Adam Killam

Haven't seen anyone post about the new Fable 5.2 score on the Remote Labor Index benchmark. We were at only 2.5% a year ago. Fable 5.1 was 17.9%. Fable 5.2 is 41.3%. The doubling time is about 3 months.

Man I am so disappointed in Jensen. So many people looked up to him including me. The story of rising from a dishwasher and waiter to the CEO of the most valuable company in the world. The story of a 41-year marriage to his college sweetheart. What the hell happened man? And of all the people to have affairs with you have to choose a spy and a freakin' NVIDIA executive? Come on dude.

Vancouver, Canada 🇨🇦 let’s build agents. Join @cognition + @onkeiki on Dec 5. Use Devin to turn your idea into a working agent on Keiki. Prizes: $1,000 cash + $2,000 Keiki credits + $2,000 Devin Cloud credits. Bring an idea. Apply: luma.com/vanspace-bkv7

Social media will shift from being the most popular channel consumers use to discover products to the 2nd most popular channel by 2030. LLMs are growing at a much faster rate and are expected to tie it. What's interesting is that by 2030, the 4th-place contender will be agents like Muse.

Introducing Grok Bot 1.0. AI teammates that work alongside your whole team. Share Bots, collaborate with them in Slack and Teams, invite them to meetings, and watch them learn and become more helpful.

Agents now make up the majority of web traffic, write more than half of new articles published online, and generate most of the code pushed to production. This is what the early stage of a platform shift looks like: adoption is measurable, but the business models it enables mostly aren’t visible yet. Welcome to the agent economy. a16z.news/p/welcome-to-the-b…

Now in beta: Businesses in ChatGPT. Claim your business, manage your information, and get insights on how people engage with you. Eligible businesses can also build a Business Agent to answer customers’ questions and help them explore what you offer. openai.com/index/introducing…

Swarm riders and Swarm-native companies AI-use even among highly AI-native people is power-law distributed. There seems to be a new class of people — call them “swarm riders” — who are capable of consistently commanding large swarms of agents to productive ends. This is a new kind of managerial skill, analogous to the skill it takes to manage large organizations of people, but wholly different in nature and of course more technical. Based on the swarm riders we know (including many at @Tempo and @Paradigm), these people are capable of productive token spend that is 1000x-10000x higher than median software engineers, and 100x higher than top 5% Claude Code users. The art of swarm riding is different from software engineering and more akin to machine learning, where practitioners grapple with black box systems: defining reward functions and evals, transmuting non-verifiable problems into verifiable problems, running experiments, etc. Swarm-native companies are a new class of company founded by and populated by swarm riders. These companies are organized around swarms in a way that conventional companies will struggle to replicate, as the cost of internal human coordination is sand in the gears of an effective swarm. Effective swarm-native companies will define the right reward functions and evals, remove functional and bureaucratic barriers, and then let the swarms cook. We’ve gotten to see a few swarm-native companies up close — reshaping financial rails @Tempo, building a new gaming platform @Spawn, cyber swarms at Cathedral Systems — and it’s clear these teams wield a significant advantage over pre-AI teams. Some questions I’ve been wondering about: 1) How fast will swarm riding diffuse through the economy? The implications for token spend could be significant. 2) Can swarms be effectively adopted by existing companies or will it generally track the formation of new swarm-native companies? 3) What becomes scarce as swarm capabilities themselves commoditize (through frontier models becoming better at swarming, swarm capabilities built into harnesses, etc)? Cultures and teams that can define reward functions well and otherwise get out of the way?

Gemini advice for next 10 years.

Agents are your new customers. Introducing Intents by @tryscope_app tryscope.app Now you can see why they discover your product, and why they leave. See what agents came to do, where they get stuck, and what's missing from your docs, content, and features. We draft the fix. You hit publish. Then track the impact.

A ‘hello world’ milestone for Project Suncatcher 🚀 After launching our prototype satellite a few weeks ago, we’ve now successfully sent a command up to orbit, booted up the TPU, ran the prompt, and received our first complete response back on earth - a haiku!

The most important book right now for understanding company building in the age of AI is about an agent... a hollywood one... Ari Emanuel's book ('roll the calls') -- there are TWO key lessons from it (one simple, one a bit more nuanced but even more important...) The two: First - the easy but important point... it is all sales right now as software commodifies, and the real lesson of first half of the book is simple -- as software commodifies and everything is just sales, if you get a 'no' call the next day... over and over and over... be relentless and keep asking til you get the answer you want. This mentality has historically not been in software / tech CEO DNA, but as the leverage of being 'unique genius' gets destroyed by arms-dealing AI / commodification of expertise (and certainly software) -- the winners are storytellers and salespeople. Second - the more intellectual but even more important point - WHAT AGENTING REALLY IS? Why does anyone pay an agent... for trust / the relationship. What do agents do? Whatever the clients need / everything - not one thing. Why this matters? it totally changes business building. In a world where tech is 'hard' being a leader is figuring something out about the universe, building an advantage around that competency, and doubling down over and over on your 'advantage' in providing something specific. No more... whether for consumers or for companies... if you are a 'business' in an agentic world, your asset it TRUST of your client, and you do as much for them as you can / anything (also send them random gifts). Your job is to get in the door, become trusted, and then pick up more and more business doing whatever the customer needs. This means the mission is SERVICE not PRODUCT or MISSION. The asset is the 'relationship' ... and the winners do everything they can for their clients. If you are building a modern business right now - this reality changes everything from how tech companies were built over the last 20 years or so... mission is less important, top-down vision is less important, instead what matters is sales, clients, and being flexible with 'free to develop' software and services to SOLVE problems for your actual specific customers. It this GOOD for most (startup) business... probably not. Agents get fired all the time, there is less enterprise value in what they build, etc... also per Ari's book, in the agenting world, scale is everything -- but from a technological deterministic perspecitve... this is where we are going, and founders that understand that (relenteless sales, how do i get in the door with something and build trust, and then what I 'do' is everything ... will be the RELATIVE winners)...

For fifty eight years, my boss in Tokyo believed that beef should be sliced as thin as paper. In Japan, we cook thin meat for four seconds in boiling broth. That is our way. Then last month, the YouTube algorithm showed Director Sato a video of a man in Texas smoking a brisket. It changed his life. On Monday morning, he called me to his desk. His eyes were bloodshot. "Have you seen this?" he whispered, turning his monitor toward me. "The American pitmaster does not sleep for sixteen hours. He sits by the fire in the dark. He guards the meat like a castle." I said, "Sir, it is just a barbecue." He slammed his hand on the desk. "This is not cooking," he said. "This is a vigil." Last Saturday was our annual company picnic by the river in Kanagawa. Normally, we grill thin meat and yakisoba for two hours and go home at 2:00 PM. I arrived at 9:30 AM to help set up. Director Sato was already there. I want to be accurate here: he had been sitting in a folding chair since 10:00 PM on Friday night. He was wearing a towel around his head and staring at a massive black barrel smoker he had imported from Oklahoma. Inside I said: THIS MAN HAS ABANDONED CORPORATE LIFE FOR THE SMOKE. When we tried to help him, he held up a pair of metal tongs and clicked them twice. "Step back," he said calmly. "The stall has begun. Nobody opens the lid." Twelve Japanese accountants stood in complete silence around a barrel for four more hours. Nobody dared to eat a single noodle until he gave the signal. At 1:45 PM, he sliced the meat. It fell apart on the cutting board. My boss looked at the pink smoke ring, nodded once, and wiped a single tear from his cheek. He has already submitted an official budget request for a trailer smoker for next fiscal year.

Introducing Gemini 4 Carbon, it's a big jump over Argon which we released just 2 weeks ago. Gemini 4 Carbon is SOTA on cyber, long horizon tasks, ranks #1 on Artificial Analysis V5, significantly improves on usability in domains like coding, and is more aligned.

It’s kinda crazy to me that we melt sand down, clean it to 99.99999% purity, literal wizards have to draw it slowly into an ingot, we cut it, inscribe a hundred billion little on/off switches on it, and when you run electric current through it you can do basic arithmetic, which when you do enough of it can do any math on the planet, and which describes reality well enough that we can teach it the ontological meaning of words and their distance from each other on a high-dimensional space, and if you ask, it can tell you what word comes next and that apparently is powerful enough that if you do it a hundred billion times it’s the smartest thing to ever exist oh yeah and we use this primarily for email