👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff ⚡
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely —E.O. Wilson
📚 Reading
AI Tutors Can't Solve Bloom's Two Sigma Problem:
Our modern obsession with efficiency and immediacy coupled with our societal and economic systems is the perfect storm. It has been and will continue to create significant issues in learning spaces. Friction and inefficiency is a fundamental part of what it means to learn. It takes energy and struggle to rewire our brains to learn something new. It takes failure.
Josh Brake—The Absent-Minded Professor | 8 minutes
AI Writing Will Feel Real—Eventually:
Where phones allowed communication between people across distances and texts between two people at different times, AI allows net-new communication that is unshackled from personal attention. But its adoption will follow a similar pattern: distrust, at first, and eventual integration into our culture. How do we account for these changing attitudes?
Dan Shipper—Every | 7 minutes
The Age of "De-Bossification":
The unbundling and distribution of where and when we work has just begun and culture, teams and excellence will need to be cultivated across time and space with limited in-person interaction as the age of AI, Web 3, XR will make working anywhere and everywhere increasingly the default state in white collar industries making old-fashioned monitoring, controlling, and overseeing difficult.
Rishad Tobaccowala—The Future Does Not Fit In The Containers Of The Past | 5 minutes
🎧 Listening
Are Tech Workers Leaving Silicon Valley For Good?
What is a tech job these days? Everything is a tech job […] If you really believe in the AI leverage story, it's highly centralized in terms of which companies are going to benefit from it. And within those companies, which teams drive the value from it is a small subset of those teams. I don't see those jobs getting highly distributed; I see them getting highly concentrated in California, maybe a little bit in New York as a token for the people who really want to stay on the East Coast.
Sam Lessin—More or Less | 61 minutes
Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company:
You cannot go into a vacuum and come out with a compelling vision; that does not exist. You have to be fundamentally inseparable from your users, and also fundamentally inseparable from your team […] A lot of folks, when they think about visioning, they kind of think about, "Okay, how do we start from scratch and learn about the user and then translate that into designs and then translate that into engineering?" And it becomes this almost linear process.
Mihika Kapoor—Lenny’s Podcast | minutes
Llama 3, Open Sourcing $10b Models, & Caesar Augustus:
I'd love to get a billion parameter model or a 2 billion parameter model or even a 500 million parameter model and see what you can do with that […] With a billion parameters, you should be able to do something that's interesting and faster, good for classification or a lot of basic things that people do before understanding the intent of a user query […] I think that's one thing that maybe the community can help fill in.
Mark Zuckerberg—Dwarkesh Podcast | 78 Minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—There Is No A.I.
2️⃣ years ago—If we’re all so busy, why isn’t anything getting done?
3️⃣ years ago—Welcome to the YOLO Economy