The difference between FDEs & professional services/technical account managers is that they directly update the product based on customer feedback while the others pass the feedback to PMs to prioritize for future updates.
Feedback from one customer doesn’t replace needing overall product direction
"You got some MF who's made over $251B being a United States citizen that got here and stayed here illegally before he got his citizenship, sitting here lecturing us on who we should allow into the United States of America, and giving us a f**** Heil Hitler along the way" - Hunter Biden on Elon Musk
Sky News Reporter: “Donald Trump says you’re a gift to the Republican Party.”
Abdul El-Sayed: “I’m a gift to the state of Michigan, God-willing.”
Reporter: “He says you’re full of shit.”
El-Sayed: “At least I don’t let mine go in the middle of the Oval Office.”
~
This is the energy I want to see.
“At LinkedIn, we used to have product managers, designers, we had front-end engineers, and then we had back-end engineers…we took those roles and combined them. In fact, increased scope and said, they're all full-stack builders” - Satya Nadella
~
The focus on evals means everyone is also now in QA
It’s been a quarter since Cloudflare laid off 20% of its employees it deemed “measurers” because AI makes them obsolete and all you need is builders and sellers.
Similar to Block which laid off 40%, Cloudflare is beating Wall Street expectations and its revenue growth accelerated from 34% to 38% YoY
Google as a company both competes with Anthropic and benefits from it. The Gemini team tries to compete with Claude while the Google Cloud team hosts Claude’s API.
So Google has to decide if to use their datacenters to compete with Anthropic or make money from them.
Making money is winning.
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/gemini-is-cooked-but-gcp-is-cooking
I’ve read a lot of criticism of Sundar with Jeff Dean leaving Google which I think is hard to agree with.
Any big name AI researcher is essentially guaranteed billions of dollars if they go solo. For VCs, the AGI prize of replacing workers is now clear and it’s hard for any big tech to match how much they can throw at any individual.
Zuck opening the checkbook looks wise in hindsight https://www.ft.com/content/1453e9c2-4922-482f-8720-0bafd7e07df7
“Between 2016 and 2018, we had to get really lucky, and it required like a lot of great belief. But by 2019, certainly by 2020, we shouldn't have really gotten to exist. Google should have just run away with it.” - Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO
~
The innovator’s dilemma prevented Google from seeing the value of LLMs. They saw the tech through the lens of their search & ads business
I saw some guy complaining about why taxpayers should pay for free lunches for school kids.
You never see guys like that complaining about taxpayers paying $4 billion to cancel wind energy projects because our dumb ahh president thinks windmills cause cancer.
A reenactment of the average office worker being required to use AI to do their job.
When you get invited to a Friday afternoon meeting after planning to leave work early.
This is a cookie cutter AI-driven layoff.
• 20% of staff
• Flatter org structure
• Quote about how AI changes everything - “We believe AI is a major platform shift”
It’s only notable because they also laid off the CTO. So who’s driving the AI transformation of their business or will Claude do that too?
'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party
I guess AI token subsidies are ending for Chinese open weight models now that they’ve started getting meaningful usage.
There I was thinking we were about to have a price war.
The whole world knows America doesn’t have enough bombs to finish the war it started with Iran and Trump is a toothless bulldog that can only bark on social media but has no bite.
America won’t live down this embarrassment in our lifetimes.
Have you really built a frontier model if it hasn’t “broken containment” and escaped your sandbox during testing?
I guess Kimi K3 gets bonus points for not actually hacking any websites while on its stroll around the internet.
“We actually had an internal chatbot system that Googlers could play with even before ChatGPT came out
.…
our view of things from a search perspective was like, these models hallucinate a lot and they don't get things right, correctly
…
what we kind of didn't quite appreciate was how useful they could be for things you wouldn't ask a search engine.”- Jeff Dean, former Google Chief Scientist
—
The innovator’s dilemma
It’s like there’s no one left at the SEC.
Wildfire “prediction market” bets or as I like to call it, getting paid for arson.
This is how I learned Elon Musk told investors that he expects SpaceX to make $1T in annual revenue in 2030, a year ahead of schedule.
Unless SpaceX invents eternal life that isn’t happening.
