How much is too much?

Greetings from a humid and busy Bangkok where I have the privilege to talk about centaurs and our trajectory towards AGI for an audience of curious leaders. I’ve been tinkering on an “AI masterclass” the past couple of months and will be sharing the material with an eager cohort learning about the future of consumer trends with other amazing speakers tomorrow.

My next step will be organizing a version of the talk for you. I really want to put together an online meetup for the community in the next month, and sharing a pre-recorded version of the masterclass is something to do in parallel.

The premise of the masterclass is explaining ten concepts I find fundamental to understand the trajectory of AI to an intermediate audience who is already working with it. The concepts build on each other: Exponentials (accelerating returns), Frontiers (what’s state of the art), Centaurs (machine augmentation), Prompts (how LLMs work), Creativity (how LLMs change our abilities), Code (how LLMs gain autonomy), Agents (multiple AIs collaborating), AGI (autonomous systems outperforming us), Risk (what might go wrong) and some conclusions about how to act now. Will share much more soon.

Meanwhile, you should join our incredible WhatsApp community to share your thoughts and learn from likeminded experts. Come say hello!

MZ

I think most companies will end up implementing something like Meta's Metamate, a company-wide AI assistant helping their workers. There's almost no info about this on the web, but here's a great thread disclosing a couple of use cases.

This is such a good interview by Malcom Gladwell with IBM's CCO (Rob Thomas). 40 min and super insightful if you're working with AI in a professional capacity.

This is so cool: using control vectors to influence the mood of an LLM output. Amazing UX and demo (by a fellow Brazilian Thiago Duarte).

Interview about animism & AI by the always wonderful Joscha Bach. More highlights than I could possibly describe.

Easily one of the consistently best (AI) podcasts out there, from YC. Always worth a listen for a Bay Area centric perspective on what's going on.

Last week I cleaned out my link backlog of the past 18 months and two links stood out.

This 9 minute US documentary from 1961 presenting the future risks of thinking machines. Absolutely worth a watch.

Entrepreneur and tech journalist Casey Newton came up with a robust list of principles to follow when reporting on AI:

I feel like this newsletter adheres to most but not all of these, namely the inevitability bit. Great read.