WSJ on retirement: ““For people who’ve had careers that have given them both an identity and status—and consumed most of their energy and attention—stopping work can feel like stopping everything,” says Ruth Finkelstein, executive director of the Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging at Hunter College in New York. “It takes a recovery process to be able to enter a chapter that’s defined differently.” Such a process often begins with a plan; after all, if career and ambition are central to your existence, replacing them with nothing isn’t going to work.”
SaaStr on Forward Deployed Engineers: “FDEs sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer success. They go on-site or deep into a customer environment, understand the actual workflows, and configure the product to work inside those workflows. They’re not building from scratch. They’re not doing basic support. They’re doing the hard middle work of making software actually land in the real world. This role has existed for a long time. Palantir essentially built their entire go-to-market around it. You couldn’t buy Palantir’s product and self-serve your way to value. You needed their people inside your organization, configuring and training the system for your specific context. That model worked. It was expensive and it didn’t scale the way SaaS was supposed to scale. But it worked, because complex software in complex environments requires human judgment to deploy well. Now almost every serious AI product has the same requirement. And almost no one has enough of the people who can do it.”
Jensen Huang: “In the end, something has to transform electrons to tokens. The transformation of electrons to tokens and making those tokens more valuable over time is hard to completely commoditize. The transformation from electrons to tokens is such an incredible journey. Making that token is like making one molecule more valuable than another molecule, making one token more valuable than another. The amount of artistry, engineering, science, and invention that goes into making that token valuable, obviously we’re watching it happen in real time. The transformation, the manufacturing, all of the science that goes in there is far from deeply understood and the journey is far from over. I doubt that it will happen.”
NYTimes: “The strange way that A.I. looks like a genius at one moment and dense in another is what researchers, engineers and economists call “jagged intelligence.” They use this term to explain why A.I is racing ahead in some areas — like math and computer programming — while still struggling to make headway in others. The term, which is widely used by the people building A.I. and analyzing its effects, could help reframe the debate over whether these systems are becoming as smart as, or even smarter than, humans. Instead, researchers argue, A.I. is something completely different: far better than humans at some tasks and far worse at others.”
