Predrag Malicevic

Ars longa, vita brevis

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.

$30 per seat per month.

$1.4 million annually.

I called it "digital transformation."

The board loved that phrase.

They approved it in eleven minutes.

No one asked what it would actually do.

Including me.

I told everyone it would "10x productivity."

That's not a real number.

But it sounds like one.

HR asked how we'd measure the 10x.

I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards."

They stopped asking.

Three months later I checked the usage reports.

47 people had opened it.

12 had used it more than once.

One of them was me.

I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.

It took 45 seconds.

Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations.

But I called it a "pilot success."

Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail.

The CFO asked about ROI.

I showed him a graph.

The graph went up and to the right.

It measured "AI enablement."

I made that metric up.

He nodded approvingly.

We're "AI-enabled" now.

I don't know what that means.

But it's in our investor deck.

A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT.

I said we needed "enterprise-grade security."

He asked what that meant.

I said "compliance."

He asked which compliance.

I said "all of them."

He looked skeptical.

I scheduled him for a "career development conversation."

He stopped asking questions.

Microsoft sent a case study team.

They wanted to feature us as a success story.

I told them we "saved 40,000 hours."

I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up.

They didn't verify it.

They never do.

Now we're on Microsoft's website.

"Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot."

The CEO shared it on LinkedIn.

He got 3,000 likes.

He's never used Copilot.

None of the executives have.

We have an exemption.

"Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction."

I wrote that policy.

The licenses renew next month.

I'm requesting an expansion.

5,000 more seats.

We haven't used the first 4,000.

But this time we'll "drive adoption."

Adoption means mandatory training.

Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches.

But completion will be tracked.

Completion is a metric.

Metrics go in dashboards.

Dashboards go in board presentations.

Board presentations get me promoted.

I'll be SVP by Q3.

I still don't know what Copilot does.

But I know what it's for.

It's for showing we're "investing in AI."

Investment means spending.

Spending means commitment.

Commitment means we're serious about the future.

The future is whatever I say it is.

As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

[Predrag Malicevic @pmalic]

@openrouter Any plans for offering any ColPali-style (i.e. late interaction visual document retrieval) models? AFAIK, the only provider offering them "serverlessly" is Jina AI, but only their own models.

[Predrag Malicevic @pmalic]

@bclavie @Dorialexander Do you expect that additional “graphics” (photos, logos, lines, backgrounds, etc) would make the results even worse? Asking because that would be a more “real-world” comparison, i.e., screenshots of PDFs/webpages vs. extracted text from those same PDFs/webpages.

[Predrag Malicevic @pmalic]

@bclavie @Dorialexander Just plain text in the screenshots, no other “graphical” elements?

[Predrag Malicevic @pmalic]

@benitocm1 @rasbt @burkov “Machine Learning Q and AI”

[Predrag Malicevic @pmalic]

@OfficialLoganK @shresbm Reach parity with other major providers in JSON Schema support for response/function parameters schema. This would enable people to more easily try Gemini models for their existing apps with non-trivial Pydantic models.

[signüll @signulll]

performative busyness is the corporate olympics. ppl schedule meetings to prep for other meetings, cc’ing everyone on emails, & “circling back” like it’s a personality trait.

half the time they’re just scrolling slack or micromanaging to justify their existence.

productivity theater at its finest—who needs broadway?

[Amjad Masad @amasad]

So much cope about DeepSeek.

Not only did they release a great model. they also released a breakthrough training method (R1 Zero) that’s already reproducing.

I doubt they lied about training costs, but even if they did they’re still awesome for this great gift to the world.

[Predrag Malicevic @pmalic]

@beginanon @jeremyphoward If you want to use OpenID Connect, it’s similarly convoluted on AWS as well.

[Predrag Malicevic @pmalic]

@DraganMocevic Znači, oni su sretni što Čović nema nikakvu konkurenciju, a mi smo nesretni što Dodik ima?

[Logan Kilpatrick @OfficialLoganK]

Today we are expanding access for the Gemini API and Google AI Studio to the following countries:

- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Montenegro
- North Macedonia
- Serbia
- Ukraine

Thanks for the patience while we made this happen (Albania coming soon)! 🌍

https://t.co/fBrh6UGcJz

[Predrag Malicevic @pmalic]

Symptoms of a certain mind virus infection 😜

[Lucas Beyer (bl16) @giffmana]

Currently happening on butterfly:

- they have API to develop custom feeds (yay!)
- they have "packs/lists" you can API manage and subscribe for follow or block (yay!)
- they have an open firehose API (yay!)

But then someone collects some data FROM THE API and they go apeshit:

[Predrag Malicevic @pmalic]

@Borik_BL Не видјех мањег града, а већих гужви 💪 Комбинација неодговорности и неспособности градских управа задњих деценија 🤗 Али, гужве су током цијеле године, и онда кад је PM2.5 “прихватљив”?

[Predrag Malicevic @pmalic]

Ljudi vjeruju u Boga i svece, ali ne i u PM2.5. Takođe, vazduh u kuću dolazi iz neke druge dimenzije, ne s vana 🤓 #banjaluka

[Predrag Malicevic @pmalic]

@Borik_BL Шта сте/смо конкретно засрали? 😆

[Predrag Malicevic @pmalic]

@mariaKhalusova The initiative won’t certainly come from middle mgmt 😜 And even when mandated from the top, they’re not going to support it for real. But some are trying 👇

[Flo Crivello @Altimor]

Just saw the first actual example of this in production in a 1,000+ people company, and it's amazing

They built an AI agent that:

1/ makes phone calls to everyone in the co every week, asking for a status update

2/ sends a report back with a summary of all the updates

3/ has a convo so the CEO can double click on any issue

Basically replaces the entire middle management layer of the business — no human needed to distill information up and down, with all the biases & politics & slowness involved in that. Just ICs, a CEO, and AI in the middle

Also means that as an IC you don't have to spend hours preparing for your big "meeting with the CEO." You can just ramble on, add as much info as you want, and trust that the agent will summarize and focus on what the CEO needs

We're adding the ability for Lindy to make phone calls, so this will soon come in a Lindy near you

[Predrag Malicevic @pmalic]

Kakva SRAMOTA sa izvještavanjem pokušaja rušenja malog dimnjaka u Incelu 🤯 Uopšte nije u pitanju the dimnjak od 150m kojeg zovemo “Incelov dimnjak” 🤬 “Jedan od simbola Banjaluke odbija da padne” 🤮 I onda svi regionalni mediji počnu prenositi tu glupost 🙈 Kad mislite da je novinarska profesija već dosegla dno, oni vas iznenade da može još gore 😵 #banjaluka
https://t.co/7XzdNzfeCe

[sophie @netcapgirl]

“i was thinking at some point, no rush from my end, it’d be great if we had a system set up to get daily updates on KPIs”