When I was a 20-something big-4 consultant traveling weeks on end for work, I took up smoking for exactly the reasons you suggest. I had nothing to do in my down time and knew nobody, but I could sit in hotel bar with a smoke and strangers would trail over.
Yep, I’m old enough to have been working when you could still smoke in hotel bars. In Monaco you could order a pack of Marlboro Reds at your dinner table back in 2006.
Manus has been the best agent for turning text into work --useable slides, code, extracting data from websites, etc. that I've seen. There are better tools for specific cases like coding, but for one tool that could handle agentic workflows with minimal oversight and configuration, it's the best.
Interesting, I hadn’t see the Knowledge Navigator before. I would argue that we’re very close to the capabilities shown in that video.
Isn’t this already that? A new business model? Something like OpenAI’s search or Perplexity can run on its own index and not be influenced by Google’s ranking, ads, etc.
In areas where there is a simple objective truth, like finding the offset for the wheels on a 2008 BMW M3, we have had this capability for some time with Perplexity. The LLMs successfully cuts through the sea of SEO/SEM and forum nonsense and delivers the answer.
In areas where the truth is more subjective, like what is the best biscuit restaurant in downtown Nashville, the system could easily learn your preferences and deliver info suited to your biases.
In areas where “the science” is debated, the LLM can show both sides.
> Everything sounds like it's just a bunch of hackers
It is! This is run by George Hotz, aka geohot, aka the kid who cracked the iPhone SIM lock at 17yo, released the 1-click jailbreak for iOS before he was 20, and then went ahead and cracked the PS3 shortly after and released Sony’s private key (used to sign all PS3 software) for all the world to see.
He’s a beast. Now he’s doing Tinygrad and Comma. You won’t be seeing Corpo-speak from this guy or his team lol.
Cool to see him doing well and doing it his own way.
He clearly states why he left. He believes that OpenAI leadership is prioritizing shiny product releases over safety and that this is a mistake.
Even with the best intentions , it’s easy for a strong CEO like Altman to loose sight of more subtly important things like safety and optimize for growth and winning, eventually at all cost. Winning is a super-addictive feedback loop.
In San Francisco, you can still find buildings where the elevators have ashtrays, though usually the actual tray is gone.