Sun, Apr 13, 2025

This ability to define your desired outcome in crisp, complete terms is one of the most important superpowers of the AI era.

• Nomic Embed Multimodal models are the current SOTA on multi-modal embeddings. Notably, they embed PDFs natively.
• Hailuo Speech-02 is the best speech model right now beating ElevenLabs. It has excellent voice cloning. Pricing: $30/1M chars. 10% of ElevenLabs, 2X of OpenAI TTS
• PaperBench is an open testing framework from OpenAI that requires models to replicate the research work in papers. It has ~8,000 tasks evaluated by LLMs and with LLMs judging the judges as well. The code is well worth studying.
• Runway Gen 4 was released with very high character consistency and longer durations
• Dreamina creates lip-synced videos from audio + a single image. Hedra is better for animated characters, though.
• Meta shared but has not released Mocha, an open character generation model that generates new characters speaking based on an audio you provide. It is not based on existing images but the quality is very good
• All Hands has a free online version where you can fix GitHub issues.

• Form close friends. Care, ask, and share.
• Become a do-er. Stay mindful of the problem or opportunity you're deferring.

• We have linguistic boundaries in media today more than national boundaries. The Chinese language media, for example, is a very different ecosystem.
• China culturally struggles with the exercise of branding and cultural power, unlike the west, which has adopted assertive and opinionated branding.
• You really learn the character of a region only by traveling
• Similarities arise from unexpected sources. For example, Japan and Ecuador have similar culutures - both are disaster prone locations.
• AI unlocks so many social research possibilities that were not possible before, e.g. by interpreting and classifying what people share in different situations.
• Companies send clients to third party trainings (e.g. at Harvard) along with their employees - to learn clients' real pain points! Education has become a tool for customer experience. Schools are tying up with companies for this (e.g. with Emeritus)
• International Schools Partnership provides services to independent schools for a small stake. It's an interesting business model.
• Research for colleges is a business model that's at risk thanks to Deep Research (e.g. analyse sustainability practices of listed companies.)

• In his experience, investors tend to let you run the show (e.g. ask what you want rather than push in a specific direction) unless there is trouble
• We discussed the "running out of problems" problem with AI. His suggestion: List problems we dropped or eliminated for lack of time/capacity. This filter is a blindspot.
• Even if you know how to do someting, use AI to discover an alternate solution approach. That's the path to 10X (rather than incremental) optimization.
• Having AI create end-to-end pitch videos based on a product idea is now a reality. (He showed me one for his product.)
• Areas to explore with Deep Research are:
  • What hidden trends is media misdirecting away from? What are second order effects and hidden gameplays?
  • Which organizations would be good clients to target? What would be an apt pitch pitch for them?
• Experience dining is an emerging theme.
• Having LLMs explain scenarios (i.e. what might happen if ...) based on parameters can help understand/quantify the impact of actions, and therefore what to do.