Randy Paynter

Serial entrepreneur, proud father, tech, environmentalist, behavioral economics and macroeconomics nerd

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

Love this!

[Andy Jassy @ajassy]

People ask me all the time about compelling use cases of AI. Here’s a good one.

Millions of dogs go missing in the U.S. every year—and options for finding them are often painfully limited. Our Ring team saw an opportunity to use our community and technology to help, so they built Search Party.

When a pet owner posts about a lost dog in the Ring app, nearby participating outdoor Ring cameras in the neighborhood begin looking for potential matches. If yours spots what might be the missing dog, it lets you know. You see the photo alongside footage from your camera, then can choose to share the video with the pet’s owner.

The AI is trained on tens of thousands of dog videos so it can recognize different breeds, sizes, fur patterns, body features, unique marks, shape, and color. And privacy stays in your control—you decide each time whether to help.

The impact is energizing. Search Party has helped bring home 99 dogs in just 90 days—more than a dog a day since launching three months ago.

Ring customer Kylee was blown away by Search Party after her dog Nyx was found by a neighbor’s camera just 15 minutes after slipping through a tiny hole he’d dug under her backyard fence.

When a Ring customer and military veteran named Kurt realized his service dog was missing after jumping his fence, he worried he might have lost her for good. He quickly initiated a Search Party in the Ring app asking neighbors to help locate her. Later that day, he got the notification he was hoping for…Lainey was found.

Chris, a Ring camera owner, helped reunite another lost dog with its family after getting an app alert that said, “Your camera may have spotted a missing dog,” flagging footage he wouldn't have otherwise noticed.

And the list of stories like these keeps growing.

Now we’ve expanded this feature so that anyone in the U.S. can start a Search Party through the Ring app, even without a Ring camera (lost pets are one of the most common posts in the Ring Neighbors app—over 1M last year alone).

With roughly 90 million dogs in the U.S., think this is gonna matter for a lot of families. Good example of real-world impact, and proud of what the Ring team has built here. https://t.co/Pr3jzP4o4o

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

Texas is set to dump water from fracking into rivers 🤦🏻‍♂️ https://t.co/X4M1E0AdNv

[The New Lede @thenewledenews]

Mounting evidence links the pesticide paraquat to Parkinson’s disease, and records show @Syngenta knew for decades.

Now the company faces thousands of lawsuits.

Watch our full video breaking down the fight over paraquat:
https://t.co/12qqmyegCp

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

Fascinating lens on how to think about / possibilities of gerrymandering: https://t.co/d1HaTBP8oe

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

Mothership Strategies raised $678M for Dem-aligned PACs - only $11M reached candidates. The rest? Mostly recycled into more fundraising paid to consulting firms tied to Mothership. Just plain wrong. https://t.co/TFoo0EbQM2

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

If you haven’t tried Grok’s image animation yet, it’s pretty mind blowing. This is from a still of my father in the early 1940s.

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

Starlink mini is a game changer for long family car rides. Cruising at >120 Mbps #ProductivityHack

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

@jeffskoll Jeff - I’m so sorry to hear that. Sending you good thoughts, while wishing I could do more 🙏

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

Bear-Hunters in Michigan Are Still Allowed to Use Disgusting 'Bear-Baiting Barrels' to Trap and Kill #care2 https://t.co/2dMoDl5tYt

My take: "To deceive a wild animal is to prove nothing of your strength, only your weakness of character."

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

Fascinating: Conservatives are happier and other interesting stats (Harvard '22 study) https://t.co/hxaI1oWYWY

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

@Starlink What do I need to do to get customer service? My Starlink has been mostly unusable for a week, constantly rebooting. I keep being told it will be addressed, yet no one is helping.

TIK-5230168-11381-37

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

I always appreciate @ezraklein's willingness to question orthodoxy...and especially trying to be solution oriented, not just a critic.

Love: "“Progressives ask, in many cases, to be judged on how much they spend to make the world a better place. ...what if we judge liberalism, not by what it spent, but rather by what it built?”

That will require some tough tradeoffs, but I'm with you that we need to focus on the supply side. Perfect has been the enemy of the good. A mind shift is required.

I look forward to reading the book.

https://t.co/iPrLVT0LLM

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

@jeffskoll I'm so sorry to hear that Jeff. Sending you good healing energy!

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

My Take: Grok is seriously under appreciated.

No one is talking about it, and it's really really good.

X has access to real time data, links to the latest news/research, and its image creation is as good or better than Midjourney. And this model wasn't even built with Elon's new Memphis Supercluster.

Everyone may be talking about DeepSeek-R1, but Grok is a story that seems to be getting better by the day.

(this pic is what Grok tells me how it envisions itself 🤔 )

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

New randomized, controlled trial of students using GPT-4 as a tutor in Nigeria. 6 weeks of after-school AI tutoring = 2 years of typical learning gains, outperforming 80% of other educational interventions.

And it helped all students, especially girls who were initially behind

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

Well said. @ezraklein continues to be one of the most thoughtful erudite thinkers at the NYT…. which inevitably leads to arrows in his back… but I for one appreciate his willingness to question the orthodoxy.

[Ezra Klein @ezraklein]

A few thoughts from the conversations I’ve been having and hearing over the last week:

The hard question isn’t the 2 points that would’ve decided the election. It’s how to build a Democratic Party that isn’t always 2 points away from losing to Donald Trump — or worse.

The Democratic Party is supposed to represent the working class. If it isn’t doing that, it is failing. That’s true even even if it can still win elections.

Democrats don’t need to build a new informational ecosystem. Dems need to show up in the informational ecosystems that already exist. They need to be natural and enthusiastic participants in these cultures. Harris should’ve gone on Rogan, but the damage here was done over years and wouldn’t have been reversed in one October appearance.

Building a media ecosystem isn’t something you do through nonprofit grants or rich donors (remember Air America?). Joe Rogan and Theo Von aren’t a Koch-funded psy-op. What makes these spaces matter is that they aren’t built on politics. (Democrats already win voters who pay close attention to politics.)

That there’s more affinity between Democrats and the Cheneys than Democrats and the Rogans and Theo Vons of the world says a lot.

Economic populism is not just about making your economic policy more and more redistributive. People care about fairness. They admire success. People have economic identities in addition to material needs.

Trump — and in a different way, Musk — understand the identity side of this. What they share isn’t that they are rich and successful, it’s that they made themselves into the public’s idea of what it means to be rich and successful.

Policy matters, but it has to be real to the candidate. Policy is a way candidates tell voters who they are. But people can tell what politicians really care about and what they’re mouthing because it polls well.

Governing matters. If housing is more affordable, and homelessness far less of a crisis, in Texas and Florida than California and New York, that’s a *huge* problem.

If people are leaving California and New York for Texas and Florida, that’s a *huge* problem.

Democrats need to take seriously how much scarcity harms them. Housing scarcity became a core Trump-Vance argument against immigrants. Too little clean energy becomes the argument for rapidly building out more fossil fuels. A successful liberalism needs to believe in *and deliver* abundance of the things people need most.

That Democrats aren’t trusted on the cost of living harmed them much more than any ad. If Dems want to “Sister Soulja” some part of their coalition, start with the parts that have made it so much more expensive to build and live where Democrats govern.

More than a “Sister Soulja” moment, Democrats need to rebuild a culture of saying no inside their own coalition.

Democrats don’t just have to move right or left. They need to better reflect the texture of worlds they’ve lost touch with and those worlds are complex and contradictory.

The most important question in politics isn’t whether a politician is well liked. It’s whether voters think a politician — or a political coalition — likes them.

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

https://t.co/9RoYCFMsYo

If you think @elonmusk is the enemy, consider the facts:

He's done more to stop global warming(@Tesla), connect marginalized populations to the internet (@Starlink), empower environmental monitoring via satellites (@SpaceX), and help brain injury survivors (@neuralink) than the rest of us combined.

His ability to execute fast and effectively should be the goal of every executive. And now he's doing it for AI. See clip below (@altcap quoting Jensen Huang).

If you think he's the enemy, consider why... when he's arguably been the world's most powerful force for progress.

[Randy Paynter @paynter]

Another very cool example of how AI is about to change everything:

There's a petition on @Care2 to ban puppy mills (on behalf of @AnimalLeague ).

I dropped a link to the petition into Google's new NotebookLM tool, and it auto-generated a podcast with two people talking about the petition.

It sounds incredibly realistic. (see below) Wow!

You can use this for pdfs, websites etc. I've found for longer documents it doesn't necessarily highlight the details I would, but we're still in the first inning of these tools.

Thoughts?