Design AI/Infra product @Meta prev @MeetApollo @scale_AI and @seiNetwork
San Francisco, Los Angeles
Joined November 2017
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John Ma 💹 🧲 retweeted
Muse vs Dots vs Grokbot
Zuck vs Altman vs Musk.
The battle of personal agents for the masses.
Who do you think wins?
John Ma 💹 🧲 retweeted
Factory CEO on why AGI is already here
@matanSF is the co-founder and CEO of @FactoryAI, a $5 billion AI coding startup building Droid agents to automate the engineering process. He tells me how AI is changing the job of a software engineer and why Factory is betting on a future with many competing models. We get into how it balances model performance with token costs and why he thinks companies should avoid depending on one AI provider.
We also discuss why he thinks AGI is already here, how Factory hires its own engineers, his view of the open-versus-closed AI debate, competition with companies like Cognition, and when companies should outsource to AI rather than build in-house.
Timestamps:
00:00 The AI coding shift
06:10 What makes Factory different
11:32 Funding Factory’s growth
16:17 When AI writes the code
20:25 Hiring in the AI era
28:30 Betting on multiple models
32:49 Is AGI already here?
34:30 AI safety and regulation
39:36 Building a trusted AI business
41:32 The risks of model dependence
44:50 Competition and engineering’s future
Links:
YouTube: youtu.be/IMxtXy2SnH0
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/3p1KZv…
Substack: sources.news/p/factory-ceo-a…
Thanks to the show’s premiere sponsors: @Atlassian, @meetgranola, and @mercury.
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John Ma 💹 🧲 retweeted
Personal AI is going to be hugely important, and it works best when it knows everything about you. That's exactly what you shouldn't hand to a platform whose business depends on it.
Wrote up why the version that wins is one you own.
You don't have one AI level. You have one per task.
I read 4 maps of AI adoption, 26 levels in total, and collapsed them into 6.
Here's each one with a short prompt:
Every level runs on one rule: Move up only when the check at your current level has caught something real.
Full issue, with the long version of every prompt and a designer track → johnmaartifacts.substack.com…
The most dangerous thing you can do right now is NOT use the latest AI tools. Period.
Every day a new company is laying off thousands of people who don't know how to use the most modern AI tools
If I were in the 9-5 world right now, this is every step I'd take:
1. Download Claude Code and build your first app using Opus 5.5. Learn how to implement a front end and database (I’d use nextJS and Convex). AI can teach you all of this
2. Download Grok Bot. Tell the agent about your entire life. Career, goals, and ambitions. Ask it which agents it can build and which workflows it can implement to get you closer to those goals. This is called reverse prompting.
3. Anytime you're about to do work manually, do it in Grok Bot instead. Tell Grok the task you need to do then ask it how it can do the task for you. You'll be surprised by how much of your work you can automate
4. Feed Astra 6 Max your hardest problems. Make sure you hit the rate limit on it EVERY single week
5. Constantly look at your limits in all your AI plans. If you're ever not above 50% on your limits, get angry that you're not burning enough tokens.
6. Start creating content and building a platform. Resumes no longer matter. Companies dont look at them anymore. They check your platform. What you talk about, what you’re passionate about, how you educate others, who follows you. This matters 100x more than anything else when getting hired right now.
If you do these 6 things you are in excellent position to not only be safe in your career, but also dominate those that don't pick up these skills.
Updated the chatbot-template to latest next, ai-sdk, shadcn/react, cn and some bug fixes. More soon.
github.com/shadcn-ui/chatbot…
Simple but valuable use case: Get your parents on Muse or Instinct, connect their e-mail account(s) and instruct it to send them a warning message when phishing links, impersonation attempts, invoice fraud or any other likely scam emails hit their inbox.
Climbing the AI ladder never means you stop checking.
It changes where the check lives.
L1: every answer L3: every milestone L4: a rule you wrote once L6: the escalation rules
If you can't say when and how you'll check, you're one level too high.
See more in my Substack newsletter: johnmaartifacts.substack.com…