Too many AI personal assistants, too little time to assess all of them. Nice work here: assistantbenchmark.com

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training. You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…

Every company says they have Forward-Deployed Engineers now. ElevenLabs CEO and former Palantir Deployment Strategist @mati gives one of the best explanations of what an FDE is—and says companies are missing the key piece of what actually makes FDEs valuable: “In our case, FDEs are part of the product team. They are not part of the go-to-market team. They are deeply embedded in understanding what the roadmap of the product is.” “You want all the FDEs to actually solve the customer problem and stretch your product in that direction. But the second thing you want them to do is bring any of that knowledge back to the product, so the product becomes better for the next generation of companies building on top of it. I feel like the second part is frequently missed.” “The beauty of that is—everybody benefits because you work with one customer, learn, and you bring that into the product experience. Both of those customers benefited from having their product optimized for better work.” “The domain expertise they have is still theirs. They can win based on their domain expertise. But the product experience of how you build based on that domain expertise can be abstracted, and can be reusable.”

Your brain produces somewhere around 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts a day. According to a figure widely cited from the National Science Foundation, up to 80 percent of them are negative, and up to 95 percent are the same ones you had yesterday. That means the voice in your head is running on a loop, and the loop is biased toward threat, because the brain evolved to keep you alive, not to keep you happy. A thought like "I am not ready for this" fires the amygdala, your brain's alarm centre, which floods you with cortisol, the stress hormone. Cortisol makes you more reactive and more likely to have the same thought again, and the repetition digs the groove deeper each time. This is why affirmations work as counter-programming. When you repeat a sentence like "I can handle this," you are building a competing pathway. The first few times it feels empty, because the old groove is deeper. But the brain rewires itself based on what it practises, and a 2015 study from the University of Pennsylvania found that a repeated values affirmation activates the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that handles reasoning, and quiets the amygdala over time. The research suggests that the mechanism works the same way whether you write the affirmation, say it out loud, or read it from a card. What matters is repetition and personal relevance, choosing words that connect to something you care about. Generic positivity does not land the same way a sentence about something you care about does. The more specific the statement, the stronger the signal. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2654…

London, your ride has arrived. 🇬🇧 Today, Wayve and @Uber launch supervised autonomous rides across all of London (except airports) - the first time the public can experience the Wayve AI Driver and the first autonomous trips available in the UK. Taking your first ride? Tag us and we’ll send a little thank-you for becoming part of our history. 👋 #RideWithWayve wayve.ai/press/wayve-uber-la…

Forward deployed engineers, or equivalent, are about to become one of the most in-demand jobs in tech. And one of the most important functions for AI rollouts. Deploying agents is far more technical of a task than most people realize, often far more involved than deploying software. Software generally works the same way every time, and generally for the past few decades has been updated versions of an existing technology or concept (which basically means easier for the enterprise to update their workflows on a newer system). With agents, you’re actually deploying the equivalent of work output within the enterprise. The customer is effectively using you as a professional services provider for a task, which they expect to get solved nearly end-to-end now. This means you need to actually deeply understand the business process as a vendor, and get the customer from the current to the end state seamlessly. Companies need help figuring out which models will work best for their workflows, they need extensive evals setup often, they need change management support for workflows, they need to get their data setup for the agents, and constant tuning of the agentic system for their process. Massive role in tech now. And another example of the kind of highly technical work that AI is creating.

Excited to open-source our new multi-modal context (mm-ctx) library, purpose-built for CLI agents like @claudeai code, @openclaw! Your CLI agents can now easily run familiar UNIX commands on multi-modal files and get meaningful context on images, videos or PDFs: $ mm cat bakery.mp4 The video showcases a bakery's journey, highlighting its history ... Try the interactive demo: @huggingface Spaces: huggingface.co/spaces/vlm-ru…

Billionaire Michael Milken joked “if a US company replaces the US-born CEO with a CEO born in India, I buy the stock” But he reveals he hasn’t backtested the idea. So we did. In the last 15yrs, that would’ve 50x’d your money: 7.5x more $$ and >2x IRR vs S&P500: 30% vs 14%!

This is valuable advice for everyone, not just young graduates

Basically Goldman Sachs saying there is another cliff for software stocks to fall off of. From today: "We expect the debate around AI disruption, and therefore uncertainty about many companies' terminal value, will persist for at least several quarters. The threat of disruption will likely represent a persistent overhang until the later stages of AI adoption. In the meantime, disproving this disruption narrative is challenging. For investors to have confidence in the long-term impact of AI, it will require more evidence of where AI is impacting earnings, which could take several quarters if not years."

I think everyone in marketing/PR at an AI company (& especially at large model companies) should watch this short piece of advice from @dylan522p w/ @patrick_oshag. Just a few minutes. Crisp and to the point. youtube.com/watch?v=LF3aUIM5…

Thoma Bravo is reportedly handing over the software company Medallia to creditors after restructuring negotiations failed to materialize This is a $5.1 billion equity wipe out for the firm, who bought the business for $6.4 billion in 2021 Largest creditors include Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, Antares and Ares This loan was last marked anywhere between 70c to 100c on the dollar, according to most recent BDC filings from them

Some early thoughts after building real apps by myself for the first time… We built an internal tool called Conveyor It’s an app builder, and internal App Store It is connected to all of our data, context, and external data APIs I’m completely and utterly useless as an engineer, but I’m good at knowing what I want a tool to do. I’d previously struggled to make useful programs with pure CLIs. Our wrapper made it easy for me. In the first 3 days of having this tool, I’ve built several fairly complicated applications, two of which I’ve used a ton for real work. I’ve only used a couple hundred million tokens so far. Some early feelings: 1) It’s obvious to my that my companies Positive Sum and Colossus will have fully bespoke operating systems, built in house. They will manage as much of our work as possible. This is already exploding for things like research and reporting. Every business will want this for themselves. Sure we won’t built our own slack, but we will built everything that pertains specifically to our shape as a firm, which is a lot. 2) x402 protocol (which enables AI agents and users to pay for API access and digital services instantly, without accounts or subscriptions) is immediately interesting to me. Many times I’ve wished I could just stream payments for individual data points. 3) right now each loop of prompt to output takes 5 to 15 minutes. As models and ASICs (@Etched !) make this faster, it’s going to be so much more fun. Even 5 minutes makes it hard to get in the flow. Can’t wait for seconds instead of minutes. 4) it’s so much easier to design things by starting with a shitty first draft of an app and seeing what’s wrong and iterating than nailing a full design ahead of time. When I had directed the design of software before this was always maddening and slow. 5) this has made me realize that my imagination had atrophied. Use it or lose it is real. Very quickly I’m finding it easier to have good ideas by building more stuff. I encourage everyone to do the same. So fun and rewarding. 6) We need more compute

If only we’d trained Grok on just these 2 books, we’d be done already!

Analyst #3 is going to get such a fire bonus.

this is a really good framework to judge where you stand today, and where your organisation needs to get to

Zapier’s CEO just released their internal AI hiring rubric. “Capable” AI operators are no longer hireable. The new floor is "Adoptive.” What gets you rejected now: Marketers who use AI for first drafts and edit output manually. Can’t show before/after evidence of AI implementations/prompts. Using LLMs for campaign ideation without personalization. What will get you hired: Repeatable, shareable prompt libraries that and always-on workflows that run without your supervision. Specific measurable results that signal where to push next. This is the new baseline.

when anyone can build anything, the only moat left is distribution. here’s the playbook (save this):

In our annual letter, we describe the progression we expect in agentic commerce. You tend to hear the later levels discussed in the hype, but we're already seeing lots of activity in levels 1 and 2 of agentic commerce. Read more: stripe.com/annual-updates/20…