Fifteen hours alone in a minivan will take your mind to strange places.
Last weekend, as I drove from the Gulf Shore back home, mine wandered from gas station hot dogs to the future of AI.
📎 It feels like we’re already in a “paperclip maximization” loop.
Each new model is just good enough to justify ongoing jaw-dropping investments in data, compute, and talent. Data center construction now seems to be propping up a flagging US economy. But the benefits of AI don’t yet show up in the numbers.
Is the point of AI simply… to build more AI?
🙏🏾 AI research has often been overtly religious undertones. Kurzweil imagined post-singularity AI as an omnipotent God — the Old Testament kind: awesome, inscrutable, alien.
But maybe we don’t get that.
With so many teams building frontier models, maybe we get something closer to the Hindu pantheon — a whole cast of deities, each with their own agendas. Some awe-inspiring. Others… a little kooky.
🎭 Calling a startup a “ChatGPT wrapper” used to be an insult.
Now I think we’ve all become AI wrappers — sometimes just the meat-interface for LLMs.
🐉 On vacation, my kids and I made up stories:
Pink glitter dragons.
Mean unicorns.
Friendly witches.
Fearsome fairies.
I tried asking ChatGPT for stories, but even the most expensive model couldn’t match my three-year-old’s chaotic creativity. That made me hopeful — because what are humans, if not storytellers?
💀 There’s probably a billion-dollar business in a “dead man’s switch” for chatbots.
An app that erases your entire chat history when you die.
Because I’d rather not be remembered as the guy who once asked ChatGPT why the minivan’s doors wouldn’t close.
(It was a switch. Of course it was.)