a quick reminder since there are a fuck ton of new followers: this account is strictly for analyzing the incredibly rapid changes in culture at the intersection of hyper capitalism & proliferation of tech at scale—we are likely only at the beginnings of the profound implications of both on macro & micro aspects of society. buckle up.

roughly the only winning hands left in software are new networks spawned through some sort of an intelligence layer. i suspect the ai labs will not get there anytime soon like they did with personal agents primarily because building networks is more orthogonal to their dna than anything else really.

pretty much every major ai company now has a personal agent product except google: meta → muse anthropic → duet openai → dots spacex → bots slowly but surely the competition is shifting from who has the smartest model to who owns the persistent relationship with the user. this will be even more the case going forward. you're seeing this because we likely reached peak intelligence required to power most of the worlds workflows probably earlier this year if not late last year.

my new theory is that what we call apps today might simply turn into a contact. like each thing you call an app today will be a simple contact like any other ppl on your device. why? well, if you think about it a contact in your contacts app is the most natural abstraction for any type of an agent & cognitively you can keep track of it pretty easily like you keep track of any ppl in your life. more specifically from a technical perspective contacts already have an identity, persistence, a convo history, familiarity, & a social contract that is implicit. + messaging layer gives you so many things almost for free, with things like discovery (no apps to find or download), continuity of relationship, attention control for end user with things like mute, ignore, stop, async workflow, easy initiation whenever you need something, & most critical bidirectionality by default. there is also something fundamentally pyschological at play here too about agents living with ppl on the same surface. it makes that relationship feel more natural & intimate.

i genuinely thought the era of ppl camping outside apple stores for a new iphone was over. but friday might bring it back. it's been a long time since an iphone launch felt like a cultural event rather than an annual upgrade cycle.

one of my fav late night things to do to clear my head is to get froyo & then get my ass handed to me while playing chess with one of the unhinged dudes in wash square park. it’s what i’m doing right now.

x is one of the only places where you can showcase your own exceptionalism w/o any credentials, institutional permission, or hell even a real identity. your ideas & thoughts become your credentials & often unlock a bunch of hidden levels of life.

there is one universal truth: you have to use emotion for acquisition & substance for retention. you can apply it to products, dating women, whatever. the same damn principle applies everywhere: what gets someone interested is rarely if ever the same thing that makes them stay.

the best way to start some form of universal high income is by creating brokerage accounts for every single american citizen (not just children) which would be seeded by an in kind annual levy on ai company shares esp the major ones (& voluntary funding from wealthy individuals), pair it with a cash dividend floor that starts to kick in at some point, & a very gradual unlocking over a lengthy period of time depending on age. obviously only works when these companies are public. but this is perhaps the simplest way to seed a very first order solution to a problem that is likely more imminent than ppl imagine (broad job displacement).

i relate so much to ppl who enjoy dark humor. there’s something wonderful about being able to recognize the absurdity of life, even in its darkest moments, & just laugh. sadly, very few ppl in this category exist.

if you've followed my account & read any vivek related content i've posted this would be the least surprising thing on the planet. & i started posting about it last year. vivek has been eaten alive by both the media & voters by doubling down on the same behavior that got him in trouble on x & arguably derailed his presidential campaign too. that behavior? remarkably little self reflection & virtually no adaptation whatsoever to both the culture & zeitgeist + excessive hubris. i'm pretty sure he went into it all thinking he would be a shoe in given his national presence. imho he actually had a very good chance of winning but now a fairly liberal democratic woman will become the governor of an important swing state which will have all sorts of implications downstream for republicans. what a fascinating case study in culture, politics, & tech to some extent. at least he made for some good content like this & memes. i wonder what trump thinks of it all.

m&a for any ai app layer stuff is now primarily for founder talent or customer relationships. everything else is worth way way less than what would’ve been before.

why do ppl carry around wallets still? i haven't carried a physical wallet for few years now. my pockets just have two things: iphone + airpods. you no longer really need anything else to interact with the world.

i've been talking to a lot of normal ppl outside of tech about personal agents & the convos have been incredibly fascinating, particularly w.r.t. to retention. most consumer products typically have one of two types of retention, one is desire driven which is just pure dopamine (like insta, tiktok, games). they often don't even need notifications because you know there is a reward for your desire always waiting. the second is dependency driven, like emails, calendars, even credit cards & banking. most ppl have to do this, it's not something they necessarily desire (unless they are a sociopath). the challenge with personal ai agents right now is that they occupy a weird third space where they aren't emotionally rewarding most of the time to become entertainment like the first category, & they're not reliable / indispensable enough to become pure infra. i.e. they fail, & there is a lot of friction. outside of pure research driven tasks, even one failure is often enough to not come back for the utility value prop. which is why i think vertical agents that focus on making your life more interesting & entertaining are worth deep exploration still. & even very focused vertically integrated utility agents that work reliably will still be in demand. tons of ppl still think in jobs to be done when reaching for anything & with general purpose agents that's just not as crisp yet on what those critical jobs are.

less than five years ago, we were all typing queries into google, scrolling through endless ads, then ten blue links, clicking on websites full of more ads & pop ups, manually digging around for answers, hitting the back button, refining our searches, & repeating the whole process over & over again. thinking about this makes me want to take a shower. it feels gross. just imagine where will be in another few years?

the irony is that the more someone genuinely understands, the more aware they become of how much they don't know. this is why humility is such an important trait & why perhaps the clearest sign of intelligence is knowing where your understanding ends.

anthropic’s model lineup is about to be ridiculously clean right before ipo: - fable 5.5 - opus 5.5 (absolute goat) - sonnet 5.5 - haiku 5.5 this is what jobs did so well at apple. you were rarely if ever confused at the product offering.

98% of the world’s population is oblivious to anything ai, it’s like a giant tsunami has formed on the way & they are on the beach enjoying the sun sipping on a spicy marg.

the more intelligent the underlying model becomes, the less intelligence a founder needs to build into a product in some sense. if you imagine some end stage of ai, it’s simply just intelligence without any fluff around it. today building ai software is much more about adding guardrails & specifying direction more than creating capabilities. this may be why there is a fuck ton of convergence with slight deviations everywhere because the guardrails are sort of universal at least for general purpose stuff. i’m not saying this is a bad thing btw but it’s certainly relevant.

one thing i find interesting is that a lot of old-ish accounts on here with insanely high follower counts >350k or even 1m+ get such little engagement on their posts while lower sized accounts get insanely high engagement. obviously i know the older accounts followers likely churned a while ago but still, goes to show you follower count is not a great metric especially for quality & thoughtfulness. unlike real capital, social capital is very much fleeting. unless you’re able to keep with the zeitgeist, it’ll disappear quickly.