The Midwest Fund launches, brings The Fund's innovative investment strategy to a fifth market tcrn.ch/3uo3oIv by @mjburnsy

Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability. The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code. But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along. So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions. TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.

Me everyday

So I'm a: @techstars Boulder alumni, a Techstars LP, and I've "given first" to Techstars by doing 17 free speaking engagements for the programs since graduating in 2019. I have a few things to say about the announcement. Buckle in. 1. Any leader undergoing the experience of Change Management 101 understands that you don't ask the people impacted by the change to do the communication and be the main point of contact for that change. The fact that senior leadership didn't communicate with alumni, but sent an army of MD's to go out and communicate this massive change is just a literal abdication of leadership. 2. If you are leaving the city that built you - you do that with care. And you take it seriously. If Ford was exiting Detroit, they wouldn't send the factory manager to do the announcement. 3. I've exited a market before (sorry, Seattle) and I know that it's not easy to make those calls. But the thing you don't do is call it "bittersweet." It's just bitter for those that are most closely impacted in the community. 4. If you are closing locations, be explicit what is closing and be explicit what is staying open. 5. Great leaders own their decisions with ALL stakeholders. Not just investors. It's shocking to me that alumni haven't heard from leadership directly, but investors did. (I got both comms.) 6. There is literally nothing dorkier on earth than calling something "2.0" in 2024. The fact that this was the best they could do and then they expect to compete in the largest markets in the world is fucking ridiculous. Am I disappointed, sure. But am I mostly surprised by how poorly this was handled? That's the one.