How to lose your mind
11:55 amGoogle said that the bar was supposed to open at 11:30 am, but a makeshift sign was taped to the door: “We open at 12:00.” It was already hot outside, and the sun was bright. We complained about it,...
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Benn Stancil
Co-founder of Mode; weekly essays on data, analytics, and the modern data stack.
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From Benn Stancil
19 posts
How to find insights
Not Secretariat, but his descendant.Surely, after so many years, this isn’t the answer, is it?—Since the time when people learned to count, the holy grail for every person who counted things was to...
How to have ideas
It’s a scene from our new post, The Man Who Knew Too Much. It starts out as holiday, and ends up as nightmare. Codenames is a board game played between two teams of players. At the start of the game, 25 cards are...
The model is man-made
A lot of machine, but still mostly man.It’s happened many times: Someone starts a company. They create a website, and an app. They want to know how many people visit their website or download their app, so they...
So that's what alignment means
Hackers, “locked” in their separate rooms.Here is what happened, they think:1OpenAI trains AI models. Models are increasingly measured by how well they can accomplish tasks on a computer; so, as part of the...
This is why we can't have nice things
I really thought it would be so simple:So here’s an obvious prediction: AI will follow a nearly identical trajectory [as cloud computing]. In ten years, a new type of cloud—a generative one, a commercial...
Brute intelligence
He’ll get it eventually.Terence Tao is a mathematician. He was 20 years old when he earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University; he was 24 years old when he became a full professor at UCLA; he was 31 when he won...
Is "jobs" a four-letter word?
An office, 2026.When three of us started a startup thirteen years ago, our first office was in a sublet of a sublet. The full office has space for about 70 people; we took a back room off to the side, among a scrum of...
Be a winner, or join one?
Kansas State?Your whole future depends on what you are going to do in the next hour. Nothing less. You have got to strike for your freedom, and strike now, for the moment may not come again.– Carmen Maria Machado,...
To weigh a watermelon
The average watermelon weighs between 16 and 20 pounds. The most common American variety—the Crimson Sweet, which was created in 1963 by Kansas State assistant professor Charlie Hall, following ten years of...
The frontier fails the Turing test
People have, typically, classified generative AI models into two categories: General-purpose models, and specialized models. The definitions are pretty self-evident. General-purpose models are designed and trained to...
Can AI make an iPhone?
Suppose it is 2004, and you are sitting in a neon white conference room with Steve Jobs. He has a dream: An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator, all in one device. There is an array of inspiration on a table in...
What will startups do in 2030?
Death of a SalesmanA high schooler is out there, somewhere. She is in tenth grade, sending Snaps, communicating in foreign tongues. She debates; she shops at Sephora; she posts about it; she is paid to post about it....
Get out of the token path
This whole post in 33 seconds.Kermit: Uh. That’s very effective.—If you want to make money, there may never be a more effective way of doing it than saying, “It is 2026, and I’m here to sell you...
Be reckless
Sports used to have a different rhythm. The shot would go up; a gasp; a pause; an explosion. In one final decisive moment: Diggs. Sideline. Unbelievable. Bang. Santa Maria. I don’t believe what I just saw. In...
WAC*
Joe Sparma: 864 innings pitched, exactly zero wins above replacement.A question that people often think about these days is, “how good is AI at doing stuff?” A lot of stuff that people do—like building...
The bonfire of our vanities
Am I working?Am I working, or am I wasting time? Working, surely. Because it’s what people do for work. Because if it works, there is money to be made. There is a business to be built. Every piece of software...
The revolution will be ticketed
If you are a bold entrepreneur who wants to change the world with ambitious artificial intelligence technologies, how should you do that? Two answers seem obvious:Build ambitious artificial intelligence...
Leaderbored
From a conversation with a smart friend,1 a fun theory:To do AI, you need a bunch of very fancy computers. However, because lots of people want to do lots of AI, there is a shortage of these computers. In a few years,...