D-Squared Musings Week 18

Swyx always does a great job writing posts that are chock-full of links and rabbit holes to fall down, this is no different. If you’re still out of the loop on AutoGPT and generally semi-autonomous agents, I recommend giving this post a read. Plus this is a great newsletter, so I recommend subscribing as well.

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman mentioned that the AI battle is going to transition away from simply increasing model size and compute, toward a different direction. That direction is still uncertain, but from what I’ve read it seems like data quality, new training methods, and fundamentally new algorithms will play a key role in future GPT 5ish advancements.

This is my first time coming across Anand Sanwal (CEO of CB Insights) and I’m impressed by the raw idea horsepower this guy has. Apparently, in preparation for this interview, the co-hosts asked Anand to pull together a “few” product/service ideas and he came back with ~70… 70!!! I struggle to come up with like 1 or 2 a week. It’s just another reminder, I need to go to the mental gym to increase my ability to observe problems and ideate on services/products that fix them.

It happened! 👏 The test flight for Starship finally happened. There was a spectacular explosion and many flips, most of which I’m assuming were unexpected, but they cleared the pad, and everything afterward was icing on the cake.

When I think about CEOs or entrepreneurs, the default persona is a person that’s serious, commonly overworked, stressed, and constantly busy. Jack (CEO of Patreon) may have some of these items in his life, but he’s anything but a traditional entrepreneur, which I truly admire. This jam session reminded me of that. Also, if you’ve not seen this presentation from Jack about his journey, drop everything and watch it now!

A close friend of mine recommended this book after sharing a few reflections I’ve had on my personal relationship with being a “wannabe entrepreneur”. It’s a solid read with practical recommendations. One practical piece of advice I’ve gathered so far is that your surroundings are key (virtual and physical) to “success”. My immediate main action item from both this book and the complimentary podcast series is to spend more time nurturing and building my relationships through a variety of methods (cold outreach, learning in public, etc.).