Nathan Labenz: belief

Transcript context

…Final point there, right? Firstly, I don't think I would have responded had you not disclosed it was favorable. The part that made it interesting for me was that I knew what I was the transaction here. It was very clear to me that you are using an AI bot. It is It is much more annoying if someone doesn't disclose it. I think a lot of slop, the definition of slop is when you have a human pass of work that was clearly produced by an AI. I don't think when you make this disclosure up front and it is very clear to the reader or the engager that, hey, this is AI, I don't think that is slop. We are going to see more and more of that into the economy. And I think the exact role an AI plays and the role, and again, the social norms you create with it in the economy, it's super early, it's extremely early days, but that's going to be interesting to see how it evolves. Relinquishment. That's what I, relinquishment. When you said the preciousness yesterday, and I was like, what is that? Relinquishment, relinquishing your, it's very Buddhist by the way, the idea of giving up your control over your external perspective. So relinquishment. I guess we all have to go through it. I just started this experiment yesterday. I will post results on Twitter in a couple of weeks where I gave Fable a new substack. And since it's part of my max plan till June 22, I thought that a good experiment to run would be get it. make $20 by getting 3 new subscribers, starting from scratch, by doing everything from zero to 1. And I think that's another interesting way to test the capabilities of these models, right? Which is, can it, sure, it's intelligent in so many ways, but can it actually produce economically useful work? I'm excited to see the results for that. And the why of it all, as it settled for me live on the air. I never want to put anything out in my name that I can't fully stand behind. The reason that I did the Fable account takeover yesterday was kind of like exposure therapy for myself to say like, okay, we're now in kind of a new world here. It probably doesn't serve me so well anymore to be so precious about making sure I've typed every single word. That doesn't mean I want to long-term hand over my account to Fable either, but I'm trying to, use this kind of extreme, short-term experiment to help kind of drag me into the future where I hopefully will land in a, good hybrid calibration. The other half of the recalibration is what I've started calling hybrid authorship. And this week, it stopped being hypothetical. For context, Frontier code is the new benchmark asking whether an open source maintainer would actually merge the model's pull request. And this leap of roughly 10% for Opus to 25 upwards of 30% for Fable, I think is a a very similar finding to some of the things that I've just personally experienced where it's like, yeah, this is getting me a lot more. it's writing the draft outline of questions for this podcast guest in a kind of uncanny way that I actually feel really good about as opposed to feeling like, you know, this is an AI draft that I'm going to kind of mine for maybe some nuggets or, you know, interesting details, but ultimately kind of throw away and do my own. I am I am feeling that sort of, impulse or at least openness to much more integrated hybrid work. Just yesterday I was like accepting a lot more copy that Fable was writing without feeling the need to rewrite every line. And it seems like this is basically the same feeling that it's able to create for these open source maintainers. Now, not obviously still ways to go, but how long will it be? I would guess that we'll hit, we're 25, 30% now, I would guess we'll hit 75, 80% by the end of the year where these maintainers will just be like, yeah, amazing. You did all the, did all the things like I wanted you to do. And, you know, at that point it is really going to be like, you know, I'm very interested to see where they'll move the goalposts to next after the, after the open source maintainers are more often than not saying that, they would just merge this straight away. And by Friday morning, 48 hours into the takeover, which for the record had not embarrassed me, I'd found a name for the deeper shift. The thing I suspect matters more than any benchmark this week. y. And by Friday morning, 48 hours into the takeover, which for the record had not embarrassed me, I'd found a name for the deeper shift. The thing I suspect matters more than any benchmark this week. I do think I'm still in the process of trying to recalibrate what a fellow Nathan, Nate Jones, I think he goes by most of the time on TikTok and other short form platforms, calls task imagination. Basically, what are you going to do? What are you going to ask Fable to do that is actually up to the scale of its capability? He, I thought, gave a great little riff on this the other day saying like, you've probably never done anything that took AI an hour to do. Now this thing can run for a couple days. What are you going to give it to do? Everybody needs to recalibrate and really expand their minds when it comes to the scale and scope of their task imagination. So I think that's one thing that I'm still working on. One of the more kind of differentiated things I do is write outlines of questions for podcast guests. And I was working with Fable last night on a couple upcoming episodes, one with an author, and I usually don't do too many episodes about a book, but this one is about an upcoming book. So I had listened to the book as an audio book, but then when it comes down to write the, sit down and write out the outline of questions, I don't have at my command every little aspect of the book, of course, right? So I'm not taking margin notes as I go, as maybe I should be. So I put the same version of the book into Fable and said, give me, look at my old stuff, of course, and give me your version of this outline. And I again was super impressed and it really did reinforce the sense of a sort of new way of working where I do need to be open to a hybrid output format. it is not the case. I don't think anymore that it really makes sense to try to rewrite every word or claim every word as my own. But it just did such an incredible job. I thought the taste factor was so high in quotes from the book that motivate what I think will be like a really interesting discussion. And I do think it's still going to be super important if I'm going to show up for a conversation. I've got to do the work to be ready for it in my own brain. That can't be fully externalized, I don't think, as long as I'm the one having the conversation. But it definitely took my prep to another level. And I think my ability to go into this conversation and cite passages from the book that were really extremely compelling, little turns of phrase or analogies that the author had made, it's going to allow me to be, I think, more concise in my presentation, which is, as you can tell from this monologue, not a great strength of mine, and really kind of tee up the author in a way that I don't think I otherwise would have been able to do. So this sort of hybrid recalibration task scale and scope reimagination, I think is one of the biggest takeaways.…

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