Something for the weekend: Meta platform updates, Twitter's 20th anniversary, and the Claude codebase leak
Aggregate #007 for the Bank Holiday Weekend
Good morning
Last week, we were away on our company offsite as we embarked on the journey to become AI-native. The current goal state is:
For any task, can it first of all be given to AI to complete for you
I take the David William Silva view that LLMs likely won’t be the singularity answer. There is just too much devolving to the baseline and average involved in them. Getting exceptional results from AI today really requires exceptional expertise.
That’s not to undermine their power – on the contrary, that is their power. But understanding how to maximise it is the game. And that for us at Ballpoint is what this next quarter is about: let’s go as close to 100% AI as possible, so we can understand explicitly where the LLMs help us the most and where our position and view is tantamount.
Amongst all of this, the concept of taste keeps returning.
I imagine a world one day into the future where we have weekly internal seminars reviewing essays of note that help deepen our thinking. I imagine an apprenticeship approach to learning.
On one of the cooking shows once, I heard a Michelin star chef say that in their kitchen you’d spend days and days and days learning how to slice an onion. And until you had become an expert at it, you couldn’t advance beyond it. I’m sure there will be approaches to learning skills that reflect that.
Our offsite last week was day zero of this journey. Everyone spent two days in the command line and cursor. The excellent Leo Ubbiali led our primary session: getting everyone in best practice mode. And then my friend and ex-colleague Paul Connor talked us through how AI has empowered his side projects, including new game Phrazy.
I hope you enjoy your long weekends.
Josh
Key image of the week
Signals
Key signals for builders, growers, and operators.
Meta launches Adaptive Ranking Model (ARM) [Meta Ads] – Meta upgraded its ads algorithm this week with tests in Q4 showing 3% improvements to conversions. This adds ‘LLM-level complexity’ to the ads algo to better serve more relevant ads.
Meta launches its Ranking Engineer Agent [Meta Ads] – this doubles model accuracy and improves rollout speed of ad model tests. This ‘compresses weeks of manual work into hours.’
Trialling new Meta features [Meta Ads] – we’ve been testing Meta’s new creative testing tool, as well as flexible ads for a while – and this week shared learnings from them. Key one: Flexible Ads proved to be 2x worse CPA than equivalent ads in ad set tests.
Oracle laid off 30,000 employees [AI] – joining big changes across Block, Meta, Amazon and more this year.
Claude’s codebase got leaked on Tuesday [AI] – sparking a big discussion about unreleased features. ‘Buddy’ their own tamagotchi seems to have been released overnight.
The Stack
A shortlist of stuff I recommend you read and watch this weekend.
📝 Your marriage has a third. After Babel
📺 The Thinking Game Documentary on Demis Hassabis. YouTube
📝 The robot training for the Olympics. Digital Native
📝 Facts and fights for the moral high ground. Behavioural Scientist
📝 World models. Not Boring
🎧 What is Twitter’s legacy, 20 years later?. The Atlantic
📝 Cryptos true believers demand to be taken seriously. Vanity Fair
What do you think?
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