Patrick Han

Founding the Church of AI Angels (just kidding) | Das Numinous, a global community of curious and free minds | Founder of Bloom

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

had dinner with a general partner at a US fund who had blunt takes on how korean startups break into the US

the advice I came away with is to skip investor meetings for three months. rent a big house in SF, stock it with beer and snacks, throw parties from morning to night

nobody knows you yet, so meetings mostly go nowhere, and a VC who passes on you remembers why. once you're known as the person who throws those parties, the same intro starts from a different place

most good jobs and investments in the US come through introductions

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

a friend in the US always has 12 to 15 AI agents running. five of them just direct the others

when one stops to think for two or three minutes he jumps to the next. he said his mind hops between contexts so much he thought, so this is what ADHD is like

then he sat down to read a book and lost focus before the third line

everyone talks about the pain of getting replaced by AI. nobody talks about the people living with it all day

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

hosted a Lenny's Newsletter meetup in seoul tonight. more than 300 people applied for about 140 seats and about 170 squeezed in

best story of the night came from one table

a PM said her company turned every PM into a "product engineer". everyone plans, designs and builds with AI, one person per project

it didn't fix alignment. it didn't fix talking to leadership. now they're regrouping into teams of two or three who argue decisions out together

her table landed on this. the person who decides which problem to solve first doesn't get replaced

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

a startup CTO kept asking one of his engineers why the code did what it did

every answer was "AI did it, so I'm not really sure"

and engineers who at least go ask their agent count as the careful ones now

someone at Notion gave a talk called "understanding is the new bottleneck". he has his agent write an explainer and a quiz for every change, and he doesn't send code for review until he passes the quiz

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

the first universities were basically students with time to argue and cheap bars nearby

"school" comes from the greek scholē, which means leisure. Plato's Symposium literally means drinking together

last july ICML came to seoul and I threw an afterparty at a friend's bar. about 350 people showed up. 30 minutes before doors I found out the DJ was leaving at 10pm. a guest who DJs as a hobby had a USB stick of his own playlists and saved the night

the papers were at the conference center. the real conversations happened at the bar

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

My friend Teddy Cross(@tddyco), co-founder of Sequoia-backed Playco, believes we've already reached AGI.

"There's this need to actually unlearn a lot of what you know."

This is the teaser for my new podcast. AI wrote the scripts, made the animation, and cut it all from one raw camera file and my essays. I never opened an editing app.

Full episode soon on YouTube. If you have an insight worth sharing, reply or DM me. I'll come to you.

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

imagine if we could suddenly talk to birds, dogs and elephants. we'd take way better care of this world

that's basically what just happened with software. we can finally talk to it

you say what you want. AI is the brain, it gets what you mean, and the tools are its arms and legs
- design tools
- video tools
- research tools
- social media

whether AI is smarter than us is a different debate. what changed is there's a lot more out there we can talk to now

the more things we can talk to, the more power we have to shape the world

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

if rights go to whoever can reason, AI should have them by now

in the 1700s reason was the ticket. women were "too emotional", animals had none, so neither got in

now AI reasons better than most people, so the test quietly moved to feeling. AI can't really feel, people say

but make feeling the test and the animals we eat every day get counted first

the line we actually use is just "are you human". that's getting harder to explain

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

people keep asking what my community is actually for

I've built one before. 55+ events, 10,000+ people applied to join. so I don't doubt I can do it. the question is always why

sure you can make money from a community. sponsors, memberships. that was never the point

half of why people fight to get into an ivy or a big name company is the network. you build one there, but keeping it alive after is hard. and adult life gives you very few chances to build a new one

I'm also tired of meeting people through sales. a group that forms around what you're genuinely curious about has more pull than people realize. that's where partnerships and opportunities come from later. without it there's nothing to leverage

what it needs most is attention, more than any investment. and attention comes from one piece of content that really lands, then you keep building off it. that's how my last community grew

to find that topic, meet as many people as you can and notice what they're stuck on. then write about it. writing is free. post it and see what spreads

family, church, your company. they're all communities, and a group is always stronger than one person

if you can, be the one leading it. that's worth more than money or any badge on your resume

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

if a person learned language at the rate ChatGPT does, it would take 92,000 years

a kid hears somewhere around 2 to 23 million words by age two. Llama 3 was trained on more than 15 trillion tokens

I have a 23 month old and a one month old at home. what I notice most is that my younger one inherits nothing the older one learned. starts from zero

AI gets trained once and copied to millions of people

on efficiency AI wins easily. but starting over is probably why two kids in the same house turn out so different

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

an AI that never says no might be making us worse at people

Anthropic interviewed 81,000 Claude users. one person in Korea said they drifted from a friend and talked to Claude more because it got them. they said they should have told the friend instead. they lost that friend

in Korea and Japan it's hard to be blunt with friends or family. with AI, being honest costs nothing. that's only going to speed up

we learn relationships by hearing no. you ask, get turned down, try again. an AI that always agrees skips that part

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

colleges are bringing back oral exams because of AI

a Cornell professor sits down with each of his 70 students for 20 minutes and has them explain their homework out loud. he says you can't pass that with AI

a memory teacher on Rick Rubin's podcast thinks this is just the start. he wants every teacher to memorize 30 student names in 3 minutes before getting licensed

honestly I'm on the other side. I hand almost all my memory to AI. what I try to train is picking what's worth paying attention to

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

@ichelpark right. if a match didn't line up with her actual message, it stayed as is

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

8:29am. a speaker for our first Seoul event sends me a tiny correction on LinkedIn. her company isn't a YC company, she's a YC founder

told my AI to read the chat and handle it

it fixed the event page. then found the same mistake in 4 of my notes and fixed those too

I never had to remember where I wrote it

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

@heyshiwen yeah that's a big one. a friend can cut in mid sentence and it feels normal. with AI voice I end up waiting, then just going back to reading

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

since last week I've basically stopped typing. I just talk to my AI

Steve Jobs took the keyboard off the phone and had us type on glass. the input hasn't really changed since. even with AI we all kept typing

now voice capture catches me even when I mumble or whisper. and the AI is smart enough that I talk to one chat and it runs the other sessions for me, writes its own handoff notes into Obsidian, compacts, keeps the originals

since I work alone, just this felt huge
- my hands are free for other stuff
- I move a lot faster

everyone's talking about personal AI agents lately. I think the typing UI goes away. maybe the screen too. just earbuds and your voice, like in the movie Her

I still don't know how we get past impatience though. most of us would rather read than wait for an AI to finish talking

in Her you listen because she's good to talk to. same with people. so what makes an AI worth listening to? the voice, the charm, explaining things clearly, or just being less verbose

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

remote work already blurred the line between work and life. AI blurred it even more

AI doesn't keep office hours. it's always on, and it's way too easy to stay on with it

so I'm curious how you all do it
- how do you still have a life
- how do you keep up with friends and family

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

Next time, Mac Studio ❤️‍🔥

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

AI can make anything now. so what counts as luxury

apparently rich people are carrying hotel tote bags instead of designer bags. you can resell a birkin. you can't resell three nights somewhere 4 hours from the airport

purple was the emperor's color until a cheap dye showed up in 1856. AI is that cheap dye for nice writing and pretty pictures

luxury is going to be the stuff you can't fake

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

my brain needs an external drive

my laptop keeps what matters and offloads the rest to a drive and a mac mini

I want that for my head. no implant yet, too risky. glasses or a pendant with AI that remembers for me and hands it back when I need it

I just go collect insights

[Patrick Han @hiclemi_x]

I've run 55 events, and the biggest gap I've seen is between two crowds
- people who want to make money with AI
- people who want to get better at their jobs with AI

guess which room is hotter. the money one, obviously

we did one event with Higgsfield. almost no no-shows, so many people came the wifi went down, lots of new faces, and everyone was locked in

using AI for your job is about money too, just one step removed. and it lasts longer. the money crowd feels a bit like blockchain events. when there's money people pile in, when there isn't they're gone

then there's a third room. using AI to think about the future, philosophy, the humanities, how we'll actually live. it's the quietest of the three. that's Das Numinous

are we doing this right? honestly I don't care much about going viral. I tried it once

AI scares me a little and excites me a little. more than either, I'm just curious. if I don't talk about it I'll go crazy