Alex Carpenter

✞=♡
CEO at Unlocking Technology | Empowering Businesses with Bespoke AI Solutions | Advocate for Entrepreneurship, and Community

[Alex Carpenter @Alex1Carpenter]

@alexalbert__ Gee, I am surprised, I have chatted a LOT to Claude it seems

[Alex Carpenter @Alex1Carpenter]

@amaarora same

[Alex Carpenter @Alex1Carpenter]

@YolandaRedrup Yep might help, just to clarify though it isn’t so much discipline as much as refusing a demand like “carry” you’d say no, they lose their mind, dad offers comfort.

[John Henderson @johnhenderson]

As a parent, I feel damned if I do and damned if I don't when it comes to my kids and social media. Common sense (and lots of research!) tells me that the likes of Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat do more harm than good to young kids and early teens. But I also don't want my kids to feel left out or excluded from a place where all their friends are, or fall behind when it comes to learning the ins and outs of engaging digitally.

13 is too young for a child to have unfettered access to internet trolling and unrealistic imagery inviting negative self-comparison, not to mention signing away their data to a corporation. I support raising the age limit to 16 and am grateful to @SaysSmithy for using his platform to add urgency to this important issue.

Please share the word if you feel similarly 🙏 https://t.co/qcuozoKnEF

[Alex Carpenter @Alex1Carpenter]

@johnhenderson Agree entirely

[Alex Carpenter @Alex1Carpenter]

@Carnage4Life Heaps of useful products came from the Dotcom Bubble, AI will be the same, it is just a timing issue and it is caused by investors being idiots.

[Alex Carpenter @Alex1Carpenter]

Money is going to the places where it can grow the overall pie. As long as the pie keeps getting larger and fast enough to counteract the increasing wealth inequality everything will be fine. And if is doesn't, history tells us we can always chop their heads off...

[Alex Carpenter @Alex1Carpenter]

Is wealth inequality bad?

Some charts to explore the question.

[Alex Carpenter @Alex1Carpenter]

The blue line shows the diminishing amount of wealth everyone outside of the top 6 has and a projection into 2030 to drive home the point. The green line shows the real amount and how it is actually growing.

[Alex Carpenter @Alex1Carpenter]

Yep Google is dead aside from the fact that all of the things replacing it can't operate without it.

Perplexity is a Google Search wrapper
Arc Browser is a Chrome wrapper
Notion calendar is a Google Calendar wrapper
Superhuman is a Gmail wrapper

[Ben Lang @benln]

It’s been real Google 👋

Google Search → @perplexity_ai
Google Chrome → @arcinternet
Google Docs / Calendar → @NotionHQ
Gmail → @Superhuman

[Alex Carpenter @Alex1Carpenter]

Klarna CEO says they have stopped recruitment and are shrinking head count by 20% per year because of AI. I call BS.

Look these kinds of headlines will become a reality but we just aren't there yet. Unemployment rates are still at record lows globally, Klarna is just trying to ride the hype train to maximise their valuation as they approach a stock listing.

I have no doubt they are using AI for everything it is good for but I bet ya they will start hiring again after their stock listing.

[Alex Carpenter @Alex1Carpenter]

This view suffers from not thinking things through fully.
The role of a bank teller changed with the introduction of ATMs, there was something humans could do that the ATM machine could not.
This won't be true for AI. Any new task that is created will also be better done by AI.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Bank teller employment continuing to grow during the rise of ATMs is a perfect example of how automation lowers the cost of delivering a particular task, letting you serve more customers, and thus growing the category. We are going to see this over and over again with AI.

[Alex Carpenter @Alex1Carpenter]

Still alright - https://t.co/wfy1tHEwdf

#Claude3

[Alex Carpenter @Alex1Carpenter]

@Simeon_Cps When you stop seeing the AI labs hiring staff then you know they have AGI internally. They are all still hiring a lot of people... we aren't there yet

[Alex Carpenter @Alex1Carpenter]

The most encouraging thing I’ve read all year!

[David Perell @david_perell]

I went from thinking the Bible was the most boring book ever to seeing the magic in it.

Years ago, I realized that the Bible is the foundational book of Western civilization. If I was going to be an educated person, I needed to know what it said. Though I was motivated to learn about it, I didn't have the patience to read it or the knowledge to understand it.

Generally, I try to follow my 4th-grade English teacher's advice to read things first-hand. But the Bible seemed too hard, too boring, and too confusing to read on my own. It was a snooze fest. The stories felt outdated in a world of smartphones and fast Internet. Living in the modern world, shouldn’t I be rooting my life in modern books, modern studies, and modern authors?

At the time, I was living in New York when a friend introduced me to the work of Tim Keller. I reluctantly found time to put down the self-help and picked up two of his books instead: The Reason for God and Making Sense of God. It was around that time when I discovered Keller's Questioning Christianity lecture series.

Instead of focusing on the Bible directly, Keller focused on Christianity's relationship with culture and the modern world. He spoke to career-driven Gordon Gekkos who were driven by the glories of the material world, but sensed the emptiness at the heart of such a single-minded pursuit. Instead of referencing scripture directly, he spoke about big-picture themes like identity and purpose, morality and meaning.

This was back when I thought all Christians had the intelligence of sidewalk pigeons. I would scoff at church-goers because I didn’t understand why anyone would worship a sky fairy or follow rules from thousands of years ago. Keller was the guide I needed.

For the first few years, I looked at faith through a cultural lens instead of reading the Bible directly. I literally knew nothing about Jesus or Christianity — and I came to realize how little I knew about my own atheism too. In school, while studying the Declaration of Independence, I’d learned that it’s “self-evident” that “all men are created equal.” Turns out, this defining American ideal is only self-evident if you assume that every person has inherent worth because they’re made in the image of God. I was stumped. Where did my moral compass come from? Do people have inherent value? And if so, is it because every human is a child of God?

In addition to advocating for the life of Jesus and the truth of his message, Keller revealed the many assumptions underlying my own atheistic worldview. He taught me that every worldview requires a leap of faith. Sure, Christianity couldn’t perfectly explain everything in the universe, but then again, neither can any worldview. Astrophysicists say that much of the universe is made up of “dark matter,” which is a scientific-sounding way to talk about a leap of faith

Though I did some Bible studies, I never enjoyed them. They felt more like reading tedious academic papers than drinking directly from the fountain of God’s wisdom. Instead of reading Scripture directly, I joined a small Christian reading group where I was the only non-believer. By showing me coherent ways to interpret reality besides my science-based materialism, books like The Story of Reality and I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist loosened the screws on my atheism.

My palate was beginning to change. Like a fine wine, the same flavors that were once repulsive to me started to appeal to my intellectual taste buds. I surrounded myself with wise Christians who were orthodox about scripture and eager to answer my hardest questions about faith. I asked them to dinner and invited myself to Church with them.

This marked a new era. Once again, I found some guides: books, Internet sources, and an in-person leader to show me the way. On the Internet, I'd turn to The Bible Project to answer my big-picture thematic questions. I picked up the ESV Study Bible, which I still read every day on the white boucle couch in my living room (if you like reading on the computer, I recommend The Bible Study App by Olive Tree).

For years, I’d stiff-armed the Bible. Now, I was skipping to a 7am Bible Study led by a devout believer who'd been reading God's word every day for almost a quarter-century, and wasn’t afraid to rebuke my theology.

What surprised me most was how carefully we read. I admired the integrity of our study. We live in a culture of binge-reading where people boast about how many books they can complete in a given year. We did the opposite. We never read more than ~20 verses in a single session and dissected every word, every verse, and every story. (I once spent two hours studying John 1:1-4 — just four verses at a strip mall Schlotzsky's in the Texas Hill Country.)

Never in my life had I read so deliberately. I spent months in the books of Ephesians, Romans, John, and 2 Corinthians, and there's no way I would've known how to read the Bible so diligently on my own. I learned to look beyond English translations, and I use the BibleHub to look up the original Greek and Hebrew whenever possible.

For a translation, I recommend the English Standard Version (ESV) (no, you don’t need to read the King James Version). And If you're going to pick two books, I recommend the Gospel of John and the Book of Romans. Either find a guide to read them carefully with you or follow along with The Bible Project and The ESV Study Bible. Whatever you do, read slowly.

I used to be a serial consumer who’d brag about how many books I read every year. I’d pick up anything and everything. The more, the merry. But the more I study the Bible, the more careful I’ve become about who I read and listen to. Gone are my days as a serial consumer. Frauds, charlatans, and false teachers abound, so be skeptical and vet your sources. In all this time, I’ve had no more than ten serious teachers. Fortunately, that’s all you need.

I became a believer on March 20th of this year, four years after attending my first Tim Keller lecture, and the Bible is alive for me now like no book I've ever read.

These days, I read the Bible and basically nothing else.

Opening it up is the best part of my daily routine. The words twinkle. The stories are supernatural. It's a living, breathing document, and I wholeheartedly believe it's the Word of God, which makes every other book feel dim by comparison.

[Alex Carpenter @Alex1Carpenter]

The crazier thing I think is that anyone can build this using @HarryStebbings podcast data and market it to his audience.

[Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings]

Holy shit.

Can you imagine a GPT where you could ask any question and it uses advice from 3,000 20VC episodes to answer your questions from the best VCs in the world.

Wow.