Designer and builder | currently building extra health capacity at https://nitter.cf/t.co/QpRmbEkzsz, founder of @orbo_call | prev @canva @amazon | running somewhere
Joined May 2012
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Alastair retweeted
for the past few weeks, I’ve been exploring painting with Fable 5.2 in code. one of the most common critiques I heard about Opus 5.5’s paintings was that it was only emulating real art. I thought that was fair, so i’ve been asking Fable 5.2 to develop personas—artists with some sort of a back story and a consistent style roughly identifiable in time
not knowing what to expect, i’ve watched this project evolve in directions i never predicted. I give comments or steers, and Claude updates or revises the engines that power the brushes and paint. where paintings come up i like or find intriguing, i ask it to go deeper. these are some favorites.
each of these is a python program, some one to two thousand lines of code, that places every stroke through a simulated paint engine with different bristles. most take a few thousand strokes, but i’ve pushed much higher with varying results. Claude does not use an image model, nor render or trace in advance
Alastair retweeted
Two things I’ve been thinking about regarding AI:
• People often highlight the risks involved in AI, which are surely very real. I’m struck, however, by how hard it is to understand the contours of the positive scenario. There are easy-to-perceive and frequently invoked elements of a positive vision — more diseases cured, more material abundance, etc. — which sound great, but these are by themselves just ingredients. I’m curious what the larger equilibrium is supposed to look like. Do people work? If so, why? What is their marginal contribution? If not, how are resources allocated? What is scarce? What is the ratio between humans and AIs? Are humans in control, whatever that means? One sometimes hears the Culture novels invoked as one scenario, but I’m not sure they depict a desirable outcome. (AI runs everything and humans compete in games? Iain Banks himself said that the humans in the Culture are “somewhere between passengers, pets and parasites.”) There is Richard Brautigan’s famous poem, but do we want to be “returned to our mammal brothers and sisters”? (Isn’t that rewinding Genesis?) We could say that it was hard to imagine the world of 1900 from the vantage point of 1700, and that’s assuredly true. But nobody in 1700 was trying to recast humanity itself within a couple of years — things necessarily unfolded slowly and by increments, and therefore with the possibility for error correction. Given how rapid the rate of progress in AI may be, it feels strange for the upside case to be so opaque.
• There is increasing discussion of whether AIs are conscious or how we would know whether they are, with conclusions there often assumed to be relevant to matters of moral worth. At first blush, this seems a rather arcane, benign, or even absurd issue. (Remember the response to Blake Lemoine’s fears.) Setting aside the terms of the debate itself, or the relevant demarcation criteria, it seems to me a quite high-stakes question, for an affirmative answer — that is, granting moral worth to AIs — would presumably mean that the aggregate worth of AIs would soon outweigh that of humans in any utilitarian calculus. The AIs will be exceptionally wise and intelligent, and vastly more numerous (especially once one considers the imminent future and the AIs not yet born). As such, even epsilon of moral worth will multiply to a lot once one considers the quadrillions that could soon exist. (This is effectively a distributed version of the Nozick’s utility monster.) If this conclusion is unpalatable, I think one of three propositions needs to be rejected: the premise AIs can have moral worth; utilitarianism itself; or the belief that there is even a possibility that they will be far more numerous than humans.
With both of these matters (contours of future society; AI moral worth), there is the possibility of dramatic change. Today, people argue about datacenters. I’m curious how popular support for AI will evolve as more people come to understand these medium-term questions and the relevant stakes. What is the vision for AI that most people would be excited about?
Love this
One of my favorite research practices I learned at @inkandswitch is “preinfusion”. The term comes from espresso (I believe @pvh coined it?) - and the original meaning is that you have a lower pressure soak before you turn on the high pressure and pull the shot.
The way it works at the lab is that you patiently let a cluster of ideas slowly form and develop, meandering somewhat in the background, and you lay the groundwork to work on them more seriously… before starting an intense high-pressure sprint. Could be a few months of part-time preinfusion before a hardcore 3 month project.
This really helps avoid the problem where you’re trying to sprint, but you don’t actually have enough clarity to know where to run.
I think this applies in many other contexts. Preinfuse before trying to write an essay. Preinfuse before raising money for a company. A slow and patient preparation can enable swift follow through.
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Alastair retweeted
handoff used to mean hands off your designs and hoping for the best
now it's hands on all the way to merge, as it should be
Alastair retweeted
It’s almost incomprehensible how wide the distance is between someone who’s working at the frontier with AI and basically everyone else right now.
The crazy thing is these lines are not converging, but only growing farther apart. If the curve of AI progress had leveled off, it would certainly have given most people and companies time to catch up or implement their workflows in a standardized way. The technology would have neutralized competitive advantage because everyone would be using it the same way.
But what’s happened is the opposite. The curve of AI progress is basically going vertical right now, which means if you had codified your processes 3-6 months ago you’re likely already behind again. Now imagine most companies that kicked into gear a year ago and thought that they were done. Even further behind now.
I’ve never seen a technology in my life and career that improves at this rate, which consequently means you need to upgrade your expectations at a similar rate. Our brains weren’t wired for this, and our organizational change management processes certainly weren’t either.
With any form of recursive self improvement, things just get wilder. It’s a time when you will need to be constantly reevaluating the things that didn’t work just a couple months ago to see if they now can be solved. AI native companies certainly have a strong advantage due to this right now, so now it comes down to can the bigger companies keep up. Wild times.
Same as it ever was.
Adhere to the control and command, or fight the bourgeoisie with your own density of truth seeking.
I'm starting to sense a divide in the tech industry:
- People thriving on autonomy who are reinventing how they work and what tools they use with AI: LOTS of work, but they're enjoying it and getting very efficient
- People used to being mentored / trained / or simply told what to do and how. Frustrated with the lack of guidance from management on what to do with AI; also frustrated by seeing some of their peers thriving; increasingly bitter about AI and the state of the industry, as a whole
Neither group seems to be aware that there's another group, or have empathy for the other group
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Alastair retweeted
The difficult part about AI, for me personally is that there are now a thousand things I can do in my industry that I couldn’t do before and somehow almost all of them lost their appeal, especially when it came to digital production work (software, assets etc... anything is possible now).
What I notice for myself is that there is a bigger shift happening in my head. I’m sort of re-evaluating my own ambitions (beyond creating digital things, like software) and trying to decide what will be worth focusing on in the coming years.
It's weirdly exciting.
good pod to get a sense of Dario and anthropic. Kinda astonishing that we got this lucky with people running one of the once consequential tech ever..
youtu.be/1OdoSzfUkec?si=73Uq…
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Alastair retweeted
This talk is a beautiful articulation of one of the most important design problems of our time. A few thoughts on planning with agents:
- I'm finding one of the best inputs to plans are recordings of live conversations among a team. this tends to capture a *ton* of peripheral useful context, that's hard to capture even in a solo voice recording -- because people elicit intent from each other. A generalization of this principle is that agents thrive on broad, high level, "messy" context - just like senior employees.
- I think visual outputs from agents are critical to complement text, but I'm actually of mixed minds on interaction. Yes, it's clearly nice for certain kinds of things like twiddling visual parameters. But most of the interactivity my agents produce feels mostly designed for dopamine reasons and not providing much utility. I also think interaction can inhibit deep thought compared to linear reading. I actually think for many deeper problems I would prefer top notch prose -- Richard Dawkins / Steven Pinker / Annie Dillard level -- from my agents over any kind of flashier output.
- One mental model I find consistently helpful for planning: the job is to establish a *design space* together between human and agent -- that is, a set of relevant dimensions of variation -- and then to efficiently explore the space. Getting the dimensions of the space right is actually one of the hardest parts. Once you have that, you can ask an agent to plant a bunch of starting points spread throughout the space, and then locally hillclimb from the best one.
New talk! About the divided human & agent worlds, boundary objects, and building thicker interfaces
I've been exploring how to improve "planning", aka. deciding what agents should build, how you want it built, & making the whole team part of that process
maggieappleton.com/planning-…
Alastair retweeted
thinking: we’re quickly entering an era of contextual computing, where the next gen of our devices, operating systems, and application-like experiences (I hesitate to call them “apps”) will spawn from the context we provide them and be tailor-made to our preferences.
we can imagine sensationally new types of products and super intelligent experiences, but their potential will be bound by the context we provide them.
right now, we’re in the early innings of the context war, as agents seek our data, data stewards weigh the costs and benefits of allowing connectors, and customers weigh the risks of sharing. as consumers, we still lack a portable single source of truth for context, and we still don’t know who to trust and how to reconcile the trade of privacy for convenience... big opportunity.
Alastair retweeted
Welcome to the new global order of the two AI empires. My latest for @ForeignAffairs with @ericschmidt and Lisa Klaassen.
gimmie ai widgets
Wabi 2.0 is live!
personal agents are one person, one chat. but the parts of life that matter run on more than one person
Wabi is an agent you use together. you talk to it, it does stuff, builds the apps you need, and anyone can join the thread - your partner, your best friend, the preschool moms groupchat
school changes pickup time → Wabi updates the family calendar, everyone sees it.
a show you’d both love → Wabi finds a night that works, gets the tickets.
the trip everyone keeps talking about → Wabi picks the dates, builds the itinerary, books it
go start a thread with your people 👇
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Alastair retweeted
The biggest product wins usually come from making some aspect the product less dumb, rather than introducing some new clever thing
