570: Alexandr Wang & Meta’s AI Reboot, Oracle, World Bank + Nuclear, Amazon Doubles Down, OpenAI + Google GCP, Supersonic Flight, Terravest, and Guitar

"Most people have too few fun side quests"

Life is so unlike theory.

—Anthony Trollope

🎸🧠 What we commonly call ‘muscle memory’ is pretty incredible.

I hadn’t played guitar in over 20 years, but after buying one two weeks ago, I was surprised to find myself picking up almost right where I’d left off.

It took me a few days to build back fingertip calluses, and I forgot how certain songs went, but apart from that, when it comes to the mechanics and skill of playing, I could do everything I could do back then. In fact, I feel *better* than I used to be — I don’t know if it’s because I’ve spent the interim listening to a lot of very varied music and further improving my ear or what ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It helps that it’s very easy nowadays to find quality tab transcriptions online, and there are dozens of YouTube video tutorials for every song. I recommend Songsterr.

In any case, it feels great to be stretching my brain in a different direction.

It reminds me of last winter when I started using Duolingo to learn some Japanese + Chinese + Italian + German + Spanish (I’m still using the app daily, but not as intensely as when I started).

I encourage you to pick up a new hobby. Pick anything that seems fun, don’t overthink it.

Most people have too few fun side quests in their lives.

See it as a NO-PRESSURE thing. You don’t have to learn a language to speak it, just learn a few words for fun and to get a better feel for what a language feels like “from the inside”.

You may never play guitar around the campfire or entertain friends at the piano, but it’ll feel good to play a few bluesy licks, Metallica riffs, or some of those blocky Thelonious Monk chords. And you’ll listen to music differently if you play, even just a little.

We forget that it FEELS GOOD to LEARN SOMETHING NEW. You start and can’t get it right, keep trying and trying, and at some point, there’s a breakthrough, and now you can do it!

Very satisfying.

If you want to play along, here are a few of the things I’ve been having fun with lately:

• John Williams’ Indiana Jones theme

• Zelda’s Overworld Theme

• John Williams’ Star Wars Theme and Imperial March

• Joe Hisaishi’s One Summer's Day from Spirited Away

• Various parts of Metallica’s Master of Puppets, Battery, Fade to Black, and One

• Gustavo Santaolalla’s main theme for The Last of Us

• Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence

🏎️ 🫳⌨️💻 This one’s nerdier. I’ve been using application launchers for a long time.

It’s a bit like using Excel with the keyboard vs the mouse — power users can do things at the speed of thought. 💭

If you’re on a Mac and don’t use this stuff, you need to try it, it’s life-changing. Especially if you spend all day in front of a computer.

The built-in one is Spotlight. You hit a keyboard shortcut (usually CMD-Space) and a text input field pops up. From there, you can type app names, do math, web searches, run AI queries, add things to calendars and reminders, search through email, access clipboard history, manage windows, etc.

Third-party launchers are much more powerful and extensible than Spotlight.

I used Alfred for years, but there are others like the OG Quicksilver and LaunchBar.

I recently switched to Raycast, the most modern of the bunch, and so far, I really like it. It’s fast, you can add extensions to do basically anything, and it’s well-designed.

Give it a try. You might be surprised how often you reach for it, and how slow everything else starts to feel.

(Launchers also exist on Windows, but I haven't tested them there. If you're a Microsoft user and love launchers, let me know which ones are best — I'm curious.)

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🏦 💰 Business & Investing 💳 💴

🗣️ Interview: How will Alexandr Wang Scale Meta’s AI Reboot? 🤖📈

I recently wrote about Meta’s deal with Scale AI and Wang, which was officially announced late last night… Here’s a great, fairly recent interview with Wang that provides a lot of context on both him and Scale.

He even reveals why he’s missing that “e” and how it was to grow up around physicists in Los Alamos.

I don’t know if he’s the right person to transform Meta’s AI efforts, but he’s very impressive. And young! Maybe Zuck’s already looking for someone to groom for the top job for when he decides to join Bezos in the after-business-life 🤔🪽

But here's where it gets spicier 🌶️ It looks like Meta’s internal AI teams weren’t all happy with Scale’s work:

Zuckerberg’s decision to do the deal is occurring despite complaints from leaders within Meta’s generative AI group about Scale AI over the past year. Like other Scale AI customers, Meta relies on the company’s experts, who often have doctorates in fields like math and biology, to annotate data and write ideal responses that it then uses to improve how AI models perform specific tasks.

But Meta’s AI leaders complained that the startup’s data-labeling contractors often returned low-quality data. They were also upset about Meta’s generative AI group exceeding its budget with Scale, which led the heads of some other teams at Meta to ask their staff not to spend money with Scale.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement!

The complaints about Scale AI weren’t enough to keep Meta’s leaders from pursuing a deal though. In doing so, Zuckerberg mostly wanted to find new leadership for Meta’s AI efforts, he told people, even after overhauling the structure of its generative AI group in February and again in May. (Source)

That makes it sound even more like a weird, indirect acqui-hire!

🤖🌊 Larry Ellison on Oracle’s AI Demand Tsunami 🚀💰

From Oracle’s most recent quarterly call, here’s Larry: