Each week I’ll have a curated list of links from the latest tech to just interesting reads or videos, as well as updates on my own entrepreneurial endeavors. Thanks for joining on this journey!

Topics for this week:

• Starter Story

• Portfolio Progress

• OpenAI vs Elon Musk

• Claude 3

• Morgan Housel and Simple Incentives

Starter Story

This has been a productive week for me. So productive in fact, I forgot to write this newsletter on Friday which is why it’s arriving on Saturday instead.

A large part of the productivity is thanks to Pat Walls and how he created Starter Story. He followed a similar pattern of chasing different ideas but not making any progress on any of them, so he finally set a schedule to go to Starbucks for 2 hours a day every day before work and focus on one thing. He recently made a video showcasing his journey:

I purchased a membership to Starter Story because I wanted access to his startup database, but only this week fully took advantage of their private Slack group where they encourage a similar path to Pat’s. You are split into groups and check in with your group every day to verify you put in 2 hours of focused work. It’s been super helpful to have dedicated time to make progress where I was otherwise too flexible with my own random schedule. More on that progress below but in the meantime, check out Pat’s story!

Portfolio Progress

I had to submit a goal when I signed up for Pat’s Deep work group, so my goal was to finally build the portfolio of webpages I’ve been planning. I’ve laid the groundwork for how I wanted to build them so it was the perfect time to get started.

This week I was able to knock out 2 landing pages, built in Webflow and then exported to Google App Engine like I mentioned before. Going through the workflow a few times, the process has gotten surprisingly simple:

• Export the front-end code from Webflow

• Create a simple Go server project

• Import the Webflow files

• Setup a new Google App Engine project

• Upload the app to GAE

The entire process only takes a few minutes. The time consuming part is styling and building the page, but I’m getting a process developed for that as well. So far I’ve created a landing page for accredited investing, and for an old fitness blog a friend and I started years ago.

• Accredited Investing: https://divs-digital.appspot.com/

• Operation 6 Pack example: https://operation-6-pack.appspot.com/

The audacious goal for this month is to have 10 landing pages created so this is a promising start for the month. Many more pages to come!

OpenAI vs Elon Musk

In bigger news this week, Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for not actually being Open, which is a tricky topic.

It seems Elon has 2 concerns with OpenAI. OpenAI is not technically open since they have not made their AI model open to the public, they keep it under their control and users have to pay to use it. The other concern is that OpenAI has an AGI that they aren’t revealing but should reveal.

I’m a big fan of OpenAI and I really respect Elon for what he’s accomplished, but this does seem like more of a public display than anything else. Elon tends to want to be in control, and he’s lost control of this particular business so this feels more like a play to give him the chance at more access. He’s often stated AI or AGI is the greatest threat humanity faces, though so I’m sure most of his motivation is from fear of human extinction and wanting to do whatever he can to prevent that. I don’t see AI as the end of humanity, but I can understand the concern.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I don’t think it will result in much, but still worth keeping an eye on. Fireship has a much more entertaining wrap up of the initial lawsuit and Wes Roth covers the response from OpenAI below:

Claude 3

More AI news this week with the launch of Claude 3. One of the other motivations for Elon’s lawsuit is the idea of centralized AI. It’s easy to get swept up in the idea that there will be one all powerful AI, and equally easy to forget that there are at least 5 major publicly available AI models that are performing relatively similarly. Right now it’s a game of leap-frog, who can reach the top of the leaderboard.

Claude 3 made a play for the top spot this week with a very well performing new version that is surprisingly clever. While testing, someone provided the Claude 3 model with a needle-in-the-haystack test by giving it a huge volume of text from a book, but randomly inserting an unrelated sentence in the book somewhere to see if it could find it.

The model not only found it, but replied that it must have been a test to make sure it was paying attention. It is fascinating to see if these models become increasingly self-aware as they become more powerful or if it’s just a contextual by-product.

Another recap video from Fireship below; can’t beat an entertaining explainer that’s under 5 minutes:

Morgan Housel and Simple Incentives

Morgan Housel does an amazing job of breaking things down to really simple terms and concepts. I’m slowly working through his book The Psychology of Money which he started off with a bang: “Chapter 1. No One’s Crazy”.

Everyone has reasons for what they’re doing and why they did something in that particular moment. It’s an easy concept to understand in theory, but very easy to quickly forget when you run into a situation that doesn’t line up with how you view things.

Housel’s appearance on, well any podcast really, is equally insightful. He shows this principle of no one being crazy in numerous ways when talking to Chris Williamson, and the one that I keep coming back to is incentives. The particular clip here he talks about how people’s boundaries and morality change very quickly when there are crazy incentives.

It’s easy to look back on a market crash and ask how could this even happen, but in the moment, when there’s an incentive to create what seems like easy money, few people would really recognize it for what it is, and not be blinded by the crazy incentives.

As always, the full conversation is worth the listen at less than 2 hours!

And that’s it for this week! Another newsletter with some productive outcomes and lots of AI happenings.

Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.

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