Elena
@VirtualElena • 32,214 subscribers
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something that i've noticed in the ~4 months i've lived in sf is there's a small cohort of founders / engineers / ai researchers who all behave as if they're living 3-5 years in the future. this manifests in a lot of bruce wayne-type behavior. i've seen workflows of engineers who lie supine on the couch as they wisprflow commands to their agent swarms without ever touching a keyboard. i've seen people build out entire second brains that they orchestrate with openclaw / hermes agents. i know guys who spend $1m +/year on tokens. so i think this conversation with alejandro maza, kavak's chief product and ai officer, with angela strange and Gabriel Vasquez is super interesting because it 1) shows us what an entire organization built around living in the future looks like 2) kavak isn't even based in sf (or the us) so it's very cool to see how an organization outside of the bay area approaches ai from first principles. some takeaways: - alejandro's governing question is what kavak would look like in 2035 with much more capable, cheap intelligence. kavak moved from functional specialists and transactions toward a persistent *agent per customer*, with a long-term goal of maximizing that customer’s lifetime value. -every major model release should trigger a fresh model–harness experiment. kavak had developed a multi-agent framework, but a new model release rendered the company's legacy orchestration outdated, so they discarded 2 years of working infra and rebuilt everything around a simpler agent harness. the lesson is to keep asking: what's the minimum scaffolding the newest model needs to express its intelligence safely and at scale? -kavak built an ai ceo for one city, and says it increased profits by 1.5x in its first month. customer satisfaction, inventory rotation, financing penetration, and other KPIs also improved. maza attributes the result to fields medal-level intelligence applied relentlessly to every number and customer: forecasting performance, assigning daily work, and collecting progress reports. -in light of above points, alejandro's deeper thesis is that the organization, not merely the model or individual worker, should self-improve as new intelligence becomes available.
Elena177,463 次观看 • 1 个月前
back in 2017 i was interning as an equities analyst at a fund in nyc, which had a 9am morning call every weekday. the purpose of this call was to discuss quarterly earnings or current events or whether we should be buying nvidia (at the time, on a tear because of the '17 crypto boom), but one morning in june the call opened with a bunch of people freaking out because some guy named "travis" had resigned. after a couple of rounds of "travis is gone" "did they fire him" "bloomberg says he resigned," i was especially confused because the firm had a portfolio manager named travis, and i looked over at his desk and he was still sitting there, not being escorted out by security or anything. who was travis? it was only after things had calmed down that i realized the people on this call were talking about *travis kalanick* of uber, a figure who loomed so large in the minds of wall street investors that even *two years before* uber ipo-ed, the news of his departure was treated like a six sigma event. everyone wanted to know: if travis was gone, what would happen to his company? even in his uber days, travis was the bits and atoms guy (watch the video clipped in the first ~2 minutes of the below podcast for proof of that). and in order to be a bits and atoms guy - as in, the kind of guy who's so discontent with the slow, staid, schlerotic state of things that he has to painstakingly reorchestrate the physical world with computers, perhaps pissing off some powerful interests along the way - some people might call you difficult. some people will not understand your vision. some people will try to get you fired. but if you're a bits and atoms guy, you never stop being one. you might retreat into near-obscurity, or spend years wandering in the wilderness, biding your time in exile. but you will not stop building. and one day you will return triumphant like a modern-day charles de gaulle, even better than ever, and ready to prove wrong everyone who didn't understand the first time around. being in a room with travis leaves you pretty pumped up. you can see why he's such a rallying leader, and why (by my count) at least six top uber execs have chosen to follow him to his new company, atoms. it isn't simply that the job isn't finished (although that's a big part of it, as travis attests). it's also because it's clear that there are very few leaders like travis out there: people who have such a holistic worldview that they can get people who would otherwise be founders themselves to join the ride and help build an extremely specific vision for the future. here are some things that stood out to me from this event: -travis is a branding/comms mastermind. he deploys memorable phrases like “food computer,” “wheelbase for robots,” “atoms as bits” and describes his vision for cheap meal delivery as "autonomous burritos." you can see why people get excited for his vision for the future. there's extraordinary complexity in what atoms is trying to do, but travis makes each step along the way feel manageable because he can distill these ideas into extremely concrete images. -atoms is building full-stack autonomation for three different divisions: food, mining, and transportation. food supplies the real estate, software, robotics, and logistics laboratory; mining supplies a commercially deployed autonomy business; and transport is intended to become the reusable movement platform connecting multiple physical industries. travis argues humanoids make sense for diverse, low-volume work in spaces designed for people. but at industrial scale (which atoms is doing), purpose-built machines should win on throughput, space, cost, and reliability. -the best way to get over your last company may be the same as the best way to get over your ex: fall in love again. travis says anger and fear of failure can carry a founder through years of pain, but they also produce long nights where very little gets done and sharp elbows felt by everyone around you. atoms is what happened when he learned to build toward a future rather than against an enemy. -doing hard things is a reminder you can do more hard things. in the q&a ben remembers travis describing attacks by chinese ride-sharing companies as proof that, if he could survive china, the rest of the world would be manageable. travis still deliberately creates problems when things become easy. but the rate of problem creation cannot exceed the organization’s rate of problem-solving. such a fun talk and q+a with travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg ! check it out.
Elena109,282 次观看 • 29 天前
in my mid-20's, a time when about half of my friends hated their jobs (a very normal phenomenon if you're in your mid-20s), i noticed a group of people my age who looked extremely happy and actualized at work. and all of these people somehow seemed to work at stripe. i'll call out Tamara Winter and Ryan Orbuch specifically as some of the first people who made me realize that it was possible to be 25 years old and do *singular* work every day, and not just whatever garden-variety boilerplate the company demands. this podcast with Will Gaybrick and David George helps explain why this was, and still is, the case. will says stripe increasingly is a platform for founders internally, just as it's always been a platform for founders externally. he wants each employee to feel like an “auteur”: an engineer, product thinker, and creative person with enough context and authority to make something real. we're now seeing a new generation of this pattern, with stripe's support of stuff like tempo (a team that might have one of the highest concentrations of founder-mindsetted people im aware of? cc Georgios Konstantopoulos Dan Romero Varun Srinivasan Liam Horne etc) the embrace of teams like privy and bridge, and other incubated initiatives like minions. stripe is trying to make employees more founder-like while preserving a shared standard of quality (one of my favorite details on this point: stripe creates simulated customer accounts so teams can experience realistic UIs for disputes and refunds before exposing products to real users). this is something that's actually very tough to do well, so it's very cool to hear will talk about it on this pod.
Elena56,729 次观看 • 25 天前
i've always enjoyed reading about the dot com era and its direct aftermath. it's a great reminder that tech cycles are long, unpredictable, and full of troughs of disillusionment before things that feel "inevitable" ever really come to pass. it's particularly funny to think about the crop of stanford kids graduating in '01-'05 (which includes a list of guys like balaji, stephen cohen, joe lonsdale, temporarily sam altman, and ofc garry tan) who started out when most people thought tech was deeply uncool and perhaps even completely over. so i really love the way this pod begins - with Garry Tan recounting what it was like graduating in '03, taking a job at microsoft because it was the practical thing for a young guy with student loans to do, turning down an early offer at palantir (which he eventually did accept as employee #10) then heading deeper into the world of startups and yc. this podcast hosted by anish (Anish Acharya) is actually a great study in how to get ever-closer to yourself and trusting your gut. there's also (this being anish and garry) a lot about building very useful ai products and living 3-5 (or in garry's case 20) years in the future. doing what you instinctively know is right, being unhedged, being earnest, or in garry's words, not LARPing, isn't the fastest but it's undoubtedly the best path toward actually having an impact. this conversation is basically an instruction manual in how to do that in all areas of life - from career decisions, to building, to local politics (we probably have garry and a handful of other people to thank for the fact that sf is now a nicer city to live in than nyc). good pod! check it out! enjoy!
Elena13,565 次观看 • 1 个月前
learned a lot from this conversation with Simon Mo and Matt Bornstein. biggest takeaways for me: -there are a lot of reasons why we should like open-weight models. a lot of these arguments stop at handwavy things like "what if the labs stop releasing frontier models to the public" or "it's lower cost." but simon's position as lead maintainer of vLLM and CEO of Inferact give him authority to talk about some of the other, more interesting and concrete reasons to pay attention to open-weight models, namely that they allow end-users to calibrate latency / other performance metrics with way more customizability than what any of the frontier closed-source labs offer (and without the fear that your job might be met with a refusal at some random point where you're deep in a 2 hour job) -re: the above point...for this reason, a lot of US companies (inferact included!) choose to use open-weight models over their closed-source alternatives. this also isn't limited to internal workloads / research - on a recent a16z podcast the team at Decagon spoke about how something like 90% of their customer service ai agents run on open-weight models that they've fine-tuned. -we should really appreciate how many companies/teams came out researchers fascinated by the wave of very small open-weight models that were being distilled from e.g. gpt-3.5 and earlier models in 2022/2023 (prior to the release of chatGPT!). these small models motivated the development of pagedattention, which then led to vlmm/inferact (at other layers of the stack with similar origin stories, you can look at teams like openrouter or ollama). in other words, we have open-weight models to thank for a bunch of the orchestration infra we now rely on. i think yet another, indirect, way we can point to open-source/weight infra pushing the frontier forward. anyway, a lot more in this convo, it was a lot of fun!
Elena12,917 次观看 • 1 个月前
it was a blast talking with Seema Amble and Steven Sinofsky about the prevailing narratives re: the supposed death of SaaS. it was also a lot of fun to grill Steven Sinofsky about the historical parallels between modern agentic frameworks and microsoft's status as a "middleware" provider in the 2000's. here he is on why the middleware dream never works out the way engineers think it will: "So much of it is driven by an engineering view of what would make for a good software architecture, and very little of it is being driven by the physical reality of the world." "No software wants to be disintermediated by some other layer above it. Nobody wants to just be put in a corner and said, 'Your job is to just store this SQL format for expense reports and do nothing more. And then we're piping you through to some other tool to analyze expense reports.' That's not a growing business. That's a decaying business." "This middleware layer, it's always, always very unstable. It looks great in a network hierarchy diagram of the OSI levels of networking, but it's just never that stable."
Elena10,808 次观看 • 2 个月前
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