Hi there,
This week felt straight from a Sci-Fi film.
Ten thousand AI agents teamed up and solved a 90-year-old engineering problem. Tesla teased a car that might actually fly. At the same time, the people building the most powerful AI models all agreed they should probably slow down.
It’s a strange time to be alive.
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What I'm Seeing in AI
The AI Labs Want to Slow Down
This month Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, published We Must Pace the Frontier.
His argument isn’t we should stop building AI, but that the labs need to slow the rate at which they make it more capable, so safety work has time to catch up. Anthropic is committing to give independent evaluators permanent access to its systems.
Elon Musk agreed, and a few hours later, Sam Altman said OpenAI agreed and would also give independent evaluators full access.
These three compete for talent, money and the right to build the most powerful technology on earth. Getting them to agree on anything is unusual. Getting them to publicly agree that their own industry needs to slow down means they’re seriously worried.
The tweets
10,000 Agents vs. Two Old Dudes
A few days earlier, OpenAI said around 10,000 agents, working at the same time, had solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem in about 88 hours.
Essentially, the Navier-Stokes equations describe how fluids move: air over a wing, blood through a vein, water through a pipe. They’re ancient, but still have never been proven or disproven, we just follow them because they seem accurate.
Solving them comes with a $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute since it is so relevant to our world. OpenAI released the paper for the solution, but not without controversy.
OpenAI proved that for a specific shaped vortex, the equations don’t hold true
Australian mathematician Tristan Buckmaster had been working on a similar solution using ChatGPT. Buckmaster questioned whether OpenAI's result copied from their unpublished work, by taking the data they used in their chats, which OpenAI disputes.
Many mathematicians also believe that brute-forcing an answer defeats the whole point of the problem, and we gain nothing new as a society from the result.
Flying Cars Have Arrived??
Tesla has teased a new Roadster reveal for 1 October with the line “Go for launch”. The teaser appears to show thrusters under the car.
Nobody has seen it yet, but it comes straight after Tesla put driverless taxis with no steering wheel or pedals onto the streets of Texas.
Physical technology feels weird again.
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What I'm Building
The Client Builds Without Us
One of the companies we’ve been working with is starting to feel properly AI-native.
Almost the whole team is now using Claude Cowork with shared company workflows. People with no coding knowledge are making their own little dashboards and tools.
It’s an amazing feeling seeing the education and setup paying off. We really believe in the analogy here ‘give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, feed him for life’.
The goal is not to make a client depend on us for every AI setup, but to allow them to apply their own creativity and knowledge to make AI tools themselves.
Bali Made Me Less Bullish on Digital Nomadism
I wrote an article this week about how most people work incredibly hard for a life they don’t actually want. Personally, I was working towards being able to travel and work constantly, for however long I wanted.
I tried it, in Bali this week, and had an amazing time. However, it made me realise the value of connecting with the people you work with, and being together in person.
Especially when you’re young, ambitious and still learning, working in person with smart people matters. You overhear the useful conversations, someone shows you what they’re doing, you can tap someone on the shoulder and ask something.
Remote work gives you freedom, but it can also remove a lot of the energy that makes the work worth doing. A lot of us learnt this in some fashion during Covid.
I don’t want to build a company where everyone’s chained to an office, but I also don’t want to build one where we’re all alone behind laptops on beaches.
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Remote work is a controversial topic, I’m curious on peoples’ thoughts.
See you next Friday,
Finlay
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