Chris Olson

@mach1ai 🇺🇸

Former: @Traceup, @ReplicatedHQ, @Amplifyla, USC, Iowa.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

Mach 1’s latest capabilities in helping operators build and deploy agents into their business.

In this demo, I recreate a sales agent for Trace, the same kind of agent we built three years ago. What once took months can now be built and deployed in under 10 minutes.

Mach 1 brings intelligence to your operations, helping teams build agents that can handle complex, real-world processes.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

@rjonesy I caught this one!

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

@marccampbell Have you tried changing low power mode to under 10%? That might keep the outlet on.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

@marccampbell I’ve been noticing this too! Unbelievably frustrating!

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

I used Codex a lot to ask questions about expected behavior in our app/api, and about half the time it answers the questions and then starts implementing assumed enhancements, which is weird.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

@yasser_elsaid_ It’s impressive but it was his third company and I think he financed the first $200m or so.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

@DnuLkjkjh 100%. It’s going to make mistakes, the tools you have to identify and improve those mistakes are the important part.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

"The idea that you will have an AI agent running around without nobody watching it is kind of insane." — Jensen Huang (via the Dwarkesh Patel podcast).

I couldn't agree more. At Mach 1, we believe operators are the conduit between the business and AI, so we build tools to power that connection.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

@DbJared Isn't the course record 56 loops?

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

Muse Spark not being publicly available via an API is strategically pretty telling of Meta's AI intentions.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

LGA tower frequency is 118.7. JFK has two tower frequencies, 119.1 and 123.9.

I don't think this was a turn of the dial mistake; I think the pilot used muscle memory and just hit the wrong muscle.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

Tesla is putting on quite the show in downtown Austin with the announcement of Terafab.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

Operational AI has to move across systems, maintain context, and decide what happens next.

@mach1ai powers complex real-world processes with automation that doesn’t just run. It thinks.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

During the holidays, Instagram should offer a feature where you can scroll nothing but ads for gift inspiration.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

@mshamsho @eightsleep That’s horrible. I probably won’t get one anymore.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

I'm a lifelong Democrat. But Gavin Newsom’s recent tactics remind me of a marketing quote: when you start copying your competitor, you end up looking like their asshole.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

@GrantM Maybe YouTube hasn’t been optimized for playback being at 10x ;)

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

Isn’t this just like when FB rolled out a redesign? History shows it makes noise, but never stops more people from using it. That’s a pretty good place for OpenAI to be.

[Sam Altman @sama]

If you have been following the GPT-5 rollout, one thing you might be noticing is how much of an attachment some people have to specific AI models. It feels different and stronger than the kinds of attachment people have had to previous kinds of technology (and so suddenly deprecating old models that users depended on in their workflows was a mistake).

This is something we’ve been closely tracking for the past year or so but still hasn’t gotten much mainstream attention (other than when we released an update to GPT-4o that was too sycophantic).

(This is just my current thinking, and not yet an official OpenAI position.)

People have used technology including AI in self-destructive ways; if a user is in a mentally fragile state and prone to delusion, we do not want the AI to reinforce that. Most users can keep a clear line between reality and fiction or role-play, but a small percentage cannot. We value user freedom as a core principle, but we also feel responsible in how we introduce new technology with new risks.

Encouraging delusion in a user that is having trouble telling the difference between reality and fiction is an extreme case and it’s pretty clear what to do, but the concerns that worry me most are more subtle. There are going to be a lot of edge cases, and generally we plan to follow the principle of “treat adult users like adults”, which in some cases will include pushing back on users to ensure they are getting what they really want.

A lot of people effectively use ChatGPT as a sort of therapist or life coach, even if they wouldn’t describe it that way. This can be really good! A lot of people are getting value from it already today.

If people are getting good advice, leveling up toward their own goals, and their life satisfaction is increasing over years, we will be proud of making something genuinely helpful, even if they use and rely on ChatGPT a lot. If, on the other hand, users have a relationship with ChatGPT where they think they feel better after talking but they’re unknowingly nudged away from their longer term well-being (however they define it), that’s bad. It’s also bad, for example, if a user wants to use ChatGPT less and feels like they cannot.

I can imagine a future where a lot of people really trust ChatGPT’s advice for their most important decisions. Although that could be great, it makes me uneasy. But I expect that it is coming to some degree, and soon billions of people may be talking to an AI in this way. So we (we as in society, but also we as in OpenAI) have to figure out how to make it a big net positive.

There are several reasons I think we have a good shot at getting this right. We have much better tech to help us measure how we are doing than previous generations of technology had. For example, our product can talk to users to get a sense for how they are doing with their short- and long-term goals, we can explain sophisticated and nuanced issues to our models, and much more.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

GPT-5 in voice mode describes my custom instructions before it actually starts answering my questions. “Absolutely, let’s dive into that with a bit of that Ben Thompson meets Adam Liptak meets Heather Cox Richardson kind of vibe.” Strange.

[Chris Olson @chrisolson]

@benhylak I always add "Reduce the number of adjectives you use when responding" to my custom instructions. I don't know when it exactly it happened, but all of these models have become quite verbose...