Search Results

A.I. may bring about a revolutionary new landscape of "unicorns." Excerpt: Anthropic’s Mike Krieger believes AI is dissolving the boundaries between idea and execution, making solo founders more powerful than ever. When Mike Krieger helped launch Instagram in 2010 as a cofounder, building something as simple as a photo filter took his team weeks of engineering time and tough trade-offs. Now, as chief product officer at Anthropic, he’s watching early-stage startup founders accomplish far more in far less time—sometimes over a single weekend. Thanks to intuitive agentic AI models (or AI agents), founders are experimenting with product, code, and business strategies, often without needing to hire specialized team members. “When I think back to Instagram’s early days, our famously small team had to make painful decisions—either explore adding video or focus on our core creativity,” Krieger tells Fast Company. “With AI agents, startups can now run experiments in parallel and build products faster than ever before.” To him, it signals a seismic shift: the rise of agentic entrepreneurship. Enterprises can supercharge engineering teams while individuals with bold ideas but no technical background can finally bring their visions to life. “At Anthropic, 90% of Claude’s code is now written by AI, and this has completely transformed how we build products. Recently, Claude helped me prototype something in 25 minutes that would have taken me six hours,” Krieger says. “I see founders who tried every model, couldn’t get their startup to work, then with Claude, their startup suddenly works.”'

If A.I. seems out of reach for you, you're not alone! Here are 5 tips . Excerpt:" The energy has shifted in 2025. You can feel it too, right? AI used to be this shiny side project, something people would experiment with in their spare time. There’s been a massive change. AI is now baked into the way work gets done. Some people like myself have run with it, attempting to automate their entire workflow and educate their teams on the many do’s and don’ts. Others are still staring at their screens and wondering where to start.   The gap between those two groups is growing, and quickly. I have a secret to share, and this is where most people get it wrong: Closing the gap isn’t about becoming a tech genius. It’s about staying curious and getting scrappy.  The AI skills gap is widening, but here’s a game plan to keep up."

“You might as well go for it. You might as well do the thing that you dream about doing for heaven’s sake.” Excerpt :" Making a movie on credit cards and bombing your first screening doesn’t sound like the origin story of a film legend, but Kevin Smith, the mind behind Clerks, Jay and Silent Bob, and Dogma (recently released in 4K for the film’s 25th anniversary) did exactly that before shooting to stardom. Sometimes, success takes an unorthodox path, and reflecting back on his journey, Smith has an unconventional pearl of wisdom: Be a little delusional. Or, in his words, have a reasonable amount of unreasonability. The first to stand I stand before you on Big Think as the first to stand. Kids, all my energy is delivered this way. So I asked the good folks. I was like, "Can I stand?" "Yeah?" And here we are. So let's go on the journey together on our feet. A reasonable amount of unreasonability I feel, in order to get to where you're going, requires a reasonable amount of unreasonability. Not like, "Hey, man. I'm going to jump off a building and fly without the aid of a jetpack." That's unreasonable unreasonability. Reasonable amount is just like, "You know, why not me?"'

"I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is (Again)" Excerpt: "Anyone is capable of cherry-picking media to suit their arguments, of course, and social media has always narrowed the aperture of news events to fit particular viewpoints. Regardless of ideology, dramatic perspectives succeed on platforms. It is possible that one’s impression of the protests would be incorrectly skewed if informed only by Bluesky commentators, MSNBC guests, or self-proclaimed rational centrists. The right, for example, has mocked the idea of “mostly peaceful protests” as ludicrous when juxtaposed with video of what they see as evidence to the contrary. It’s likely that my grasp of the events and their politics are shaped by decades of algorithmic social-media consumption. Yet the situation in L.A. only further clarifies the asymmetries among media ecosystems. This is not an even playing field. The right-wing media complex has a disproportionate presence and is populated by extreme personalities who have no problem embracing nonsense AI imagery and flagrantly untrue reporting that fits their agenda. Here you will find a loosely affiliated network of streamers, influencers, alternative social networks, extremely online vice presidents, and Fox News personalities who appear invested in portraying the L.A. protests as a full-blown insurrection. To follow these reports is to believe that people are not protesting but rioting throughout the city. In this alternate reality, the whole of Los Angeles is a bona fide war zone. (It is not, despite President Donald Trump’s wildly disproportionate response, which includes deploying hundreds of U.S. Marines to the area and federalizing thousands of National Guard members.) I spent the better part of the week drinking from this particular firehose, reading X and Truth Social posts and watching videos from Rumble . On these platforms, the protests are less a news event than a justification for the authoritarian use of force. Nearly every image or video contains selectively chosen visuals of burning cars or Mexican flags unfurling in a smog of tear gas, and they’re cycled on repeat to create a sense of overwhelming chaos. They have titles such as “CIVIL WAR ALERT” and “DEMOCRATS STOKE WW3!” All of this incendiary messaging is assisted by generative-AI images of postapocalyptic, smoldering city streets—pure propaganda to fill the gap between reality and the world as the MAGA faithful wish to see it. I’ve written before about how the internet has obliterated the monoculture , empowering individuals to cocoon themselves in alternate realities despite confounding evidence—it is a machine that justifies any belief . This is not a new phenomenon, but the problem is getting worse as media ecosystems mature and adjust to new technologies. On Tuesday, one of the top results for one user’s TikTok search for Los Angeles curfew was an AI-generated video rotating through slop images of a looted city under lockdown. Even to the untrained eye, the images were easily identifiable as AI-rendered (the word curfew came out looking like ciuftew). Still, it’s not clear that this matters to the people consuming and sharing the bogus footage. Even though such reality-fracturing has become a load-bearing feature of our information environment, the result is disturbing: Some percentage of Americans believes that one of the country’s largest cities is now a hellscape, when, in fact, almost all residents of Los Angeles are going about their normal lives."

This venture's objective: to replace white collar jobs "as fast as possible" Excerpt: " Years ago, when I started writing about Silicon Valley’s efforts to replace workers with artificial intelligence, most tech executives at least had the decency to lie about it. “We’re not automating workers, we’re augmenting them,” the executives would tell me . “Our A.I. tools won’t destroy jobs. They’ll be helpful assistants that will free workers from mundane drudgery.” Of course, lines like those — which were often intended to reassure nervous workers and give cover to corporate automation plans — said more about the limitations of the technology than the motives of the executives. Back then, A.I. simply wasn’t good enough to automate most jobs, and it certainly wasn’t capable of replacing college-educated workers in white-collar industries like tech, consulting and finance. That is starting to change. Some of today’s A.I. systems can write software, produce detailed research reports and solve complex math and science problems. Newer A.I. “agents” are capable of carrying out long sequences of tasks and checking their own work, the way a human would. And while these systems still fall short of humans in many areas, some experts are worried that a recent uptick in unemployment for college graduates is a sign that companies are already using A.I. as a substitute for some entry-level workers."

DARPA and U.S. Navy reveal future sea defense, and offense Excerpt: ' "I could imagine the battle group eventually becoming completely autonomous,” said Greg Avicola, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, outlining a vision of a Navy strike force built not around an aircraft carrier, but of a “heterogeneous” mix of robotic assets of varying size, role, and capability.  “There’s gonna be a lot of experimentation” in design and operation, Avicola said Tuesday at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C. “If I make the vehicle look like this, and I make the ship look like that, how does that pair? And how do I do the logistics? How do I do the refueling? How do I do the assured comms between those platforms?” Avicola’s vision is a lot more robo-centric than those offered by Navy leaders, who have generally tempered expectations around replacing manned vessels with uncrewed ones. In 2020, for example, acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly suggested that autonomous capabilities might actually increase the need for manned surface vessels.  But the pace of technological advance—along with the high cost and insufficient industrial capability to build a manned fleet to meet service goals —are changing that equation.

Opinion: The best explanation for what went wrong (audio with transcript) Excerpt: "Was Elon Musk ever a genius? Yes, he revolutionized the electric-car industry and space travel. Yes, he once seemed to represent America’s ability to innovate at the cutting edge of technology. But Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and he doesn’t regularly appear in headlines as a prominent tech genius. In fact, many well-informed people probably don’t even know his name. So what makes one man merely wildly accomplished and another a genius? And which descriptor makes a man more likely to engage in an ego-crushing battle with the president? In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Helen Lewis, the author of The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea , who explains how Musk has tanked his reputation in many ways: First, he alienated environmentalists by teaming up with Trump, and then he alienated Trump fans by insulting their hero. Another way is clear by looking at American culture’s historical relationship with “genius,” and how it tends to go wrong. Genius, it turns out, is less a series of accomplishments than a form of addiction. It traps the men who indulge it, and they often end up, like Musk, depleted. We talk with Lewis about what Musk has in common with Thomas Edison, how the psychedelics fit into the archetype, and what the possible paths are for Musk moving forward."

A new political movement emerges (audio interview and transcript) Excerpt: "Lindsey: So today, we’re going to talk about all things abundance related, and that topic actually allows us to start off with talking about how we met and the history of our relationship, because I think that has something to do with the history of the abundance movement. So let’s start off with how you and I met. I’ll tell my version of it. I had written an article for the New Republic at the end of 2006 called Liberaltarians. This was in the second half of the Bush administration when libertarians were disgusted with the George W. Bush administration on a whole bunch of different fronts. And so with that context, I was writing an article that said, Hey, libertarians have always seen themselves as beyond left and right, and yet in practical terms and sociologically, they’ve been part of the right. They have affiliated with the right. They’ve tended to emphasize their common positions and to figure out how to finesse their differences and work together. Maybe we could do that now with the left, given that the fusionism between libertarian economics and social and foreign policy conservatism seemed at that time to be unraveling. Maybe there’s a possibility of a new fusionism between libertarianism and liberalism or progressivism. And turned out, the article, at least in the short term, was spectacularly ill timed because it came out right after the 2006 midterm elections and the Democrats had swept into power. So they weren’t really looking to be told what to do or what kind of new compromises to make or new allies to seek out. They were feeling heady and chesty. So it didn’t really go anywhere in politics terms, but it did plant some seeds. One of them sprouted. About a month after that, I got a phone call and voice said, “Hi, I’m Steve Teles.” I think you were at Maryland back then. You said, “I’m a political scientist at Maryland and I think I may be a liberaltarian.” I don’t know if you recall that the same way, but we started talking and we tried to figure out some liberaltarian thing to do. My first idea, I remember, was having a big liberaltarian conference at Cato, which is where I was working at the time, the Cato Institute. As I started to map it out, I thought, there’s no way I can hold this at Cato and keep my job. It would cross too many red lines to address too many possible libertarian heresies to have a conference. So then we started thinking about, well, why don’t we have a dinner series, an off the record dinner series where we could get liberals and libertarians together? I think that was your idea. But we started it up back in 2008 and then over a dozen or more years between then and the time I moved to Thailand in 2021, we had over a hundred of those roundtable dinners, pulling together journalists and policy wonks and academics. Started expressly as the liberaltarian dinner Series, but it eventually became sort of an ideologically diverse group of people across the political spectrum who could play nicely with others. And I look back on it very proudly. It still exists in altered form now under Johns Hopkins auspices, but that was our first attempt to build bridges across ideological lines. Teles: Yeah, so the… Well, this to say a couple of things on that. One, you may have noticed a couple days ago, Jonathan Chait dropped a big article on abundance and its conflict with other factions in the Democratic Party. This connects into our conversation because one of the big attacks on your original Liberaltarian essay came from Jonathan Chait, who I think, in that article famously told you to get the hell out of his party. Lindsey: Yeah, so it was nice for the New Republic to run the piece by a Cato guy, but Chait insisted on having a rebuttal in the next issue. What he said, he quoted Michael Corleone from The Godfather so, you can have my offer now. My offer is nothing. We will give you nothing. We need nothing from you. We need to borrow nothing from you. We need to learn nothing from you. Teles: I mean, Jon has evolved more on this than you have. Lindsey: Yeah, life moves in mysterious ways. Jon has written a number of articles that have spoken more kindly about my ideas and about the places I’ve been affiliated with, Niskanen in particular, since then. And so here in this article he did for The Atlantic on abundance, he cites the Niskanen Center, where we both work, as close to an institutional home for the abundance movement as exists. So yeah, very good to see the liberaltarian moment showing up a couple decades later."

These thinkers are convinced that humanity is undergoing civilizational phase change. KEY TAKEAWAYS In their latest book, Stellar, Tony Seba and James Arbib argue that the old system of “extraction” — reliance on land, labor, and capital — is over. Instead, we’re entering an age of abundance powered by technologies that need no external input to continue growing. Seba and Arbib consider how individuals and businesses alike can adapt — and thrive — in this unfolding future.

The child has no control at all and the adult tries to control too much. But there is a third way. KEY TAKEAWAYS In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with philosopher Oliver Burkeman about how our desire for control grows from childhood dependency and often leads to stress and existential angst in adulthood. Burkeman challenges modern definitions of a “meaningful life,” suggesting that small acts of care and presence can be profoundly significant. A happy life lies in accepting our limits — like a “dancing monk” who acts freely without trying to gain others’ approval.

Clarity driven by anxiety rarely lasts KEY TAKEAWAYS Uncertainty is psychologically uncomfortable, triggering stress responses that make quick clarity feel rewarding, even when it doesn’t align with your goals and values. The rush to escape uncertainty can lead to premature decisions and overcommitment. Sustainable clarity emerges when you make room for it through exploration and reflection.

Will anyone stand up to the toxic wrongs of U.S. leadership? One does so (6 minute listen) Another does Perhaps related? Excerpt (of first link above): President Donald Trump continued his war against America’s most cherished military traditions today when he delivered a speech at Fort Bragg. It is too much to call it a “speech”; it was, instead, a ramble, full of grievance and anger, just like his many political-rally performances. He took the stage to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”—which has become a MAGA anthem—and then pointed to the “fake news,” encouraging military personnel to jeer at the press. He mocked former President Joe Biden and attacked various other political rivals. He elicited cheers from the crowd by announcing that he would rename U.S. bases (or re-rename them) after Confederate traitors. He repeated his hallucinatory narrative about the invasion of America by foreign criminals and lunatics. He referred to 2024 as the “election of a president who loves you,” to a scatter of cheers and applause. And then he attacked the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles, again presiding over jeers at elected officials of the United States. He led soldiers, in other words, in a display of unseemly behavior that ran contrary to everything the founder of the U.S. Army, George Washington, strove to imbue in the American armed forces. The president also encouraged a violation of regulations. Trump, himself a convicted felon, doesn’t care about rules and laws, but active-duty military members are not allowed to attend political rallies in uniform. They are not allowed to express partisan views while on duty, or to show disrespect for American elected officials. Trump may not know these rules and regulations, but the officers who lead these men and women know them well. It is part of their oath, their credo, and their identity as officers to remain apart from such displays. Young soldiers will make mistakes. But if senior officers remain silent, what lesson will those young men and women take from what happened today?