Tucker Peters

co-founder of @tryniska | talk to me about books

[Tucker Peters @TuckerPeters6]

@DavidPawlan 🙋‍♂️ and @leorubberto

[Tucker Peters @TuckerPeters6]

@itsalicesoul PTSD from when I started vibe coding with GPT-3.5 turbo. We’ve come a long way 😂

[Tucker Peters @TuckerPeters6]

@AlexFinn @tryniska completely agrees. Soon to come 👀

[Foreign Affairs @ForeignAffairs]

“The central tragedy of ‘The Peloponnesian War’ is the story of growing Athenian arrogance and hubris and its fateful consequences,” writes Jonathan Kirshner. “Modern-day Athenians, trumpeting the virtue of strength, would do well to heed Thucydides’s warnings.” https://t.co/xud3Y1ubB1

[Tucker Peters @TuckerPeters6]

I've been learning a lot in my international security classes recently about the calculation of the national interest and war, and I think a lot of it applies to business in general.

When you think of applying war tactics to business, you usually picture the aspiring salesman or trader walking down Wall Street carrying The Art of War. But I think the way a nation thinks through a decision, and how leaders shape policy, is a lot like how a business works.

When a nation decides to go to war, it is running a few calculations at once. Whether the other actor is willing to give it what it wants at an acceptable cost, and whether it is willing to bear the cost of forcing that actor to give it what it wants. The calculation of the national interest comes down to four things. What the problem is costing you right now, what ignoring it costs you later, what fixing it costs, and whether the people who have to carry the fix will actually carry it. (To anyone in the IR field, I am generalizing a couple of major arguments here.)

When a company evaluates a decision to use AI and how to deploy it, it runs the exact same four. What the manual work is costing them right now. What it costs them a year from now if they do nothing. What it costs in money, engineering time, and mental bandwidth to actually deploy. And whether the people who have to change how they work will go along with it.

We see this all the time in the companies we work with or try to work with. Some have incredible potential with AI and are missing out on 10x improvements to their bottom line, but their people simply do not want to bear the mental cost of switching. Three of the four check out and the fourth kills it. Others are perfectly fine without it and do not need it. So before every sales call, we need to calculate their national interest and make sure we understand their preference structures.

The same goes once we are deploying and they are using our software. It is a continuous battle, and these calculations always need to be reassessed. Hopefully IR tactics keep pointing us in the right direction.

[Tucker Peters @TuckerPeters6]

@ForeignAffairs @mchorowitz @Lauren_A_Kahn Completely agree. The Cold War taught us this. The best warheads in the world meant nothing without missiles to deliver them. Same logic applies now. We don't balance against China with better tech we can't deploy.

[Foreign Affairs @ForeignAffairs]

To win the AI race, Washington should stop fixating on the prospect of superintelligence and start emphasizing “practical investments in the development and rapid adoption of AI,” argue @mchorowitz and @Lauren_A_Kahn.
https://t.co/OsVJnTRHoC

[Tucker Peters @TuckerPeters6]

@16vchq Substantive

[Tucker Peters @TuckerPeters6]

@leorubberto Nah. (see you there)

[Tucker Peters @TuckerPeters6]

@rehan_shei @a16z Check out https://t.co/e6wvpO5iKn - congrats 👊

[niska. @tryniska]

Our take on human-centered AI.

https://t.co/Wx50ylBhBv

[Tucker Peters @TuckerPeters6]

I think that in 10 years, AI adoption in an organization and how they deploy it will not matter. What will is the creativity and critical thinking decision makers and employees will put into it.

Most of the time when you hear a statement like this, it comes from a professor who thinks their entire career is slipping away from their self worth because AI can automate their skill, or an English major who fears their job is going to be lost. But let's think about game theory for a moment. Because of the unthinkable gains and efficiencies AI will bring, it makes no rational sense for an organization not to adopt AI. Thus, eventually, everyone will. This is under the assumption that, from an ROI perspective, it makes sense among other things.

It will also force companies to be as efficient and robust as possible with their deployments to drive that exponential growth in productivity. By year 10, I really wonder what else people will be able to do to make it even better.

I must say, we should never predict the future of AI since it's dumb to do so, but as adoption ramps up, I believe this race to keep up will make companies look very similar in the future with their AI workflows, much like how the old firm stack looks like a mix of Microsoft 365, Salesforce, among other things. Same systems, but different work. I'll admit that analogy cuts both ways. Everyone has had Excel for 35 years and firms still perform very differently, and a lot of that comes down to deployment. So I am not saying deployment stops mattering. I am saying the gap narrows as the playbooks get copied, and what is left over is the crucial aspect.

Which leads me to my overall thought that if all of these firms have hyper efficient systems that are godlike in the future, human thought may be the only way we can push further gains. If everyone uses AI, what will make it so that my company outperforms my competitor that also has godlike AI? Some of it is not thinking at all. It is proprietary data, distribution, and switching costs, and a competitor with the same model and none of my customer history is not really running the same system. But those moats still get built by people making judgment calls.

I often find myself thinking extremely hard about this same problem today. Everyone uses AI to code, to optimize, and automate. Thus, the only way I can truly make my company better is by still outsmarting my competitors with unique thinking. If it comes from AI, they'll probably have the same.

I think it's imperative that we continue to educate ourselves and make ourselves smarter every day. In a capitalist society, we will simply not accept universal basic income. We will not rest. People will continue to work because it brings them immense satisfaction. I don't believe in utilitarianism, but Mill was correct when he said there is more value in the pleasure found in the grander things in life. Thus, to achieve this, I believe it is still as important to actually think today, and to continue to do so for decades to come.