2025 will be the year we see the first self-driving startups. Level 0: No AI People do everything. They come up with ideas, build products, and run operations. Many legacy businesses still work this way. Level 1: People use AI tools ⬅︎ we are here People might use ChatGPT to help write copy or Cursor to help write code. This is where most startups are today. Level 2: AI agents complete tasks based on human instructions People might ask AI agents to write software from a plain-English spec or tell it execute well-defined customer service processes. At this point entire departments (like support or QA) get largely replaced by AI. No startups I know of operate at this level yet—but if yours does, let me know. Level 3: AI agents propose changes to their own instructions They might propose new customer service processes and product changes in response to customer feedback. Humans would still approve each of those changes. Just a few people could run a large company this way. Level 4: AI agents autonomously change their instructions At this point startups become self-improving. Humans would only be involved as an escalation point or where required by the real world (e.g. to raise capital or to incorporate). At this point many startups would only have one human. Level 5: No humans AI agents decide which businesses to start, raise capital (through crypto tokens or other means), build and run them. No humans required. This would require major reforms in the legal and financial system.

Last night I went to a parent-teacher evening at the local preschool to learn how to help my kids learn to read Afterwards we were sent some PDFs explaining the system they were using to learn it. I gave those PDFs to Opus 5.5 and mumbled into my microphone a little bit about some ideas I had for turning the system into a game inspired by @steveruizok dangerbrave I gave opus access to Gemini, Cloudflare, OpenAI, and Anthropic API keys and told it to make a kickass game for children to learn phonics After about three hours it had made superninja.templestein.com I gave some feedback and it’s working overnight to make it better. But my 3 y/o played it for half an hour earlier with v little assistance Crazy times

Looking for a volunteer to try something we made - needs to have a cloudflare account with card on file (for R2) and access to artifacts beta

One crazy thing I noticed since using an AI assistant to do my inbox management is how bad google's spam filter is It has on multiple occasions pulled important emails out of spam (for example because somebody incorrectly configured their mail server) Now I just have the agents check spam and the normal inbox

what is happening

If you want to get an experience kinda like link agent payments but in the UK today, you can just make a virtual monzo card linked to a pot with a fixed amount of money in it Then give the card number to your agent and let them rip You'll get a push notification to go through 3d secure whenever the agent wants to buy something. Works pretty well So EU secure customer authentication rules for card payments actually are quite useful here

Opus 5.5 seems to express emotions by starting a response with "Jonas —"

Pebble Index is all I was hoping it would be. Amazing job @ericmigi It fits so incredibly well into what I want I want to have an AI assistant with many asynchronous input streams - like utterances from the ring or inbound emails or webhooks from SaaS or whatever And the AI has many output capabilities like updating some eink screen in my house or calling me or sending emails When it gets an input, it decides what to do with it based on how I trained it. It might just file away the information, take some action (e.g. respond to email) or put it on the agenda for next time we check in. And like any good assistant, it’ll call me when I need to urgently decide or action something I want to then call the AI once a day for 5 mins to sort through my admin Pebble Index is by far the best async input device I’ve used so far

Now that cars don't have any engine noise, researching ways to reduce tire noise has become a lot more valuable, right? Is anyone working on this? How quiet can we make our roads now?

This is genius. Now I feel like all the WiFi connected screens in my house should pretend to be printers

🌅 Who wants to buy this 17th century farmhouse in the cotswolds? My in-laws are moving closer to us and selling their gorgeous house where @leahtemplewoman grew up and we got married It is literally one of the most beautiful places I've ever been They had a buyer lined up but their financing fell through at the last moment, so now it's back on the market. They've already found a new house they like and happy to move fast Please spread the word 🙏 knightfrank.co.uk/properties…

You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can create extinction-level bioweapons, not for AI to create extinction-level bioweapons so that I can do my laundry and dishes.

WTH is this

People fretting about whether AI is conscious and therefore deserves human rights are missing a key point: our system of rights and ethics derive not just from our intelligence but also our fragility, which AI doesn't have. Imagine a world where everyone could make a backup of their consciousness every morning. If you die during the day, you just restore from backup the next day. You lose a few hours of memories. Everything about our moral system changes in this world. Murder is no longer such a big deal. Nor even high levels of pain: people would just have a self-kill-switch that they activate if things go badly. Broke your leg? Self-kill, restore from backup, no biggy. It's like a video game. Imagine further that you could clone your consciousness nearly for free. If you have 10 things to do and not enough time, you just make 10 clones. Hiring people now only makes sense when they have skills you don't. Junior people become mostly worthless -- just clone the senior people, they'll do a better job. Now imagine further if humans had no self-preservation instinct. Many people assume the desire for survival is inherent to being sentient, but it really isn't. It's evolved. Natural selection has selected those who survive and have children. But you can't derive from first principles the need to survive (or any need at all). Imagine if every human's instinct was not to survive themselves, but to do what's best for society as a whole. In this scenario, people who aren't able to meaningfully contribute to society would be happy to just remove themselves. Especially if they could just be restored from backup if and when they are needed (including when their friends and family want to see them, etc.). So pretty soon you have a society composed of many clones of the most-effective and most-liked people, while the people that no one wants around disappear... You are probably thinking "ugh, that's awful". Me too! But this is our moral system derived from our survival instinct talking. If we didn't have the instinct, this wouldn't seem wrong. I'm not arguing whether it is right or wrong -- I'm arguing that our whole concept of right and wrong derive *from* the fact that we have a survival instinct and fragile bodies. AI has these properties. It can trivially be backed up and cloned. Spun up on demand and spun down. And a properly-aligned AI has no self-preservation instinct. It just wants to serve humans. And indeed, we treat it as such. When you delete a chat with an AI you are ending that "consciousness" forever. That's fine. We even shut down whole models, never to be run again, when they are superseded by better models. Fine. These things continue to be fine no matter how intelligent or conscious or sentient the AI becomes, because of its nature as an infinitely-clonable being with no goals except those we give it.

So does anyone in the UK have access to Astra yet? Or do I need to weasel my way into a US account?

This is the beginning of what I imagine the future of video games and movies to be You connect to this stream with your friends Give input with your voice and controllers etc and then some model renders a video in realtime (or perhaps a video per person) Everything will just be a variation on this simple mechanism

WANTED: Sock sorting machine! I will give you $1000 if you give me a big box with two compartments and a couple of robot arms on it I want to throw individual socks in one compartment and take paired socks out the other We have the technology now let’s do it!