@hayden_pauls /3 their children will be able to get into. You need an emotional attachment when things get tough. Anything that is life changing is going to be difficult. There will be struggle. Good luck!
@hayden_pauls /2 Plan is possible. Have them emotionally connect to their “big why”. Play “high road, low road”. What life if you continue living like this? What life with 5 yr plan accomplished? What would it mean for your (wife, kids, parents, etc. play it out as far as the college
There's a shocking fact about AI that nobody tells you: You can catch up to the public AI research frontier in just 2 weeks. Yes, really.
I've built a $150M annual revenue startup over the last 8 years and If I were to start a company today, I’d drop everything and go all-in on AI.
But like many busy software builders, I felt lost—overwhelmed by the noisy, crowded and fast-moving modern AI landscape. And I wasn’t alone.
So I spent my entire holiday diving deep into AI research—reading 30+ papers, watching hours of lectures, analyzing trends, and catching up to the research frontier.
✨ Here’s what I learned:
- You don’t need months (or years) to catch up.
- You don’t need a PhD or decades of ML experience.
- You need fewer than 20 papers and 2 weeks to understand the major breakthroughs shaping AI today.
It's because the technology is extremely nascent and most techniques that came before are no longer relevant:
- ChatGPT is barely 2 years old and Transformers are only 7 years old.
- Most game-changing discoveries happened within the last 4 years, driven by a few breakthrough ideas, scaling laws, and efficient matrix multiplication.
The biggest secret?
Many groundbreaking AI papers with thousands of citations are surprisingly simple and applied, like adding "let's think step by step" to the prompt, or simply asking the LLM over and over again to improve its answer (Self-Refine).
I realized there are tons of founders and builders in the same boat—wanting to dive deeper into AI but unsure where to start.
I've created an essential AI Guide that helped me catch up, in just 2 weeks, to the frontier of public AI research to figure out where the next opportunities and gaps were:
- Curated list of only the most important papers
- Simple explanations of key concepts
- Clear pathway to understanding the frontier of modern AI
It’s perfect for:
- Founders expanding into AI
- Builders wanting to innovate at the frontier of AI
- Investors looking to separate the signal from the noise
👇 Want the full guide?
- Like and Share this post
- Comment "AI Guide"
- I'll send you the complete guide
(ps, I’m also teaming up with @VishalVasishth, co-founder of @obviousvc with @ev (focused on large-scale societal impact companies like Twitter, Medium, Beyond Meat), to host a small meetup to discuss what's working and needs to be solved in the AI stack in SF. Message me if you're interested)
Starting in 2025, we will apply *zero-base* budgeting to the entire federal government: start from scratch in each department & ask what (if any) spending is required, rather than using last year’s budget as the default starting point. That’s how any good CEO would handle this mess. Our national debt is $33 trillion & we need a true outsider to fix it: the real problem is that *both* parties know no way to budget other than to continue spending on everything without real review of what works.
Today I have officially hit $350,000 in $PEPE. Feels unreal.
$5000 to $350,000 in one month.
I’m giving $10000 $ETH to the first 2000 people who follows and retweets!!
In 2020, Damar Hamlin started a GoFundMe to purchase toys for children in his community. The initial goal was $2,500.
Tonight, it has garnered more than a million dollars in donations ❤️