david

My take on OpenAI is that both of the following are true:

• OpenAI currently offers, by far, the best product experience of any AI chatbot assistant.


• There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble.

Will Tavlin in N+1 on how Netflix has moved towards forgettable, low-end-of-middlebrow content. This is a function of the invisible base rates problem: when Netflix launched its streaming service, it was great for people who loved movies; these people raved to their friends who merely liked movies, and there are simply more people with taste close... See more

I picked up Edwin Frank’s Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel thinking I might read a few chapters. But this is literary criticism that is itself literary—alive and strange and hard to put down. Frank’s selection is eclectic—of the thirty-two novels he covers, some are expected (James Joyce’s Ulysses ), some unexpected (H.... See more

Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel , translated by Susan Bernofsky, set in post-lockdown Berlin, is an absurd, dark, dreamlike narrative that meditates on warfare, religion, memory, migration, and belonging through the strange consciousness of a literary researcher, Patrik. A Celan scholar who self-identifies as “the patient,”... See more

Excited to announce the first 18 startups of the Menlo's Anthology Fund with Anthropic! Anthology Batch One. In the last 6mos, we looked through 1000s of startups to get to these. CRUD business apps will collapse in the AI era, logic will shift to AI agents.... See more