Tom Babb

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi says if frontier models stopped advancing, it wouldn't matter for most orgs because enterprise AI is bottlenecked on context, not intelligence: "There's no agentic work that's automated the whole enterprise. That has just not happened. Why is that? The real reason is the models are smart enough, but they just don't have the context that exists inside of any organization." "They have not been in every meeting. They don't know what's in everybody's heads. They don't know all the processes. There's always a couple of employees who know everything in every organization. You go tap on their shoulder, and everybody's like, 'Oh my God, what would happen if he or she quits?'" "If you just fused that and gave that context into the AI models, just the frontier today, I think there's so much productivity gains you could get for any organization on the planet." "For that, we actually don't need smarter models... If the frontier doesn't advance, it doesn't actually matter for the vast majority of organizations on the planet. They're just so far behind in the adoption curve of actually automating things and getting value out of this stuff." @alighodsi Read the latest Profiles of the Future by @bhorowitz and @mikemcg0 on Databricks & the Future of the Firm: a16z.news/p/databricks-and-t…

Remember I told you about the person who was doing new brain/computer interface work since he has a spinal injury that keeps him from opening his hands, or walking? @TBabb02 is the guy, and is the director of marketing here. He is doing a bunch of R&D with brain/computer interface companies. Last Sunday he was the first to use a new kind of device from an Austin stealth mode startup that let him operate a robot hand. He showed it to me and it blew my mind. It can "listen to" the electricity headed down his arm to his hand. AI is going to help so many people that when doomers doom I just think about him and what's being worked on in labs around the world, but particularly in Austin (Neuralink has a big presence there, for instance). Inspiring. Along with @adamasonbrink and @grantweston they are building a new kind of "company brain" that's very different than the others I've seen. All starts with watching how you work over time. The future of work is right here. Scary as it might be, it will help many people work better together.

AI makes new kinds of automatic time sheets possible. Say you are a lawyer, and charging $1,500 an hour. How do you keep track of your time? Timeglass, run by @grantweston does it automatically. But it goes way beyond that. If your entire team runs it, you can see how your company is working in a whole new way. It reduces wondering when Joe down the hall is going to finish the report you are waiting on. And see how you are working in a whole new way, even if you don't have a team. Innovative startup in Austin, Texas that I got first look at. Try it at timeglass.ai/ and here Grant and team show me why it unlocks productivity in a whole new way. And, yes, it watches your computer screen. Scary? They take that on too. I'm not compensated for this post. But my sponsors support me traveling to meet innovative new startups like this, which I greatly appreciate.