Amar Sood

Building Pervasive, frmr. CTO @ @Forge_Global (NYSE: FRGE)

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

With AI, We can dream bigger: when music, images, video and 3d assets are far easier then treat them as primitives.

We can use these to create entire virtual worlds, games, software that incorporates these, and to incorporate creativity and media into infinitely more situations in real life.

We can create massive installations that are not a single image but an endless video with endless music, and then our hand turns to stabilizing and styling and aestheticizing those exactly in line with our (the artist's) preferences.

Romanticizing the idea that picking at a guitar is somehow 'more creative' than using a DAW to create incredibly complex and layered and beautiful music is the same thing that's happening here, even if the primitives seem 'scarier' and 'bigger'.

Plus, there are many situations in life that would be made infinitely more human by the introduction of our collective work in designing our aesthetic and putting it into the world, and encoding it into models. Installations and physical spaces can absolutely be more beautiful if we can produce more, taking the aesthetic(s) that we've built so far and making them dynamic to spaces.

Also for learning: as a young person learning to draw and sing and play music and so many other things, I would have tremendously appreciated the ability to generate and follow subtle, personalized generation - to take a photo of a scene in front of me and have the AI first sketch it loosely so that I can copy it, then escalate and escalate until I can do something bigger.

[Brie Wolfson @zebriez]

.@camillericketts and I first got introduced to @eigenhq by Akshay, Notion’s COO, who said its founder, @paulscherer, reminded him of Ivan, Notion’s exquisitely high-taste founder.

Then there was Benchmark’s $15M seed bet and Peter Fenton’s tweet putting Eigen in the lineage as “TheFacebook, Twitter, Instagram, and SnapChat.”

Stuff like this gets said pretty often about founders–especially by investors–but after spending time with Paul and the team, we think there’s something special going on here.

A dispatch from a month with Eigen and their honestly 🤯'ing mutual friend.

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

Kinda assuming that it's a first-(ish)-distillation of Mythos, and they haven't quiet figured out how to do it right quite yet?

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

Something I've noticed with Opus 4.7 is a lot of inversions – "FoundationDB became an internal customer for Apple's backend" (no, Apple's backend became FDB's internal customer), or "Fortunately, we can't access this field." (it means 'un').

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

@paulg As someone who's been programming since I was 5, I read incredibly accurately and quickly and still prefer bullets because they're instantly scannable.

Flash 10 bullets in front of me and I'll know roughly what they say in a fraction of a second -- prose takes a second or two.

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

My laptop's built-in screen is now serving only to display the cart for its replacement.

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

@sumedha2199 Welcome to programming, folks :)

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

@haridigresses

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

A bunch of discussion recently about who builds product after engineers and PMs.

I think what you want is people with long-held dream(s).

Product dreams without execution clarity.

Engineering ones, where they understand what they want the system to do but it's been too hard.

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

@Altimor Update: to be honest this kind "proactivity" in response to a @getlindy error is distinctly not cool.

In this case it's an member of my team, but if it were a customer or investor, I would be right now apologizing for an e-mail I can't even see.

Fireable for an assistant. 🥲

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

More of the thread so you can see that this is just the direction that the autonomy took in this instance.

As I said above the not responding to the connect buttons is because I wasn't receiving those on iMessage. You only see them on the web. On iMessage all of those instances are places where I just saw nothing.

Also on iMessage I can't actually see the message where it told me that it's going to email Sasha. So if I had switched back from web to iMessage I would have completely missed it and not even been able to apologize...

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

@Altimor Update: to be honest this kind "proactivity" in response to a @getlindy error is distinctly not cool.

In this case it's an member of my team, but if it were a customer or investor, I would be right now apologizing for an e-mail I can't even see.

Fireable for an assistant. 🥲

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

@Altimor Ah, I see, it's because you guys connected your web chat interface to iMessage but the surface isn't complete, so if it hits a prompt that isn't implemented in iMessage-land, it freezes.

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

Programmers and PMs have always had to articulate things super clearly, but with the rise of agent and AI prompting, it'll be interesting to see what it does to people's quality of articulation.

Explaining things in crisp (systems) terms is what you need to do better and better, and as people improve, we'll surely see it spill over into real life.

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

But I think that if classical software allowed you to barely outcompete others... new-school software should increasingly unlock the original dream that 'software will eat the world'.

So new-school software will let you demolish other companies and people who cheap out.

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

I'm desperately excited for the next generation of software. I think folks' low-hanging imagination is that it will be 'like today's but custom', but I think that will only last until we build a wholly more powerful generation of horizontal software.

[Amar Sood @tekacs]

The strongest argument that this won't happen is simply that people are cheap. So in the same vein as plastic widgets replacing handcrafted things people not wanting to pay for software and just using cheap lower quality stuff absolutely will likely happen in some places.