thecutline.ai , a Product Management Suite. I call it "A Product Manager That Says No", which stems from previous challenges I had using AI that was too sycophantic and optimistic to help with product decisions.

Working heavily right now on Customer Personas to use in validating/invalidating , which are configured with viewpoints, biases, and tendencies. Coming very soon will be Persona Journeys, in which you can get live, goal-oriented evaluation of your web app by a Persona.

Anthropic sign-on is surprisingly bad.

The problem of running a $4 Trillion consumer hardware company, with incredibly optimized supply chain operations, is that it heavily constrains the directions a new CEO would take the company, and by extension, the set of plausible people who could take the helm. I think even if the next CEO has a new or different product vision, they'd need deep knowledge on the hardware side of the house just to steer in any different direction.

I'd agree with all those facts about the competitive landscape, but in each of those competitors, there's enough wiggle room for me to think OpenAI isn't completely boxed in.

Google on multimodality: has been truly impressive over the last six months and has the deep advantages of Chrome, YouTube, and being the default web indexer, but it's entirely plausible they flub the landing on deep product integration.

Chinese companies and pricing: facts, and it's telling to me that OpenAI seems to have abandoned their rhetorical campaign from earlier this year teasing that "maybe we could charge $20000 a month" https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/05/openai-reportedly-plans-to....

Coding: Anthropic has been impressive but reliability and possible throttling of Claude has users (myself included) looking for alternatives.

Social: I think OpenAI has the biggest opportunity here, as OpenAI is closest to being a consumer oriented company of the model hyperscalers and they have a gigantic user base that they can take to whatever AI-based platform category replaces social. I'm somewhat skeptical that Meta at this point has their finger on the pulse of social users, and I think Superintelligence Labs isn't well designed to capitalize on Meta's advantages in segueing from social to whatever replaces social.

There's the technique of model orthogonalization which can often zero out certain tendencies (most often, refusal), as demonstrated by many models on HuggingFace. There may be an existing open weights model on HuggingFace that uses orthogonalization to zero out positivity (or optimism)--or you could roll your own.

Honestly, I think the mode that will actually occur is that incumbent businesses never successfully adopt AI, but are just outcompeted by their AI-native competitors.

Yes this is exactly how I see it happening - just like how Amazon and Google were computer-native companies

And Sears had all the opportunity to be Amazon

Sears also did everything it could to annihilate itself while dot-com was happening.

their CEO was a believer of making his departments compete for resources leading to a brutal, dysfunctional clusterfuck. rent seeking behavior on the inside as well as outside.

Sounds kinda like Amazon..

And some, both new and old, will collapse after severely misjudging what LLMs can safely and effectively be used for.

it looks like a variant of Planck's principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

IMO the lack of real version control and lack of reliable programmability have been significant impediments to impact and adoption. The control surfaces are more brittle than say, regex, which isn’t a good place to be.

I would quibble that there is a modicum of design in prompting; RLHF, DPO and ORPO are explicitly designing the models to be more promptable. But the methods don’t yet adequately scale to the variety of user inputs, especially in a customer-facing context.

My preference would be for the field to put more emphasis on control over LLMs, but it seems like the momentum is again on training LLM-based AGIs. Perhaps the Bitter Lesson has struck again.

I’d agree with your quibble.

People are trying to design how to prompt, but it’s very different in both implementation and result than designing a programming language or a visual language, ofc.

I think in part because of YouTube demonization, which is how TikTok could poach the creators in the first place.

I suspect if they're mirroring content to YouTube, it's more to try to attract audience to TikTok than monetize through YouTube.

I would use the word 'fresh' for TikTok; like old school YouTube, there's quirkiness and variety.

Exactly. In other threads on hacker news people have bemoaned the loss of the old weird web. I don't think anyone believed me that the same spirit exists in some sides of TikTok.

I remember seeing threads here about how TikTok reminded people of the old web. It's wild seeing attitudes shift so completely.

My belief is that while eng manager empire building was the easier path to get promoted before 2022, it's not anymore, for two main reasons:

1. HC doesn't accrue like that anymore. 2. Many organizations are looking to delayer; harder to promote up to director when your org went from 9 runs to 5.

I hear a lot of the focus going to Tech Lead Manager roles--fewer reports but more hand-on keyboard than EM roles of the past.

Interesting take, thanks. I worked for very different companies (FAANG vs. startup) pre- vs. post-2022, so I don't have continuity to compare.