‘big beautiful’ is gonna cost over the next decade…. Smarter folks have pointed out that this really isn’t a good comparison, but a Trilly still squints like a Trilly and it does make the cost of BBB seem less to see individual company market caps at that level… also props to the NYT — I really enjoyed the coverage / story pointing out that there is a way to look at this from a political lens as more a strategy to shift inevitable taxes towards consumption and away from income… and forcing the Dems to waste time bringing back programs that are lost vs. making further progress on their agenda. Who knows if it is really that strategic (I have seen the smart-post-tense-justification for actions too many times up-close in my life) — and cynical as can be… but still…
- Socialism is for mid-wits & networks are hilariously polarized. …. what gets said on X vs. what gets said on threads — This was an interesting A-B test… the rare instance where people on ‘x’ were like ‘meh’…. And the THREADS mob went nuts on the same post. It really points out how crazy polarized networks are / and I think especially threads vs. x because the schism was so so great at the establishment of threads.
- Camera angles are fun… when you see a bunch of ‘extreme’ stuff in person you realize how much camera angles matter. GoPros always make epic ski runs look flat… it turns out that sticking your insta-360 in the water makes pretty basic stuff look cool tho.
- LLMs hallucinating… I am upgrading my personal contacts app and got a really big kick out of Gemini’s strong assertion of the professional bio of my 6 year old.
- Body Mods — even I saw all this commentary on plastic surgery etc coming out of Bezos wedding, and that isn’t my algo-tune…. But it really gets me thinking that body control / mod is an interesting ‘high-road’ / ‘low road’ obsession…. The uber-wealthy who have all the power and control care / the ‘last thing to control’… as do the super-un-empowered who have nothing they own/ control but their bodies…. Feels very Foucault Discipline and Punish 2.0
- Lettermeme— still having a lot of fun with this and tweaking it… I do like that it comes up with better themes and ideas than I would on my own (cribbing from the select set of newsletters I like and filtering out the rest)… things like this IMHO are far more likely to work than ‘social networks focused on balance’, oy vey.
Have a great week,
Sam
P.S. The ’sneaky sasquatch’ obsession continues in our household… and a friend made a very good point, it is just GTA for kids — yup.. well that makes me feel even worse that my kids play it!
P.P.S. One thing airlines do that is really smart? package super small snacks but then give you 2 or 3 packets vs. one.... makes you feel like you are getting something nice and special
sam lessin | @lessin | podcast | sources / lettermeme stop | get added to my weekly nl