William Bicknell

Delivering data to understand the exposure in travel payments

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

@shadcn compatibility with design.md

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

@t_blom Lets us know how you get on with Linkedin please.

[Henry Shi @henrythe9ths]

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)

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

@henrythe9ths AI Guide

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

@sytaylor Spot on, does this mean legacy systems that do not have public APIs but valuable data will disappear or will AI mean we can create our own API via the front end? Please share how people are solving this today.

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

@jkwade Too late I tore my Achilles back in August... Annoyingly slow to recover, how long did it take for you to start playing football again?

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

A home for the New Internet @withportrait on @base

01/01/2025 — U7R6

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

@t_blom What would be the first chunks you would focus on?

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

@IrvinZhan Been playing with it for a few hours over the weekend, love it, next as I am not a developer is to see how I can deploy something and connect it to some an api, replit, cursor?

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

@mttjon Yes probably, but I am no expert!

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

@ahaupt or use @Wise

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

Might try @Replit to see how well that works. Probably need a style guide library/market to go with it.

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

Who is building a @webflow alternative mashing up @v0 @cursor_ai and hosting?

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

@sytaylor Does anybody have the data on the monthly flows for each customer, as one that uses it for pocket money vs household bills and salary are very different

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

@jburnmurdoch I would also recommend this hotel, still had availability when we were there https://t.co/Uuv47Twn6D

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

@jburnmurdoch Could not recommend it more, especially when the venues look like this...

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

@dcanisse @relume_io I am very keen to see your styleguide, when can we expect that?

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

@makermattevans https://t.co/oamLgmMhd7 is this it?

[William Bicknell @WilliamBicknell]

@_sere @pitdesi BMW