Latest posts
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My AI Startup Got Steamrolled by ChatGPT
The first time our AI business advisor recommended Viagra to solve a cash-flow problem, I should have known we were in trouble. At the time, it just felt like part of the fun. This was 2019. Before COVID, before “AI” meant ChatGPT to everyone. Back then, TikTok was still a teen fad, WeWork had just imploded, and the hottest tech IPO was Peloton. Large language models were a fringe research curiosity, not the center of the tech universe.
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Not Every Utterance is Sacred
Humans have always found strange ways to make big decisions. In the 6th century BCE, people seeking answers to life’s big questions traveled to a remote mountainside in Greece to speak with a woman seated above a crack in the earth. She inhaled vapors that rose from the stone, slipped into a trance, and began to mutter. A team of temple priests—men trained in ritual and rhetoric—stood nearby to translate her broken words into something the rest of society could use.
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The Ballmer Method for Prompting
In the late 2000s, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer always came off a bit unhinged. Sweaty and loud, he became a meme while ranting about Microsoft’s future. There’s an apocryphal story about how Steve figured out something important, that ended up being a prescient take about an AI-first world. I think about this story once a week; I hope it is equally impactful for you in how you use AI.
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Why Experts Are the Worst Teachers
About twenty years ago, I developed a repetitive stress injury from playing guitar. I was in a band, and I had to quit. The pressure I had to apply to the fretboard created a tendon issue that just wouldn’t go away. But I wasn’t ready to walk away from music entirely. If I couldn’t play guitar, I figured I’d get into electronic music. So I bought a copy of Reason, a program used by music producers to make beats.
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The Last Moat
At AI Innovation Week in Mexico, we explored a counterintuitive idea: As AI makes public knowledge cheap, relationships and unspoken knowledge rise in value. This piece explores that concept through the lens of a hedge fund manager’s rogue approach to the Enron collapse.
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Mexico Stories and Observations
I just wrapped up AI Innovation Week at IPADE—Mexico’s most prestigious business school—across their Mexico City and Monterey campuses. The formal recap is on my work site. But here on the personal website, I share the things that caught my attention during my time south of the border. Read on for the interesting and unusual, from the witchraft market to the grandma who tried to seduce me.