Scott Sundvor

Chief Product Officer - Instrumental. 2x founder, 2x exits. Surfer. Free-diver.

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Brian on why pure people managers won't survive AI:

"I don't think people that only manage people will have any value in the future.

Everyone's going to have to be a hybrid people manager or manager IC.

In other words, even the managers need to code. You can't just be these managers where you're people's therapists and you're just doing meetings, just one-on-ones.

People who have lots of recurring one-on-ones are not going to survive.

That kind of leadership style is not gonna work. You need to have context.

I hear about heads of design, they don't actually manage the design. Johnny Ive manages the design. He designs and he leads people. A design leader who only manages the people that's crazy to me.

The way Frank Lloyd managed his design team is through the work. You don't manage the people, you manage the work.

I think a lot of people will survive this age of AI.

The two types of people that will not survive are pure people managers, and people that are rigid and don't want to change and evolve."

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. Right now, in this room, it is on.

The circuit predates primates. Mammals have been using ambient soundscape continuity as a predator-detection system for roughly 200 million years. Birds stop singing when something larger moves through their territory. For most of mammalian history, a forest full of song meant no large predator was nearby, and the cessation of sound was the warning. Your nervous system never updated this software.

The Max Planck Institute tested the inverse in 2022 with 295 participants. Six minutes of birdsong dropped anxiety with a medium effect size. Six minutes of traffic noise raised depression with the same. The effect worked on subjects who lived in dense urban environments and had no regular contact with nature. The brain still ran the check.

Birdsong sits in the 1,000 to 8,000 Hz range. Your brainstem reads continuous patterns in that band as a signal that nothing dangerous is currently moving through the environment. EEG data shows birdsong at 45 to 50 decibels boosts alpha wave activity by 14.1% relative to silence. Alpha is the brainwave signature of relaxed alertness. Push the same birdsong above 60 decibels and the response flips. Stress markers rise 29%. The circuit only trusts the signal at the volume of quiet conversation, which is exactly the volume birds sing at from a typical distance.

Three things happen simultaneously when the brain registers ambient safety. The amygdala downregulates. The parasympathetic nervous system takes over from the sympathetic. Heart rate variability rises, cortisol drops. The posterior cingulate cortex, which sits at the center of the rumination circuit, quiets down. King's College London tracked this through a smartphone study with over 1,200 participants and found the mood lift lasted hours after the sound stopped. People diagnosed with depression got the same response as healthy controls.

Most of what gets labeled mental fatigue is hypervigilance running in the background. Birdsong tells the circuit it can stand down, and the brain reallocates the freed compute everywhere else.

A quiet park feels different from a quiet office because the parks have sentinels.

[Scott Sundvor @ScottSundvor]

@chamath @karpathy Optimized for Claude Code*

[Scott Sundvor @ScottSundvor]

@chamath I built a solution for this over the weekend inspired by @karpathy’s wiki idea. My tool is optimized for Code and Granola transcripts, but I’ll be expanding it to ChatGPT / Claude native apps too. It worked quite a bit better than I was expecting https://t.co/1SyhUYM80R

[Scott Sundvor @ScottSundvor]

@crypto_kerr @chamath @karpathy @lexfridman I built a solution for this over the weekend inspired by @karpathy’s wiki idea. My tool is optimized for Claude Code and Granola transcripts, but I’ll be expanding it to ChatGPT / Claude native apps too. It worked quite a bit better than I was expecting https://t.co/1SyhUYM80R

[Scott Sundvor @ScottSundvor]

@bcherny my team is getting logged out of Claude Code on a daily basis and we can't figure out why. It started a couple weeks ago. Have other users reported the same? Fix incoming?

[Scott Sundvor @ScottSundvor]

Spot on, sir.

[sysls @systematicls]

https://t.co/FQe5bCBqW1

[Boris Cherny @bcherny]

I feel this way most weeks tbh. Sometimes I start approaching a problem manually, and have to remind myself “claude can probably do this”. Recently we were debugging a memory leak in Claude Code, and I started approaching it the old fashioned way: connecting a profiler, using the app, pausing the profiler, manually looking through heap allocations. My coworker was looking at the same issue, and just asked Claude to make a heap dump, then read the dump to look for retained objects that probably shouldn’t be there; Claude 1-shotted it and put up a PR. The same thing happens most weeks.

In a way, newer coworkers and even new grads that don’t make all sorts of assumptions about what the model can and can’t do — legacy memories formed when using old models — are able to use the model most effectively. It takes significant mental work to re-adjust to what the model can do every month or two, as models continue to become better and better at coding and engineering.

The last month was my first month as an engineer that I didn’t open an IDE at all. Opus 4.5 wrote around 200 PRs, every single line. Software engineering is radically changing, and the hardest part even for early adopters and practitioners like us is to continue to re-adjust our expectations. And this is *still* just the beginning.

[Scott Sundvor @ScottSundvor]

Agree with all, but I predict it comes in the next gen after Vera Rubin.

[Gavin Baker @GavinSBaker]

Nvidia is buying Groq for two reasons imo.

1) Inference is disaggregating into prefill and decode. SRAM architectures have unique advantages in decode for workloads where performance is primarily a function of memory bandwidth. Rubin CPX, Rubin and the putative “Rubin SRAM” variant derived from Groq should give Nvidia the ability to mix and match chips to create the optimal balance of performance vs. cost for each workload. Rubin CPX is optimized for massive context windows during prefill as a result of super high memory capacity with its relatively low bandwidth GDDR DRAM. Rubin is the workhorse for training and high density, batched inference workloads with its HBM DRAM striking a balance between memory bandwidth and capacity. The Groq-derived "Rubin SRAM" is optimized for ultra-low latency agentic reasoning inference workloads as a result of SRAM’s extremely high memory bandwidth at the cost of lower memory capacity. In the latter case, either CPX or the normal Rubin will likely be used for prefill.

2) It has been clear for a long time that SRAM architectures can hit token per second metrics much higher than GPUs, TPUs or any ASIC that we have yet seen. Extremely low latency per individual user at the expense of throughput per dollar. It was less clear 18 months ago whether end users were willing to pay for this speed (SRAM more expensive per token due to much smaller batch sizes). It is now abundantly clear from Cerebras and Groq’s recent results that users are willing to pay for speed.

Increases my confidence that all ASICs except TPU, AI5 and Trainium will eventually be canceled. Good luck competing with the 3 Rubin variants and multiple associated networking chips. Although it does sound like OpenAI’s ASIC will be surprisingly good (much better than the Meta and Microsoft ASICs).

Let’s see what AMD does. Intel already moving in this direction (they have a prefill optimized SKU and purchased SambaNova, which was the weakest SRAM competitor). Kinda funny that Meta bought Rivos.

And Cerebras, where I am biased, is now in a very interesting and highly strategic position as the last (per public knowledge) independent SRAM player that was ahead of Groq on all public benchmarks. Groq’s “many chip” rack architecture, however, was much easier to integrate with Nvidia’s networking stack and perhaps even within a single rack while Cerebras’s WSE almost has to be an independent rack.

[Scott Sundvor @ScottSundvor]

@nicochristie Would love to try this.

[Scott Sundvor @ScottSundvor]

@carlvellotti The post is accurate, this is terrible. Working like this is completely devoid of morals, ethics, not to mention self respect.

[Scott Sundvor @ScottSundvor]

@DavidSacks @FoxBusiness Sacks, we need you back on the pod! We can’t handle this much Calcanis. @Jason

[Briana Cap @BrianaCap]

Those hands, that man and all the firefighters, have been through hell this week. Those hands have been hard at work for seven days straight, pulling 24-hour shifts (some even doing doubles!) in the most insane, worst-case-scenario conditions imaginable.

[Scott Sundvor @ScottSundvor]

Future UX will see less reliance on apps, less reliance on chatbots, more reliance on voice, and brand new modalities like interfaces that will change and modify in real time based on each user's needs and preferences.

[Logan Kilpatrick @OfficialLoganK]

1-800-ChatGPT might seem like a silly gimmick, but the underlying principle is critical to scaling AI adoption.

The next billion AI users will not be on the existing UX’s, they will be using text, email, and voice.

Whoever lands this experience is going to win in a huge way.

[Scott Sundvor @ScottSundvor]

@aakashgupta First of all, this isn’t one skill. Second, memorizing process may make you an average PM, but it will not make you a product leader.

[Mt. St. Helens @MtStHelensWA]

Mt. Rainier is a lil bitch

[Scott Sundvor @ScottSundvor]

@werkman @Jason

[FoundMyFitness Clips @fmfclips]

Omega-3s broadly seem to have pharmacological potential similar to that of a drug, but a risk profile more akin to nutrient.

For most people, taking about 2g per day [EPA + DHA] increases omega-3 index from 4% to 8%, which is associated with a 5-year increase in life expectancy

[Dylan O'Sullivan @DylanoA4]

One of my favourite quotes comes from an obscure book written by a Scottish mountaineer in the 50s

[Scott Sundvor @ScottSundvor]

For everyone in the comments, the point here is that we haven’t logically learned much. There is no playbook that gov, media, or citizens would have that is noticeably different than last time. THAT is a major failure. At this point, we should have a bulletproof plan. We don’t.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Thought experiment. New respiratory virus hits the US, call it DOVID. Just like COVID, except 1.75x the lethality rate. All other statistical characteristics including spread rate and age effects the same. How would US policy react? How would US population react?