AVOID AI SLOP

“Beethoven was sick all the time too. What would motivate you to write music, this beautiful music that you can never actually hear except for in your head? The amount of time it takes to write a thirty five minute, forty minute piece, all the parts, you gotta hear all the orchestration in your head. There's a thing called the Hellagerstatte Testament that he wrote. It was a letter to his brothers from eighteen o two. He felt a sense of shame and humiliation because of his hearing loss.”

“I don't think nowadays, 2026, that there will be any company who is, let's say, having access to a technology that no other company has access to. And that is mainly because researchers are frequently changing jobs, changing labs, they, rotate. So I don't think there will be a clear winner in terms of technology access. However, I do think there will be, the differentiating factor will be budget and hardware constraints.”

“DeepSeek is kind of losing its crown as the preeminent open model maker in China and the likes of, Z dot AI with their GLM models, MiniMax's models, Kimmy Moonshot, especially in the last few months, have shown more brightly. The new deep seek models are still very strong, but that's kind of a it could look back as a big narrative point where twenty twenty five deep seat came and then all and it kind of provided this platform for way more Chinese companies that are releasing these fantastic models.”

“When I first started making these AI videos, it started back in 2023. I would take my phone, come up in the kitchen, I'd play a song, and my youngest, Layla, soon as I played, why are you listening to AI? And I was like, oh my god. Instantly. I was like, how do you know? Oh, it has this ringing sound in the thing. So it took me probably about four or five days to figure out, okay, what are they hearing that I'm not hearing?”

“Llama was the, I would say, pioneering open weight model, and then Lama one, two, three, a lot of love. But I think then I think what happened just hypothesizing or speculating. I think the, leaders at Meta, like, the upper, executives, they I think they got really excited about Llama because they saw how popular it was in the community. And then I think the problem was trying to, let's say, monetize the open not monetize the open source, but, like, kind of use the open source to make a bigger splash.”

“The next few years are definitely gonna be an increased value on physical goods and events and then even more pressure on slop. So there'll be so they'll keep the slop is only starting. The next few years will be more and more diverse versions of slop. Hoping that we society, drowns in slop enough to snap out of it and be like, we can't. Like, none. Like, it just doesn't matter. We all can't deal with it. And then, like, the physical has such a higher premium on it.”

“When I interviewed Ron Carter that played in Miles' sixties quintet, I asked Ron, because Ron did records. He played bass on 2,200 famous records. And I said, did you guys ever rehearse with Miles? No. Never. I said, so what would you do? He goes, we'd just show up at the studio, and he'd have the charts, put them on the stand, and we would just roll. And I said, well what about the live records that you did when you'd record at clubs and things like that? He goes, we never knew that we were recording.”

“It's held for 13 orders of magnitude of computer something. Like, why would it ever end? So I think fundamentally it is pretty unlikely to stop. It's just like, eventually, we're not even gonna be able to test the bigger scales because of all the problems that come with more compute.”

“I was training the Gwent three base model with RLVR on math 500. The base model had an accuracy of about 15%. Just 50 steps, like in a few minutes with RLVR, the model went from 15% to 50% accuracy. And the model you can't tell me it's learning anything about fundamentally about math in 50 steps. So the knowledge is already there in the pre training. You're just unlocking it.”

“Elton John just walked into our session, and he said he's a big fan. He said to come over when we're done and hang out in Studio A. So we did, and he was there with Bernie Taupin. They were working on a song, and we talked there for an hour, and he was talking about recording two records a year and then they'd go on tour and they'd write and record the whole record in two weeks. So Bernie would give him lyrics, Elton would go out and spend fifteen minutes writing all the melody.”

“Anthropic is known for betting very hard on code, which is called code thing, is working out for them right now. So I think that even if the ideas flow pretty freely, so much of this is bottlenecked by human effort and kind of culture of organizations where anthropic seems to at least be presenting as the least chaotic, it's it's a bit of an advantage.”

“I think it's very similar to learning languages, which kinda is like my theory on perfect pitch, that every child is born with perfect pitch, and they start to lose the ability around nine months when people become culturally bound listeners, when babies do. They start out as citizens of the world. They have the neural pathways to hear the sounds, the phonemes of all 6,500 languages spoken on Earth. But then around nine months, they begin to lose that ability.”

“If you go back and you watch videos, The Beatles, any of their movies, they're smoking all the time. The Get Back documentary, they're smoking constantly. Every singer smoked. Every musician smoked. This is the reason that so many of these virtually every famous singer, no matter what genre music, jazz, soul, rock, they all smoked. Nat King Cole, he smoked, I think, four packs a day. He died of lung cancer.”

“To me, the bass is one of the only instruments that when you play a bad note, everybody notices. As much as I love to play the guitar, and I love to play the guitar more than anything, I think, but the bass really defines what the quality of the chord is. Because you can put the root in there. You can put the third of the chord in the bass. You can put the fifth in there. So the bass player has a lot of power.”

“I disagree with some of their presumptions and dynamics on how it would play out, but but I think they did a good they did good work in the scenario defining milestones. The camp that I've fallen to is that, like, AI is, like, so called jagged, which will be excellent at some things and really bad at some things. So I think that when they're close to this automated software engineer, what it will be good at is that traditional ML systems and front end, the model is excellent at. But the distributed ML, the models are actually really quite bad at.”

“Fight these content ID claims. If it's fair use, if you're not just playing the song and listening to it. A lot of stuff that are reaction videos or whatever that are not where they play the whole song. I'm using these things and I'm talking. He went through my entire catalog. I have 2,100 videos. He's fought 4,000 content ID claims and won every single one of them. Historically, YouTubers never would fight back. They were like, oh, this is easy money. YouTubers never fight back because they're afraid to have their channels taken down.”

“My dad gave me for Christmas when I was in tenth grade. And he said, and this is not like my dad. My dad worked for the railroad. He was very, you know, few words spoken, born in 1919. He said, if you ever learn to play guitar like this, you've accomplished something with your life. And I was like, What? So, this record state was unopened until about March after Christmas, and one day I was like, Okay, I'll open it up, and I put it on, I start listening to it.”

“My theory of my channel has always been make videos on things I'm interested in. And at first, I thought, oh, nobody's gonna watch an old white haired guy on YouTube. That was kinda my thing. Well, that was not correct. And then it's like, we'll just make videos on stuff I'm interested in. It just so happens that other people are interested in the same things I'm interested in, and keep learning.”

“Building an element from scratch is a lot of fun. It's also a lot of to learn. And like you said, it's probably the best way to learn how something really works because you can look at figures, but figures can have mistakes. You can look at con concepts, explanations, but you might misunderstand them. But if you see the there is code and the code works, you know it's correct.”

“Anthropic lost in court and was owed $1,500,000,000 to authors. Anthropic, I think, bought thousands of books and scanned them and was cleared legally for that because they bought the books, and that is kind of going through the system. And then the other side, they also torrented some books. And I think this torrenting was the path where the court said that they were then culpable to pay this billions of dollars to authors, which is just, like, such a mind boggling lawsuit that kinda just came and went.”