SWL Week in Review - Scale, Sambot, Harvard Reunion

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6/14/2025, 11:01 PM

This was a substanative week — the ‘lipstick on a pig’ of ‘liquid glass’ (btw, all glass is liquid) — Scale ai historical context & wang turns out to be surprisingly good at BD + fracking humans and PHDs + lots on how AI is changing evaluating startups (as it makes pivots / rapid business evoluton easier and faster) + how AI talent payments should shift (like early iOS engineering where talent commodifies or like the NBA?.

Hot Takes:

Sambot… — been spending a lot more time messing with computers recently than I have in a long time… some for serious projects, some not. Sambot is a fun toy (and maybe my future website) — a bot that feeds off of a vector DB populated with all my tweets & screenshot essays of last few years… learning some first hand lessons about the tricks around embedding well, etc. and managing these new-school workflows… it is fun tho & produces some hilarious takes on my takes

AI making businesses more ‘ninble’ — as disucssed on more or less.. but this was the pre-musings…

Barry Diller’s Movie of The Week — totally loving his book — and see real parallels to his whole meaningful innovation (profitable from day one - volume - cheap - built in audience) around movie of the week and the $100K documentary thing I want to do

Putting AI in cuddly bears — this is a theme of the last few weeks with Eric Antonow’s Pirate-GPT … but hilariously i got all hot and bothered about putting AI in stuffed animals, only to be reminded that I was shooting my mouth off about this a year ago and forgot (got bless twitter timestamps)… lick the cookie.

Rostra.fun - Jet-A 5m Token Poll — i am really into building the ‘missing’ obvious crypto tools that fall thru the cracks because they aren’t mind blowing concepts vs. just good things that you need to build communities and manage tokens, etc… simple good polling (experimeting with Jet-A) is an example — you just need to be able to vote for god sake.

Harvard 20th Reunion was fabulous … mostly becuase it reminded me how excellent my classmates really are (and fun, and more mellow 20 years later!) — some sparks for me are / were around the ironic humility of the east vs. the shock and awe AGI of the west — and on the incription in the dexter gate of harvard yard / why activism has no place in the yard — also ++ to Alan Garber for a great speech on friday / nailing the right words... and I had fun giving a talk with Tarek Masoud at Hillel. Also props to an unnamed friend who literally said un-ironically "one of my favorite parts of Harvard was getting to meet conservatives" (lol)

Fondly, Sam

P.S. WOW alcaraz — i mean… wow— as jessica keeps saying ‘no free points’ … and as GPT added ‘earn everything’

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