This track is [🔥🔥🔥](https://emojipedia.org/fire)

Disco vibes

Here's the track played during the [Kaytranada Boiler Room](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5EQIiabJvk&t=395s)

SebastiAn - Arabest

Hi I'm Jeremy. I'm building this site because I'm not satisfied with other online community type websites and their lack of innovation (see the /about page). The goal is to make a superior, more open, and more decentralized online community.

The site is still in early stages in active development (see the dev masterthread here: https://zsync.xyz/p/zsync-dev-update-masterthread)

Join us if this sounds interesting! Feel free to send me any feedback or reach out directly!

*"This is a 1 hour general-audience introduction to Large Language Models: the core technical component behind systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Bard. What they are, where they are headed, comparisons and analogies to present-day operating systems, and some of the security-related challenges of this new computing paradigm."*

Andrej Karpathy - Intro to Large Language Models [Video]

Trump's Truth Social has lost $73 million in less than 2 years, new filing says                

*"While self-correction has shown promise in improving LLM outputs in terms of style and quality (e.g. Chen et al., 2023; Madaan et al., 2023), recent attempts to self-correct logical or reasoning errors often cause correct answers to become incorrect, resulting in worse performances overall (Huang et al., 2023). In this paper, we break down the self-correction process into two core components: mistake finding and output correction. For mistake finding, we release BIG-Bench Mistake, a dataset of logical mistakes in Chain-of-Thought reasoning traces. We provide benchmark numbers for several state-of-the-art LLMs, and demonstrate that LLMs generally struggle with finding logical mistakes. For output correction, we propose a backtracking method which provides large improvements when given information on mistake location. We construe backtracking as a lightweight alternative to reinforcement learning methods, and show that it remains effective with a reward model at 60-70% accuracy."*

LLMs cannot find reasoning errors, but can correct them

The New PS5 SLIM is just around the corner! 5 things you need to know.

Show HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38285228>

*"I built a simple React/Python app that takes screenshots of websites and converts them to clean HTML/Tailwind code.*

*It uses GPT-4 Vision to generate the code, and DALL-E 3 to create placeholder images.*

*To run it, all you need is an OpenAI key with GPT vision access.*

*I’m quite pleased with how well it works most of the time. Sometimes, the image generations can be hilariously off. See here for a replica of Taylor Swift’s Instagram page: [https://streamable.com/70gow1](https://streamable.com/70gow1) I initially had a hard time getting it to work on full page screenshots. GPT4 would code up the first couple of sections and then, get lazy and output placeholder comments for the rest of the page. With some prompt engineering, full page screenshots work a whole lot better now. It’s great for landing pages."*

Convert any screenshot into clean HTML code using GPT Vision (OSS tool)

Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have gained popularity as a financial instrument, offering several benefits for investors. Here are some key advantages associated with Bitcoin ETFs:

1. **Accessibility and Convenience:**

   - **Mainstream Investment Vehicle:** Bitcoin ETFs provide a familiar and regulated investment vehicle for traditional investors who may be hesitant to directly invest in cryptocurrencies. This can attract a broader range of investors, including institutional players.
   - **Ease of Trading:** ETFs are traded on traditional stock exchanges, making them accessible through regular brokerage accounts. This eliminates the need for investors to set up and manage digital wallets, private keys, and navigate cryptocurrency exchanges.

2. **Regulatory Oversight:**

   - **Regulatory Approval:** Bitcoin ETFs operate under the regulatory framework of traditional financial markets. This provides a level of oversight and investor protection that is often lacking in direct cryptocurrency investments. Regulatory approval can enhance investor confidence and attract institutional capital.

3. **Risk Mitigation:**

   - **Diversification:** Bitcoin ETFs can offer investors exposure to the price movements of Bitcoin without the need to hold the actual cryptocurrency. This allows for diversification within a traditional investment portfolio, helping to spread risk across different asset classes.
   - **Custody Solutions:** ETF providers typically employ secure custody solutions for holding the underlying Bitcoin, addressing concerns related to theft, hacking, or loss of private keys.

4. **Liquidity:**

   - **Market Liquidity:** ETFs are traded on established stock exchanges, providing high liquidity compared to some cryptocurrency exchanges. This liquidity can be especially beneficial for large institutional investors looking to buy or sell significant amounts of Bitcoin without causing substantial price slippage.

5. **Transparent Valuation:**

   - **Net Asset Value (NAV):** Bitcoin ETFs regularly disclose their Net Asset Value (NAV), providing investors with transparency regarding the fund's underlying value. This can help investors make informed decisions based on the fund's performance and market conditions.

6. **Tax Efficiency:**

   - **Tax Treatment:** Investing in Bitcoin ETFs can offer tax advantages compared to direct cryptocurrency investments. Capital gains taxes may be more straightforward, and investors may benefit from the tax efficiency associated with traditional investment structures.

7. **Market Integration:**

   - **Integration with Traditional Markets:** Bitcoin ETFs bridge the gap between the cryptocurrency market and traditional financial markets. As they become more integrated, the correlation between Bitcoin and traditional assets may evolve, potentially offering new opportunities for risk management and portfolio optimization.

8. **Institutional Adoption:**

   - **Attracting Institutional Investors:** The regulatory framework, transparency, and risk mitigation features of Bitcoin ETFs make them more appealing to institutional investors. As institutional participation in the cryptocurrency market increases, it can contribute to greater market stability and acceptance.

While Bitcoin ETFs offer various benefits, it's essential for investors to carefully evaluate the specific ETF structure, fees, and regulatory environment before making investment decisions. As with any investment, there are risks involved, and market conditions can impact performance.

Explore the Benefits of Bitcoin ETFs

Troye Sivan has so many bangers it's ridiculous. I heard this song on the radio and that chorus been stuck in my head since.

Troye Sivan - Got Me Started

October 1, 2003 reading text on my Nokia 3390

<https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1683656350046232578>

From Elon Musk:

*"Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing.*

*The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.*

*In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird."*

Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

Elon Musk Is Wrong (Simulation Theory Explained)

This is super inspirational. Long read but well worth it. Also his blog is great and he posts very frequently there and on Twitter [@alexwestco](https://twitter.com/alexwestco)

*"There is no epic launch. No epic event. No going absolutely viral.*

*I built the website with a no-code tool and launched it on ProductHunt out of the blue. If people did indeed subscribe, I would rush and create it before by the 1st of the next month and deliver them the list, as my website stated.*

*No pretend work this time.*

*Even those mockups, soft launches, Reddit posts and cold emails had started to feel like "pretend work" now.*

*Just launch already.*

*The launch went well, and I got ten paying customers. Just like that. With a $29/mo price tag, I was at $290 MRR!*

*Some subscriners had business emails as well. I had officially built a B2B product at last!*

*All and all, I went from no idea to $290/mo in two weeks."*

Alex West (getcyberleads.com, $500k/yr) - Two and a half years of building products [2020]

Apple is cutting off social media support!

MetaGPT takes a one line requirement as input and outputs user stories / competitive analysis / requirements / data structures / APIs / documents, etc.

Internally, MetaGPT includes product managers / architects / project managers / engineers. It provides the entire process of a software company along with carefully orchestrated SOPs.

MetaGPT - Given one line Requirement, return PRD, Design, Tasks, Repo

Mitch McConnell escorted away from cameras after freezing  during a news conference

 A Caltech Nobel laureate celebrates his 100th birthday. Then he gets back to work 

[Fable](https://venturebeat.com/games/fables-the-simulation-lets-you-build-a-society-of-ais-based-on-character-nfts/), a San Francisco startup running a big project dubbed [The Simulation](https://venturebeat.com/games/the-simulation-by-fable-makes-everyone-robert-ford/), has released Showrunner AI technology, dubbed SHOW-1, which can generate new episodes of TV shows

Paper: <https://fablestudio.github.io/showrunner-agents/>

AI-Generated South Park Episodes (by Fable)

Solid thread by Sam Hogan <https://twitter.com/0xSamHogan>

6 months ago it looked like AI / LLMs were going to bring a much needed revival to the venture startup ecosystem after a few tough years. 

With companies like Jasper starting to slow down, it’s looking like this may not be the case. 

Right now there are 2 clear winners, a handful of losers, and a small group of moonshots that seem promising. 

Let’s start with the losers. 

Companies like Jasper and the VCs that back them are the biggest losers right now. Jasper raised &gt;$100M at a 10-figure valuation for what is essentially a generic, thin wrapper around OpenAI. Their UX and brand are good, but not great, and competition from companies building differentiated products specifically for high-value niches are making it very hard to grow with such a generic product. I’m not sure how this pans out but VC’s will likely lose their money. 

The other category of losers are the VC-backed teams building at the application layer that raised $250K-25M in Dec - March on the back of the chatbot craze with the expectation that they would be able to sell to later-stage and enterprise companies. These startups typically have products that are more focused than something very generic like Jasper, but still don't have a real technology moat; the products are easy to copy. 

Executives at enterprise companies are excited about AI, and have been vocal about this from the beginning. This led a lot of founders and VC's to believe these companies would make good first customers. What the startups building for these companies failed to realize is just how aligned and savvy executives and the engineers they manage would be at quickly getting AI into production using open-source tools. An engineering leader would rather spin up their own 
@LangChainAI
 and 
@trychroma
 infrastructure for free and build tech themselves than buy something from a new, unproven startup (and maybe pick up a promotion along the way). 

In short, large companies are opting to write their own AI success stories rather than being a part of the growth metrics a new AI startup needs to raise their next round. 

(This is part of an ongoing shift in the way technology is adopted; I'll discuss this in a post next week.)

This brings us to our first group of winners — established companies and market incumbents. Most of them had little trouble adding AI into their products or hacking together some sort of "chat-your-docs" application internally for employee use. This came as a surprise to me. Most of these companies seemed to be asleep at the wheel for years. They somehow woke up and have been able to successfully navigate the LLM craze with ample dexterity. 

There are two causes for this:
1\. Getting AI right is a life or death proposition for many of these companies and their executives; failure here would mean a slow death over the next several years. They can't risk putting their future in the hands of a new startup that could fail and would rather lead projects internally to make absolutely sure things go as intended.
2\. There is a certain amount of kick-ass wafting through halls of the C-Suite right now. Ambitious projects are being green-lit and supported in ways they weren't a few years ago. I think we owe this in part to 
@elonmusk
 reminding us of what is possible when a small group of smart people are highly motivated to get things done. Reduce red-tape, increase personal responsibility, and watch the magic happen.

Our second group of winners live on the opposite side of this spectrum; indie devs and solopreneurs. These small, often one-man outfits do not raise outside capital or build big teams. They're advantage is their small size and ability to move very quickly with low overhead. They build niche products for niche markets, which they often dominate. The goal is build a saas product (or multiple) that generates \~$10k/mo in relatively passive income. This is sometimes called "mirco-saas."

These are the 
@levelsio
's and 
@dannypostmaa
's of the world. They are part software devs, part content marketers, and full-time modern internet businessmen. They answer to no one except the markets and their own intuition.

This is the biggest group of winners right now. Unconstrained by the need for a $1B+ exit or the goal of $100MM ARR, they build and launch products in rapid-fire fashion, iterating until PMF and cashflow, and moving on to the next. They ruthlessly shutdown products that are not performing. 

LLMs and text-to-image models a la Stable Diffusion have been a boon for these entrepreneurs, and I personally know of dozens of successful (keeping in mind their definition of successful) apps that were started less than 6 months ago. The lifestyle and freedom these endeavors afford to those that perform well is also quite enticing. 

I think we will continue to see the number of successful micro-saas AI apps grow in the next 12 months. This could possibly become one of the biggest cohorts creating real value with this technology. 

The last group I want to talk about are the AI Moonshots — companies that are fundamentally re-imagining an entire industry from the ground up. Generally, these companies are VC-backed and building products that have the potential to redefine how a small group of highly-skilled humans interact with and are assisted by technology. It's too early to tell if they'll be successful or not; early prototypes have been compelling. This is certainly the most exciting segment to watch. 

A few companies I would put in this group are:
1\. https://cursor.so - an AI-first code editor that could very well change how software is written.
2\. https://harvey.ai - AI for legal practices
3\.  https://runwayml.com - an AI-powered video editor

This is an incomplete list, but overall I think the Moonshot category needs to grow massively if we're going to see the AI-powered future we've all been hoping for.

If you're a founder in the $250K-25M raised category and are having a hard time finding PMF for your chatbot or LLMOps company, it may be time to consider pivoting to something more ambitious.

Lets recap:
1\. VC-backed companies are having a hard time. The more money a company raised, the more pain they're feeling.
2\. Incumbents and market leaders are quickly become adept at deploying cutting-edge AI using internal teams and open-source, off-the-shelf technology, cutting out what seemed to be good opportunities for VC-backed startups.
3\. Indie devs are building small, cash-flowing businesses by quickly shipping niche AI-powered products in niche markets.
4\. A small number of promising Moonshot companies with unproven technology hold the most potential for VC-sized returns.

It's still early. This landscape will continue to change as new foundational models are released and toolchains improve. I'm sure you can find counter examples to everything I've written about here. Put them in the comments for others to see.

And just to be upfront about this, I fall squarely into the "raised $250K-25M without PMF" category. If you're a founder in the same boat, I'd love to talk. My DMs are open.

If you enjoyed this post, don't forget to follow me, Sam Hogan. I share one long-form post per week covering AI, startups, open-source, and more. 

That's all folks! Thanks for reading. See you next week.

```markdown
```

AI Startup Market Outlook

&gt; "There will be no programmers in five years.” -Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI (Stable Diffusion)

I agree with this, except I’d put the timeframe more conservatively around 10 years.

I think in 5 years, most software development will be done by computers. Humans will prompt AIs that generate the code. AI at that point will be able to work within existing codebases and implement trivial feature requests on its own, detect and fix bugs, and debug itself.

In 10 years, AI will unquestionably be superior to humans in software development – just like AI is already better than humans at chess and Go. Handwritten code will not only be considered useless, but writing code by hand will be considered bad practice because humans will be considered less reliable and more error-prone than the machine.

A “software engineer” in 2033 will be more of a CTO-like managerial position where that person is in charge of the tech of an organization, but they’re delegating the tasks to AIs. Companies will need less and less software engineers as the AI advances and ultimately displaces humans. Of course there will be engineers building and maintaining the AI, researching, and working at the bleeding edge, but overall there will be significantly less demand for human engineers. What few jobs remain will be higher demanding since AI will only improve – and a human has to be able to do what an AI can’t in order to be useful – a bar that will only get higher and higher until it is eventually unattainable.

With humans rendered economically obsolete to machines, governments will have no choice but to implement a universal basic income in order to prevent mass poverty and chaos. Unfortunately a lot of workers will be displaced and people will suffer before governments implement UBI due to the enormous capitalistic brainwashing against UBI.

### Why this time is different

The reason technological advancement will actually result in net job destruction this time is because technology is getting better than humans and approaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can reason, and thus solve problems it hasn’t specifically been programmed to. In the past, technology had to be built to solve a specific problem in order for the human to be rendered obsolete (eg. the loom), but AGI can solve any problem. As we approach AGI, the only value that humans can provide will be that which AGI is not yet capable of solving. There is no upper bound on how smart AIs can get, but humans have a clear biological ceiling.

### AI will beat humans at software development

Just like AI is superior to humans at games like chess and Go, there’s no reason that AI won’t reign supreme when it comes to programming. AI can already pass Google’s coding interview, the bar exam, MCAT, etc. at a speed that no human could even come close to – like a flashlight competing with a sloth.

Humans look at ChatGPT now and laugh at its often nonsensical answers and hallucinations. Yes, but you’re looking at the equivalent of one of the first computers in the 1950s, or dialup internet in the 90s, a floppy disk with 1MB capacity, or mobile in 2007. Remember, ChatGPT was only released November 30, 2022. OpenAI’s Code Interpreter was released in beta last week to ChatGPT Plus users, an AI that can execute Python code and that you can upload files to. We’re in the first inning of an AI arms race, and at the speed at which things are progressing, it’s pretty clear that AI will be drastically more developed even just another 6 months from now.

As a software engineer, I have full awareness that most of what I know that makes me valuable will be obsolete within a decade because AI will be able to do it faster, cheaper, and better.

The stages of AI progress in software engineering look something like this:

1. Chatbots tell you the answer, for example by giving you code, which you then need to copy & paste in the right files – adjusting to fit within your codebase.
2. AI assistants write the code directly inside your codebase (eg. like “autocomplete” except with a task more complex than simply predicting the end of the word you’re typing)
3. AI assistants/agents execute the code, and debug itself to correct any errors

The reality is that the vast majority of dev work has already been done before, and thus is very trivial to replace with AI.

Humans basically get paid by arbitraging knowledge and producing some output. Software engineers have knowledge of tools, libraries, frameworks, commands, version control, infrastructure, data structures & algorithms, networking, APIs, etc. and use this to write computer programs and create software.

Search engines, Stackoverflow, open source, internet forums, tutorials, Youtube, books, etc. democratized much of this knowledge – but still require a human to research and utilize this information to create software by writing computer code.

AI can do all of this far superior to humans because AI has all of the world’s knowledge, and can execute at the speed of light.

Even if AI code were to be inferior to human code – which by the end of the decade certainly won’t be the case (just like AI beats humanity’s best chess and Go players), humans are still going to be rendered mostly obsolete. Businesses don’t care about code, they want solutions that improve their bottom line. If an AI can solve the problem with half the performance and code quality in a couple minutes, is available 24/7, and only costs pennies/dollars, vs. a team of engineers with $200k/yr salaries taking a month, only available during business hours, and with vacation time, maternity/paternity leave, and other liabilities – who do you think is going to win out? Remember the AI is only going to get better, faster, and more knowledgeable, while humans are biologically limited in work output, and there will be a point where humans no longer have the edge.

I think it’s fairly obvious at this point that AI will supplant humans, but **most people are drastically underestimating how quickly this is all going to happen because most humans struggle to understand exponential growth.**

I don’t have a crystal ball, but here are some rough conservative predictions I’ll make off the top of my head:

- 2024-07-14 – AI agents can create codebases, write code in existing codebases directed by prompts (eg. “add this feature”, “create this API endpoint that does this”), and debug itself (eg. detect compilation/runtime errors and patch them). The tech will be slow and awful at first so engineers will initially laugh at it claiming they’re not worried about their jobs.
- 2025-7-14 (2 years from now) – These AI agents will start becoming reasonable enough to where they’ll automate the more mundane / trivial work. People will still have to know what to prompt to get the right results, and modify and fine tune the resulting AI-generated code, but AI will start to take the driver’s seat. Instead of the default being for the human to start tackling the problem and ask the AI for help when in need of assistance, it’ll start to become expected to let the AI tackle the problem, and bring in a human when that fails.
- 2026-7-14 (3 years from now) – AI agents start becoming competent enough to where their belonging is no longer questioned. Everyone is using them in some capacity. AI is the driver, but humans are still necessary to direct them and handle the edge cases where they fail. Typical dev work like building trivial web apps and APIs is a commodity at this point and nobody is doing that by hand.
- 2027-7-14 (4 years from now) – AI is the norm. At this point as an engineer you’re either working on building the AI itself, or you’re using the AI. The job of an engineer has evolved from less hand-writing code, to more of a managerial CTO type position, except instead of delegating to other managers and engineers, one is delegating to AI agents.
- 2028-7-14 (5 years from now) – So much human work has been made obsolete by AI that all governments in the modern world have implemented universal basic income.

### How to position yourself

Tech was always a rapidly evolving field that required constantly staying on top of the latest advancements, but that’s only going to exponentially increase.

- Stay ahead of the curve on AI advancement. Ensure you’re leveraging the most advanced tools.
- Don’t be overly married or emotionally invested in any one programming language, library, framework, or technology. Assume it will get displaced sooner than you think.
- Learn architecture and systems design. As we move up the ladder of abstraction, an engineer’s focus and responsibility will be more on deciding *what* to implement, rather than actually implementing the thing. Individual contributors (ICs) will become more like managers directing AIs.
- Stay humble. Assume that everything you know will be irrelevant in a few years.
- Either seek to become more of a CTO-like generalist, entrepreneur, or pick a specialty/niche (eg. machine learning, distributed systems, product, etc.) to stay at the forefront of. If you specialize, realize that you’re competing with AI.
- Get your government representatives to implement a universal basic income so that AI advancement can become unquestionably a good thing for society, instead of the current system where it results in the masses losing their livelihoods and an arms race for an ever-dwindling pot of human jobs as robots overtake us. This can either result in the freedom and leisure utopia that Keynes envisioned, or mass poverty coupled with enormous wealth inequality – and inaction will lead to the latter.

Human Programmers Will be Mostly Obsolete in 5 Years

Just arrived to Osaka, Japan for a few days and looking for some nice cafes to work from. Any suggestions?

I'm writing this from a nice cafe I found here, but unfortunately they charge for the wifi (1,100 yen for 2 hours, 2,500 for day pass. I wish they told me this before I bought my drink)!

In Tokyo and Fukuoka I was able to find nice ones to work from, but in my brief walk here I didn't see much. But perhaps I'm not in the right area (this area feels super hipster [😂](https://emojipedia.org/face-with-tears-of-joy/)).

On a broader note, I wonder if there's a way to foster the knowledge share of nice cafes to work from. I recognize that it's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma problem. Had a vision for a site to solve this and built a basic prototype [nomadz.app](http://nomadz.app), but stopped working on it due to time constraints, but it's definitely something I want to build out in the future. There's just so much opportunity now with AI and everything it's hard to justify working on something like this, especially since I'm not financially independent and thus ultimately to a degree still a slave to money.