Summary
The AI gold rush has sparked a vibe shift in San Francisco. The city is flush with (Saudi) money again after the post-ZIRP recession of 2022.
Highlights
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Humor is a release valve for what you can’t say.
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Economic “agents” maximize utility under constraint. Sutton and Barto, fathers of reinforcement learning, turn utility into “reward,” giving examples of a chess player making a move or a cleaning robot optimizing its path. In each case, an agent “seeks to achieve a goal despite uncertainty about its environment.”
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While a pocket of tech elites have been using “high-agency” since the mid-2010s, it’s no surprise the term has taken off amid the LLM boom. Given access to a system that’s memorized all documented human knowledge, what matters is not expertise, but a dogged ability to adapt and win no matter who you are and what you start with.
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If agency combines autonomy (“the capacity to formulate goals in life”) plus efficacy (“the ability and willingness to pursue those goals”), AI in 2025 is sorely lacking in both.²