Patrick Collison
Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.
Patrick Collison did not write this page.
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Our reading
Personal agents will probably make people somewhat more rational in how they deal with companies.
Their wordsThanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies.
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Their wordsIt true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful.
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Their wordsToday, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals.
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Their wordsHow will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big.
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Their wordsIt's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.
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Their wordstaking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.
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Their wordsCompanies are in some sense the original superintelligence.
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Their wordsWell, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't).
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Their wordsIt's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc.
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Our reading
Focusing on making a product better is going to become a more effective strategy for companies.
Their wordsOn the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good!
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Their wordsTaken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine
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Their wordsPersonal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality.
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Their wordsThis has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great.
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Their wordsMuch of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions.
- 2 weeks earlier
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Their wordsI'm often struck by how figures in this period across many countries seem solemnly concerned with the character of the nation.
- 8 days earlier
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Their wordsconsuming its publications is so easy for the models (the world's knowledge is neatly serried in their pretraining corpora) and so cumbersome for most humans (with trenches of CAPTCHAs, accounts, and paywalls ensuring that only the unusually dedicated reader will ever make contact)
- 6 days earlier
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Their wordsArchitects oppose the kinds of buildings that most people like.
- 12 days earlier
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OpenAIHuggingFacecybersecurity
Their wordsOverall, I’m very surprised at how little media coverage there’s been around the OpenAI / Hugging Face attack. It’s clearly one of the most important things to happen this year.
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsMet a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.
- 4 weeks earlier
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Their wordsThat's a hell of a lot slower than knowing it in cognitive L1 cache. And you can have way more round trips in your brain than you can, you know, muttering through, you know, super whisper or typing it out or whatever.
↗Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook?youtube.com 1st of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsthere still seems to be an enormous premium on cognitive ability. And so, I wouldn't I I I I think, um, renouncing that before there's evidence that we've saturated, uh, those benefits would be premature.
↗Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook?youtube.com 2nd of 20 in this recording
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Our reading
Models can prove monumental theorems and still have never written an essay worth reading.
Their wordsI mean, it's very interesting, right? Because these can prove the Jacobian conjecture, you know, whatever. Uh and so clearly they're capable of these monumental feats. Um but somehow I still haven't read the LLM essay that I found super compelling.
↗Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook?youtube.com 3rd of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsYou know, I think a lot of parents think that dropping out is very risky and impune your reputation for the rest of your life and so forth. And as far as I can tell, nobody has ever cared.
↗Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook?youtube.com 4th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsYou know, in hindsight, I think that um that was a a poor intuition. Uh it's been pretty robustly and reliably the case over many decades in Silicon Valley has a surfeit of opportunities.
↗Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook?youtube.com 5th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI mean, obviously aviation was was a pretty big deal, but uh I I I don't think it was sort of quite the um the sociological rewriting that some of the you know excitable proponents at the time imagined. So I am you know it's it's hard to predict anything especially the future but I would I would take the under on this being the last couple of years to get a company going.
↗Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook?youtube.com 6th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordssomething we learned from YC uh was that the importance of focusing on very concrete easy to explain customer problems. Like it's it's very easy to to hallucinate or to you know imagine some customer problem that's not actually something viscerally felt by a person who would pay money.
↗Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook?youtube.com 7th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsSo, anyway, I'd say it like it both seemed like an obviously good idea in that people really wanted this, but also a bad idea in that nobody took it seriously. Um but I I think that I think the fact that it was ultimately the fact that it was grounded in such a concrete actual real user problem saved us.
↗Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook?youtube.com 8th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsUm in our domain, to answer your last question, because we had to do so much stuff around security and partners and money movement and infrastructure and reliability and you know, all the things. We just we didn't feel like we could scale a really good self-serve experience without getting a lot of the kind of the preconditions um and the infrastructure in place.
↗Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook?youtube.com 9th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd so, every, you know, every week, we had actual customer feedback, requests, new users coming in. We're learning things from reality as opposed to our own kind of hypothesized or extrapolated conception of it.
↗Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook?youtube.com 10th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsmany of the companies that were most successful over the last 10 years, so many of them are are very anti-lean startup, right? Uh whether it's, you know, the labs themselves or Anduril or um yeah, you you you you can go down the list. A lot of them have this characteristic.
↗Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook?youtube.com 11th of 20 in this recording