Artificial Ignorance

As someone who grew up with the Internet, I’ve occasionally found myself in strange corners of it. But more often than not, I’ve walked away from those experiences with more knowledge than before, and a constant reminder to stay open-minded. So when I stumbled upon Adelyn Moore , an escort who charges $3000 per hour and tweets about using AI for sex work, I wanted to learn more. In our candid and...

At OpenAI's DevDay, I had the pleasure of meeting Helena Merk, the CEO and founder behind Streamline Climate . Streamline is rethinking the way climate tech startups secure vital government funding, but leveraging AI to navigate, automate, and optimize the labyrinthine grant application process. In our interview from March (before the release of GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 Sonnet), Helena shares insights...

Back in January, I wrote about what business models might make sense with OpenAI’s GPT Store: As part of that, I included a screenshot of the featured GPTs, which included Consensus, the number one “Research & Analysis” GPT since day one. That said, the company existed well before the GPT Store - they’ve been working for years on an AI-native search engine for research papers. They’re also a part...

In our post-ChatGPT world, few companies have moved to integrate generative AI as quickly as Intercom. Mere weeks after ChatGPT first went viral, Intercom had its AI-powered chatbots in the hands of beta testers, and it's continued to iterate on its products since. That's why I was eager to talk with Fergal Reid, the VP of AI at Intercom and one of the company's key champions of generative AI. Bef...

Something that I’m often thinking about is AI’s ongoing impact on the arts. Clearly, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have unlocked a new engine for creativity, but it’s just that: an engine. Most of us wouldn’t get much value out of a V8 if it was just dropped in our garage, and most professionals probably can’t go from diffusion model to productive workflow without some extra steps. So designers,...

When I went through YC (many moons ago), I still remember hearing stories about startups with incredible traction and growth rates. The YC partners would use them as examples of companies that had found the elusive "product-market fit" and would advise cohorts of startups to follow in their footsteps. One of the companies was Teespring - at the time, it was the fastest-growing e-commerce company e...

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to sit down with Andrew Lee , the CEO of Shortwave and the cofounder of Firebase. If you're not familiar with Firebase, it's a platform for developers who don't want to host their own backend infrastructure. After being acquired by Google in 2014, it's now a key part of Google Cloud Platform and is used by millions of businesses. These days, Andrew works on Shor...