In the era of base LLM scaling (2022-2024), I believed the LLM line of research would reach a capability plateau (as later seen with base LLMs).
In late 2024, after the o3 test-time compute demo, I changed my views: the new models were showing genuine fluid intelligence, and with this new line of work, the LLM line of research could achieve unbounded capability scaling. "There will be no wall."
Rather, the way that AI companies engage with communities-forcing NDAs, dangling billion-dollar promises, pushing environmental externalities far away from AI's wealthy user base-resembles a classic story about dark money in politics.
you just you can't base your business decisions based on what everyone else is saying around you. Like, if you go too much with the herd, you will get immensely confused and you will end up nowhere. And so you have to develop your own compass of what you think the future is going to look like because everyone else will just confuse you.
And so his power base was fragile vis-a-vis untruth. And for him because of the specific shape of his power and then the specific way he handled his contradictions, that did hurt him.
and it turns out people kind of over glorify entrepreneurship. I think a lot of people believe there is tremendous upside, right? the type of entrepreneurship we talk about with software companies, the the upside is crazy. But when you're doing like selling parts or service business, unless you plan to open lots of stores and you know grow a larger employee base, it's not the same growth trajectory as software companies.
I know this from experience because I've been trying to build a lot of other businesses since. And some of them have been moderate successes, even good successes, none of them have been Basecamp. It's really difficult to do that twice.
Their words now
And I have no shame in saying that Base Camp was the best idea objectively in terms of a business that we've ever had.
I look at um the talent base and I think it is best for us to create opportunity for people to keep on growing with fresh new challenges within the company because if we don't do that they would leave the company
we're trying to crack the next frontier which is how we get that level of productivity increase and output building new features on top of a code base that are older,
They come to a computing platform because the install base is large. Because a developer, like anybody else, wants to develop software that reaches a lot of people. So, the install base is, in fact, the single most important part of an architecture.
one of the magic tricks about these things is that they they're incredibly consistent. If you've got a code base with a bunch of patterns in, they will follow those patterns almost to a T.
There were booms and busts, and cumulative price inflation was zero, and the United States went from a new-world emerging backwater in the late 1700s to being the world's largest economy by the late 1800s.
I- i- like, we are in a stage where I'm not building the code base to be perfect for me, but I wanna build a code base that is very easy for an agent to navigate.
The robot arm base case saves some hourly labor at the expense of adding more skilled labor, and can easily be negative if it needs reprogramming more than a few times per year.
I think especially if you have a product that has daily frequency like that's actually the retention that matters the most is that like of your existing user base that has developed a habitual pattern how sticky is your product and it's that retention rate that really compounds and build that builds that daily habit.
My sort of base case is to say this is kind of another platform shift and all the new stuff will be built around this for the next 10 or 15 years and then there'll be something else and so the impact on employment will be kind of like the impact on employment from the other platform shifts
Don’t base your life choices on whether parents and teachers constantly tell you that you’re “smart.” They’re not trustworthy assessors of your intelligence.
But really the software engineering agents I think can be done faster sooner than any other agent because it is a verifiable domain. You can always unit test or compile, and there's many different regions of it can inspect the whole code base at once, which no engineer really can.
I really believe that the founder led growth is not being popularized enough that you do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base
So, trying to establish a base on Mars it's going to be so hard that it is not even going to be close to being self-sufficient for a couple a century at least. So, it's not like a backup plan now, we have to solve the problem of climate change, we have to deal with that.
I think that when people wanted to build a big building without rebar or cement, you end up building something with a fat base that goes up to a skinny top, and that turns into a pyramid.
Does the user care if Perplexity has the most dominant model in order to come and use the product? No. Does the user care about a good answer? Yes. So whatever model is providing us the best answer, whether we fine-tuned it from somebody else’s base model or a model we host ourselves, it’s okay.
Physics hardly even acknowledges that the universe is random at its base. We like to think we live in a deterministic universe and everything’s deterministic. But I think that’s probably an artifact of the way that we’ve written down laws of physics since Newton invented modern physics and his conception of motion and gravity, which he formulated laws that had initial conditions and fixed dynamical laws.
There’s this assumption that computation is at the base of reality, and I see it at the top of reality, not at the base, because I think computation was built by our biosphere. It’s something that happened after many billion years of evolution. It doesn’t happen in every physical object.
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