Technology, Connected - How to Stay Valuable in the Age of AI: Packy McCormick on Why the Most Human Wins

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

AI can now produce text, images, analysis and software at low cost. That weakens the value of work built around repeatable processes, standard templates and easily replicated outputs. In his latest Not Boring essay Packy McCormick argues that people will remain valuable by developing qualities that are harder to automate: judgement, originality, humour, emotional intelligence, physical experience and a distinct point of view.In this episode, we discuss:How to stay relevant in an AI-driven economyWhy prompt engineering is unlikely to provide a lasting advantageWhich jobs and tasks are most exposed to AI automationWhy abstraction and first-principles thinking are becoming more importantHow originality and specificity create value when generic output is abundantWhy founders should think more like comedians than consultantsWhat emotional intelligence and embodied experience contribute to workHow to raise children in a world of unlimited AI-generated contentHow people can evaluate truth when synthetic media becomes commonplaceWhy being recognisably human may become an economic advantageThe argument isn’t that humans can compete with AI by producing more work or completing it faster. It’s that value shifts when competent output becomes widely available.This conversation examines what people, founders and creators can offer when execution is cheap, templates are everywhere and machines can reproduce the average.--SHOW LINKS:Download the Not Boring strategy guide - https://www.notboring.co/ Join your people: www.thinkingonpaper.xyzInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thinkingonpaperpodcast/Watch On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPEusidDNO4&t=645s&ab_channel=ThinkingOnPaper--Timestamps(00:00) Disruptors And Curious Minds(00:43) Not Boring Newsletter(02:00) Is AI Really Taking Our Jobs? (03:07) Commoditization Of Human Skills(05:12) The Ingredients Of Outputs Are Changing(07:39) Abstraction: Aim Higher(09:29) Be A Business, Man(10:24) Advice For Parents(11:00) AI Collateral Damage(12:52) The Value Of Ideas(13:54) Know Yourself(14:38) Differentiation And Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy(17:00) Will We Be More Human?(18:10) Hot Buttons(20:13) When Resources Are Scarce: Move Up The Stack(21:22) Who Turned Off The Funny Button?(23:10) How Do You Find Scarce?(27:19) Creativity For Everyone(29:15) I Hate Perfect(32:55) The US V UK AI Comparison(35:24) The Energy Cost--#ai #notboring #packymccormick

Disruptors and Curious Minds, welcome to another episode of Thinking on Paper, your personal vehicle to understand the intersection of culture and emerging technology, how it applies to business, how it applies to family, how it applies to relationships. That's what we are here to do. My name is Jeremy. This is Mark. And as always, we have this episode broken down into multiple segments. We have a first interview segment, which will be interesting today because we're doing

something just a little different. we have a hot button segment, which is turning out to be the fan favorite with Mark Fielding, and we have the news, and then we unpack a bunch of stuff backstage at the end. Mark, how are you, and what the heck are we talking about today? I'm very well. I'm very optimistic ahead of today's show.

We're going to be unpacking Pachy McCormick's not boring newsletter, and this was your idea. It was a great idea, and I think it came a very pertinent time for me personally because I am a content creator, a writer, and the last couple of years, I have noticed my clients, the number of my clients declining,

my work declining, as more and more people use AI and keep the work in house. I need to adapt or I need or I will die. And so today in this newsletter, Paddy McCormick kind of outlines a strategy for surviving, flourishing, thriving in a world of AI. He writes it as a secret memorandum from the Boring Institute to the Council of Humans on Earth. That's you, that's me, that's our listeners.

And the idea is that it will give people who don't want to lie down, roll over and let AI take their jobs a toolkit to fight back. We love toolkits. We love frameworks. We want easy buttons. We want answers, especially to big problems, right? And the way, the way, let's just jump right in. The way, the reason why this was so appealing, I think, like you said right now, a lot of people are like, man, what is going on with AI especially? I hear it's like replacing something that I kind of do.

I'm a coder. I'm a writer. I'm a graphic designer. Like now people can just push a button and some cool stuff comes out. Like, how do I, how do I maintain my participation in the economic engine, right? And as practice says that's fueled, isn't it, by the leaders of these AI companies who every day say that critical thinking, creativity, content creation, your jobs, whether you're designing, whatever you're doing, they're at risk now. And that makes more fearful. That makes us more scared.

That makes us question our usefulness and our ability to survive, doesn't it, and work and earn money? Definitely a somewhat of a frightening proposition. And that's why we want to help kind of share some of these great insights that he had, The memorandum is, what, about 35 pages? I mean, would love, I mean, definitely read it. It's super valuable. But here are some nuggets to kind of set the stage. So let's start with a couple of defining terms.

Let's talk about commoditization. And then we'll talk about compliments, right? What people are concerned about right now, and rightfully so, is that AI is commoditizing certain human skills, right? Certain human skills like writing, like graphic designing, like coding, like marketing, like, you know, all of these other things, all of these things that humans do very well. Now machines are able to approach the threshold of doing them equal or better, at least in certain tasks. And the cost for doing said thing is coming down too, which makes it even more and more appealing.

But the important thing to think about here is not AI is going to replace or commoditize humans. AI is going to commoditize and replace certain human skills. And if you live in just the window of that singular human skill, let's say, I mean, look at calculators, right? So the Karen Johnson, the brilliant mathematician who helped get John Glenn back from the moon, right? She was what was called a computer. She was a computer, like literally.

And she had a piece of paper. She had, you know, a chalkboard, you know, maybe a slide rule or whatever the heck else it is. But she literally was a computer. So now, even in that movie, there was a movie out about that whole thing, talked about IBM coming in. And now these computers where you fed cards and all of that stuff. That was teased in very early in the essence of that story. But are mathematicians still valuable? Hell yes.

Is it easier for a mathematician to do cooler? things by offloading some of the, we called it grunt work last time and doing that grunt work quicker and faster. So the way I look at it, Mark, I think the ingredients are changing. The ingredients to do your job are changing. And those ingredients are your former outputs of work. Like, that's a pretty crazy thing to think about, right? Your input equals your output. So change. your input. I like that, the analogy of the mathematician, if you used a modern day, a marketing expert, somebody who their job is to write emails, write tweets, write deep dives on LinkedIn, write white papers. That, if you just do that, if you just focus on that, you are going

to be superseded by AI is going to do it better than you, it's going to do it quicker than you, and it's going to do it cheaper than you. And your ability, you might still be able to do it, but you're going to have no value. Your value will decrease because there is a cheaper alternative to you, a replacement, a substitute, what he calls a substitute. The more machine-readable and interchangeable your processes and outputs are, the more troubled you are in, he says. And so I was thinking about music as an analogy, you're a musician.

I was thinking about the analogy of music and how in the 1970s, Pink Floyd got boring, so you had the sex pistols and the remotes. Like, this is this kind of idea where the input changed the output. They built on something that came before it. And I think the point of this memorandum was, and correct me if I'm wrong, but if you, like, take what AI gives and build upon it, create something new, just add it. If your input is books and comments.

conversation, add AI into that input to create a new output. Is that, am I thinking about along the right lines there? Yeah, the way, the way I think about it is, he talks about it, there's a, there's a thread throughout this whole paper of aiming higher, of, of stepping into the next higher level of abstraction, right, which is, which is interesting because we've always talked about this, you know, this idea of, of polymaths, of interdisciplinary thinking, of nexus thinking, Julio Otino plug, ding, ding, where you, you don't have just your convergent mind activated, where you're specializing in one thing, you're actually able to explore multiple threads and see in between multiple

things, right? So that's this higher level of like, okay, what do the adjacencies between all of these things that I'm doing? And you can't think about that kind of stuff. You don't have time to think about that kind of stuff, if your heads down buried running through a pile of data to get insight on something or to create the framework of a website, right? So let's look at, let's look at as an entrepreneur, all of these tools pre-AI that started coming out to help entrepreneurs, right? You had Squarespace where I didn't have to, you know, HTML code a website anymore, right? You had, let's see, what else? Like QuickBooks, right, where I didn't have to hire an accountant to send invoices and manage my AR and, like, do financial statements, very simply high level, right?

So these are mechanical extensions of humanity, which helped entrepreneurs. And you have this big push right now. This is going to be really interesting. You have this big push for people to, and he references is this in his memo for people to kind of be not just a, he used to quote, not just be a business man, but be a business, comma, man. And I don't know if that was a Rick Rubin quote from his book, but he referenced Rick Rubin. But this idea of like, what can you do to think about making something, about creating something, about doing something instead of participating in someone else's doing of something? That's where things could get really interesting. That's where entrepreneurs could really scale. But, you know, who knows, there's probably a whole other side of this

where everything gets automated. So if everything gets automated and everything is, there's money even a thing anymore if everything gets done by something else other than humans. Like, does money become something that's not anything anymore? That's Ian M. Banks and the culture novels, which I often talk about. Yeah. So he does talk about financial analogies. He says become an entrepreneur. He says, quote, people who compete for specific jobs will increasingly lose to machines, which is what I'm going to tattoo on my children's arms, I think, so that they know that in the future, because that comment really struck me. People who compete for specific jobs will increasingly lose to machines.

And I worry, okay, here's one pushing back on, become an entrepreneur, work for yourself. I mean, perhaps an analogy for the LinkedIn, for our LinkedIn fans is, you know, personal brand building, okay, transcend the job. That's really, really difficult. Become an entrepreneur. Unleash your own shackles. Be free. What does that look like in reality for normal folk? I think there might be a lean to give the advantage to someone that is more entrepreneurial-minded than someone who is comfortable wanting to just specialize in one particular skill? Like we're taught in school? Yeah, to specialize, right?

So he references this, and I talk about this all the time. And, you know, in 1800s, the Prussian school model gets referenced, right? Not to say, you know, all Russians or Prussians or people from that area are robots and machines, but their model of school that basically created the same individual to be spun out to work in factories as a widget was co-opted by Western culture. a long, long time ago. And, you know, I'm not going to jump on soapbox for too, too long because there are great schools and great teachers and people who have a high level of care in educating. There is also a model that's still a little bit broken that's spitting out widgets where it needs

to be spitting out creators. It needs to be spitting out thinkers that are able to activate ideas. And there's a segment of this, too, that I thought was really interesting. You know, as entrepreneurs, is you always you always hear, well, yeah, great ideas or dime a dozen. It's all about execution, right? But now with AI, he points out, and I agree with him, AI could make execution a hell of a lot easier than it used to be putting the value on the ideas, right? Putting the value on seeing the adjacencies, the interdependencies, the things living in the smoke between two subjects where you could figure out as a human what to do with it, what to make what he, He calls a novel experience, a new novel experience, but doing that with more efficient tools.

Yeah, what does they say? Novel experiences are the human currency. Commoditorization reduces the value of specific capabilities while simultaneously enabling the growth of new experiences. And this is why most human wins. What does a new experience, if you're a graphic designer, what does a new human experience look like, feel like, sound like? How do you get there? At what point does the AI beat the human at seeing the individual? of dependencies in seeing the clouds and the shadows between subjects.

Polymath AI AGI is the ultimate polymath, is it not? I really like this memorandum. I think you've got to read it a few times and really, really kind of know yourself to know how you can apply it to your existence, to your job, to your career, to what you are interested in. And that's a difficult part. Yeah. And he references a lot.

I mean, he's a, he's a, he's a heck of a researcher and writer and, and, and, and, and, connecting old things to new things. And we talk about how anything new, rooted in old, is easier to understand. You know, there are a lot of older business models that he references Michael Porter's competitive strategy written in the 1980s that talks about these three kind of generic business strategies, right? One is overall cost leadership. The other is focus. And the third is differentiation, right? And only one time is now available to us. That's it. Just one of them, right? Because he talks about the on the cost side, you know, cost declines are just are just rocking and rolling right now. And he says never bet against the curve when it's going that way, which is right.

And then the ability to focus on something, something is better than us at focusing on one particular thing. And it's going to only improve, you know, with these skill sets of coding and math and all of that stuff. So what do we do? What is what do we lean on? What's the third one, Mark? Differentiate ourselves. Differentiate our thinking. differentiate our products. Differentiate. Well, yeah, how do you do that? There's an interesting callback.

What drew me in to this, the TEP that he did to this memo in his actual newsletter, drew me in because he started talking about very human things that technology are these mechanical extensions of ourselves as technology, the phone, the computer, the, you know, the car, the plane, all of these things are extensions of, of us as humans. And he teased the idea of like, hey, there's a circular thing happening here

where we're eventually going to bust through this tech cycle, this tech extension cycle, back to humanity, back to what makes us human. So I start thinking about this. And as I see technology getting crazier,

people looking at their phones, people like, you know, locked in and not, communicating on a human to human level, I start thinking about, hey, there's going to be a thinking on paper cave where we have record players and books and candles and pencils and things, a little couch to where we can have meaningful discourse to understand the meaning of us and the planet. Like, I don't know, did you, what do you think about that as a, as a, as a,

as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, a, as a, a, as a, a, a, a, a, a, a and more human in the future? The winners, not the losers, the minority, not the majority. I don't see us turning back. We are a technological species. We are an AI species. We are going into the future, dancing hand in hand with what we've created. And perhaps there has to be for some reconnection with what came before in order to

surpass what exists. But on mass, I think there's going to be a lot of collateral damage. I think there's going to be a lot of losers and I think there's going to be a lot of people being lost. Is this a way? This is really, I just, if I had to, my concern with this memorandum is that it's not applicable for most people. All right. Time for the fan favorite. Segment, Hot Buttons, Five Questions with Mark Fielding.

Taxi driver or Raging Bull. Taxi driver. What's your superpower? One word. Synthesis. Describe AI in one word. Offloading. Mindfulness or.

Dental meditation. Mindfulness. We are one or we are infinite? Both. No? There you go. Five in five. Well done, Mark.

Mark, hit me with a favorite quote from this paper that you pulled. Don't just move up the stack, run up the stack. As something is becoming commoditized, determine how to use it as an input to propel yourself up the stack. Offer what becomes scarce and precious when something once scarce and precious becomes abundant. and cheap, offer what becomes scarce and precious when something once scarce and precious becomes abundant and cheap. So what would be, so he references standard oil, right? Rockefeller and standard oil when, you know, oil became, like crude oil became cheaper, right?

And he, that was a resource that was once more precious. Price came down. Availability was more accessible. So he took that one input. it and, you know, went into distribution, went into refining and that sort of thing. So he took that. But man, we're not all J.D. Rockefeller. So, like, what do you think is an example of us taking something now that was once precious

and using it as an ingredient? Remember, the ingredients are changing, right? So what's a new ingredient that someone could take and run with? Well, spot quiz. I hadn't heard that question before. And just as you were speaking, something popped into my mind. and it was comedy, humour, and with the homogenisation of messaging,

with the homogenisation of social media. And maybe these are, I just followed the wrong people, but somebody's kind of turned off the funny button, haven't they, in a lot of this? And maybe comedy, humour, has become scarce. And maybe that could be something you add in to your messaging. Be funny, it'd be more approach. Yeah, funny, comedy, humour.

So that's a point of connection, right? That's, you know, with humor, it has a chance to do two things. Number one, lets people let down their guard and potentially make a connection, right? But humor can also go on the bad side. If you go more into sarcasm or, you know, that sort of thing, you get into, I'm going to put my guard up and be like, Mark's kind of a jackass, like, by saying that, right? So humor's a little dangerous. And it's, I don't mean danger as in like jumping off a high cliff without a parachute. mean, you know, put people's backs up.

Maybe, maybe that's, you know, you're talking about scarce things which are scarce. So I don't know, I've not thought about this. Okay, what about you? What comes to your mind? Anything practical? I don't know if humor is a practical thing. You know, if you're a designer, if you're a marketeer, like, how do you find the scarce? Like, what do you do differently?

It's really interesting to, like, to think about, like, the availability of them that's out there right now, the availability of data that's out there right now, but turning that into a useful insight or something that I could take as an ingredient, right? So my ability to process right now, if I like reading books and I enjoy the slow process of reading books, but if I wanted to do some research on something, I could accelerate my learning and research on that to generate ideas. So like there's an old adage of like, you know, generating bad ideas can lead you to good ideas. And when you try to generate a bad idea, your guards down and you don't really care. So like what if you were able to parse through a giant chunk of information about a subject or

about multiple subjects and then create 10 bad ideas out of that just as a fun exercise, right? So this brings us back to like what makes us human is the ability to create these connections between things. Creativity is the useful arrangement of found elements, right? Or the unique arrangement of found elements. You might see four building blocks differently than I see four building blocks, right? And my unique take on it could lead to something novel. Your unique take on it could lead to something novel.

But we as humans have to be willing to do that thing. We have to be willing to uncover the Lego blocks and willing to look a little silly in mashing up different combinations of those Lego blocks. That's something that I think if we lean into, we can get up that level of abstraction or what did you say run to the... Everybody calls it running up the stack doesn't either that abstraction of human experience. But I think you touched on something there, something being scarce and precious, something that's very scarce and precious right now as well as humor. is looking silly, looking stupid, ego. Everyone has an ego and people don't like looking silly. So maybe that's some kind of superpower you could add to the way you think can work.

I want to add a little bit of the paper. I'm going to quote him again. If the cost to perform certain units of work for math problems to code, to marketing, to finance, to sales, to design, to customer support calls is decreasing, then the value of their substitutes decreases. and the value of their compliments increases. So compliments.

So something that I've been doing as a writer-marketeer is complementing that with speaking gigs. Okay. Like I compliment what I do. I will add things to my skill set rather than doubling down on writing tweets, but that's not going to work, is it? So I'll add a compliment.

So maybe whatever domain you're working, in add compliments make your make your value increase by being better at multiple things compliments and extensions right this it goes back to like the there's that book a while back the adjacent possible right so what are you doing and what things are adjacent to that thing you're doing and how can you extend into those pieces but man we're we talked about this before we're taught like that we have to pick a path we have to jump on that conveyor belt and kind to ride it for 30 years until we can go to the beach. That's ingrained in our head. And it's ingrained because we have a deep need for security in us as humans. And there's a fear of not

being secure. And that is kind of manipulated by these, hey, you got to jump on this conveyor belt. You've got to get a job. You've got to get insurance. If you don't do that, if you play around and be entrepreneurial-minded and big thinker, then you're going to be in a risky situation, right? So I don't know if this enables entrepreneurship or it just elevates those who are willing to be entrepreneurs and leaves the rest holding the bag. It's kind of scary. I mean, I would want to figure out how we can help those people understand that they can be creative,

understand that they have that capability, it just gets beaten out of us. You know, at a very young age, Picasso said, you know, all kids are genius until they become adults, right? So it's like, how do we rekindle that? I think that's the opportunity. How do you think about this quote? The simpler the product is for anyone to make, the more important brand is. Brand exists at a higher level.

And then he gives some example. are like, you know, some pretty obvious examples. But is that giving us all a carte blanche to make our own personal brand? I'm actually exhausted at the idea of personal brands. Like did the whole LinkedIn thing, you know, become an influencer and like, you know, be this invented, invented construct of yourself instead of just clearly demonstrating the value. But that's not how, that's not how you scale. You don't go from.

Jeremy, not in the attention economy. I want to talk about, he references like, actually, as a quote in this paper, Perfect AI will possess the Midas touch. Everything it touches will turn to perfect, okay? I'm going to tell you, I hate perfect. Like, I think the reason why shit is cool is because it's imperfect. Like, I'm going to give you a musical analogy, right? So say I make a beat, right?

in a digital audio workstation in logic or Pro Tools or something, I create a beat and I quantize that beat, meaning it goes to perfect segments of that beat, whether it's a quarter node, an eighth node or 60, whatever it is, perfectly segmented, right? Guess what makes you dance? A delay in that beat, a push in that beat, right? And, you know, the ability to dance is not driven by perfection.

It's driven by anticipation, anticipation of what, when perfection messes up, right? That's the cool stuff. Like the bleeding of a color and a painting that makes something super interesting and novel. So it goes back to this novel and unique approach. What do you think about that with perfection and like AI being able to do everything perfectly? Okay, you use music. Yeah, what is perfection anyway? I don't think God Save the Queen was deemed a perfect song.

was it? Are you, Quentin Tarantino? Okay, a group in the 90s, when Pulp Fiction, when Mesovaluad Dogs came out, it wasn't, nobody had an idea of what perfection was. Who decides what perfection is anyway? No, I don't. And he used it in the paper, he uses the example of Paul Schrader, which is why

we had Paul Schrader in the hot buttons about, yeah, then if everything's perfect, then we go back to what's the differentiator, don't you? If everything's perfect, and there's a billion films, then you still have to decide to which film to watch, so you have to, what's a differentiator. Is it that people like that the imperfections, the personality are

perfection, our personalities are imperfections, you know, so yeah, screw perfection. Well, and also you mentioned like deciding what to watch or deciding what to listen to you, right? And there's that, there's that piece of it. And Kevin Kelly, who we are super excited to announce is going to be going to be on the show this April, which is going to be amazing. I read his book, The Inevitable 12 Tech Trends, a long, long time ago and he references this idea of filter right there's going to be but even back before AI there was more information created in a day that anyone can watch in a lifetime so the important aspect of filtering right so say AI can create all this content can create all this stuff right

I listen to Spotify I listen to music on Spotify I can I can listen to any song I want at any time right but I still go to playlists because I want like oh I like this music what else can And I look for filter buttons. I look for easy buttons in that regard. So this ability to be tour guides, to be filters, to be not literal tour guides, but like experience guides in any kind of discipline with some sort of taste of imperfection could be really valuable down the road. It is really valuable.

It always has been really valuable. And it will be increasingly more valuable than it's ever been. There you go. Let's go to the news. First point we want to talk about is infrastructure plans behind building this capability of AI. And also the second piece of this is a metric on evaluating the success of that infrastructure. So Mark, let's talk about the Stargate project. And a group of companies that happen to have $500 billion that they're ready to deploy over the next four years in the states.

And then what's happening over in Europe? What are you seeing there? Over in England, so for new listeners, I'm English, I'm from England. Jeremy is American. And about a week ago, the UK got really, really excited about the UK AI plan, to quote the government recently unveiled an ambitious AI Opportunities Action Plan backed by a 14 billion pound investment from leading tech firms. The plan includes establishing AI growth zones, creating new jobs and investing in infrastructure

like supercomputers and data centers. The goal is to boost economic growth, enhance public services, and position the UK as a global leader in AI innovation. 14 million. And then, of course, yesterday, the day before, the $500 billion stargate AI plan announced by Trump and Open AI in working with Oracle SoftBank.

The project aims to build advanced AI infrastructures across the US, starting with an initial investment of $100 billion. The plan is expected to create over $100,000. 100,000 jobs and establish the U.S. as a leader in AI technology. And Elon Musk has already come out and say, that's BS. They don't have any money. At least they're coordinated and collaborating, right?

Just like the U.S. to be like, oh, 14 billion sounds like a massive investment and awesome from the UK perspective. And it's like, nah, we're going to do, we're going to do 500 billion. But like, I don't even think that the UK's landed on their radar. and looking at the UK thing, there's nothing about Web 3, cryptos, doesn't about blockchain, there's a lot missing out of it.

I think, it's almost like, I don't know, call to Book Club, we're reading Nexus, information isn't truth. Right, right, right, right. A lot of it, a lot of it is, you know, posturing and talk and that sort of thing

because, you know, I don't know how 500 billion comes together and how it's deployed over the next four years by some organizations. I bet we could put 500, billion dollars to way better use than building out server racks, power distribution units, UPSs, generators, and cooling towers to make AI happen. I mean, think about the greater good of things we talked about in the last X-Prize episode.

So there's a scaling law that's out there, you know, as, you know, there's Moore's law, you know, on resistors and chips. There's a scaling law that says, what is it, that the size and complexity of AI models doubles every six months. And Packy's paper references the cost of GPT4 type technology has dropped 600 times since 23. 600 times. How does that, like, that's, that's super important because it's only going to increase.

I mean, 600 times cost decrease. And you're talking about $500 billion. being invested to build more of these scalable types of infrastructure, that's only going to reduce costs, only going to commoditize things more. It's only going to bring forward the importance of turning on that human light bulb again and figuring out what to point to how to get a layer up, how to use your own creativity and novel ideas and know how to create and build new things using this, a resource that used to be scarce, compute used to be scarce.

compute used to be scarce, right? Compute resource used to be scarce and you used to have to, Mark, if you and I were researchers and we were at a university and there was a shared research computer, we used to have to compete for time on that computer. And I would try to take as much time on the computer as possible so I could compute a bunch of stuff. And then that would limit your ability to use that. Now we've got more computers on our phone than that whole university had way back in the day. Right. So paradigm shift, right? We need to get a guest on. If anyone's listening who works in data centers specifically for AI, because that 600x decrease in, what, a year, year and a bit, is that mostly because of GPU power efficiency and how the models are programmed? Like what's driving that cut?

And if it is GPU, you, what's the impact elsewhere? What are the knock-on effects where we're not being, where we're not seeing it on an energy level? I want to talk to the space data center people. Lumen orbit, we want to talk to you. We want to unpack this stuff because, well,

this is a rabbit hole, but now lower Earth orbit, apparently is going to be too crowded to do anything at some point. And they're actually companies designing technology to remove trash from lower Earth orbit. Anyway, I digress. Massive investments or massive announcements of investments are happening right and left. Let's talk about how you analyze the success of said investment, right? So I came across a video that was shared by Chris.

Yeah, Mueller, he's one of our listeners, one of our collaborators, does some awesome work, resilient communities, all of that stuff. He shared a video from Nicholas Thompson from the Atlantic. that had Microsoft CEO on this quick little video and talking about this idea of a new metric to see how efficient we are in deploying AI infrastructure. So there's an old metric. Let me talk about a metric speaking to data centers.

It's been around for a while. It's called P-U-E. It's called power usage effectiveness, right? So in data centers, you have IT load. It's servers and compute stuff, asset, storage devices. that have a specific power draw. And then you have the facility infrastructure

on the back end of that that supports that power being up all the time with redundancies, right? So oftentimes you design two different systems electrically and mechanically to make sure the one system doesn't go down. So PUE has been a rating in data centers for years and years and years.

And now we're talking about tying it down to tokens per dollar per watt, right? So three pieces of the component. Tokens is basically how information is chunked up and fed into models, right? So you have the tokens and then you have the electrical power needed to do that processing of the tokens. And then you have the dollar cost of that electricity, of the redundancy behind that electricity. And like we talked about in PUE. So this could be a new metric for analyzing how efficient these systems are, not just from a compute standpoint,

but how are we doing environmentally with this stuff as well? It was a very big, big question. I think in the memorandum from Not Boring, there was a 30 cents for two million tokens on the new Open AIO3 model. And so 2 million tokens, I think a token can be, depends how they categorize it, but like a word, a phrase, a couple of words. So it stands per 2 million.

They talk about trillion, data sets of trillions. So that's where the money goes. One other metric that I was thinking about too is this idea of AI inference, right? And I looked this up a little bit and it's how quickly a model applies what it has learned to new information. That really should be like the, you know, the test of how well it works and how quickly it

assimilates to that new information. So what I'm picturing like this dashboard, right? So you have like PUE, you have tokens per dollars per watt. And then you have AI inference time and like all of these different things. Because we love to create dashboards, right? Dashboards to look into, you know, you're the CTO and you're like, oh, let's look at our, let's look at our AI dashboard. Oh man, our inference.

Our inference is way down, Jeremy. How can we increase that, right? So anyway, we've been going on and on. That is the news. We're talking about investments. We're talking about how you evaluate how well these investments are doing. We've unpacked Packing McCormick's call to humanity or call back to humans and their superpowers and understanding what they are not.

to understand what they can become. It's a, he references this netty, netty, Sanskrit term that was really interesting and a callback to humanity. Packy, we would love to have you on the show

to talk about this stuff. We can only do it justice by reading what you wrote and kind of inferring it ourselves. But we'd love to have you on the show. If anyone knows, Paci, get us in touch. Yeah, nitty,

you are what you aren't, subtraction, take away. Yeah. And I think we'll leave you with one of the closing lines of the memorandum. The more human you are, the more likely you are to win. Good news for us humans. There you have it. Stay curious. Be disruptive.

Keep thinking on paper.