- Valley Boys
- Posts
- positive sum games
a bit of thursday philosophy followed by what we’re hearing in ai
Status games are multiplayer, zero-sum, hierarchical, judged socially.
Get grades, applause, titles now - emptiness later.
Natural games are single player, positive-sum, internal, judged by nature/markets.
Pay in pain now - get wealth, health, knowledge, peace, family later.
Play positive sum games.
How to Pick Your Game? Select 3 hobbies
One that Makes money
Two that keeps you fit
Three that preserves your creativity
How to Win in your games?
When input and outcome are directly related - consistency is key
When input and outcome are not directly related - find a small win and double down
When money cannot buy you happiness, it can buy you freedom
Happiness without material comfort is playing on hard mode
How to Become Lucky?
Dumb Luck (Lottery Winner) - hope luck finds you
Position Luck (Alexander Fleming) - go to places where luck finds you
Judgement Luck (Next Cristiano Ronaldo) - prepare your mind to be sensitive to chances
Crazy Luck (Deep sea diver discovering treasure) - become the best at something, luck will find you
Move from 1 → 2 → 3 →4
And lastly, keep iterating till you become the best player in the game you pick
It should feel like play to you and work to others
Change your objective until it arrives at your specific knowledge, skill sets, position, capabilities, location and interests. Your objectives and skills should converge to make you number one.
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Thinking of Building in AI? Make It Proprietary
When GPT3 was released to the public, we made one prediction. When OpenAI released GPT4 - it would be heavily paywalled. And that’s exactly what happened.
So what makes a model better than a previous version? It’s your data. So if you’re considering building in AI - your selling price should be measure in user data points.
It’s not like every start-up is going to build its own LLM. So what differentiates you as opposed to another competitor? And with ChatGPT releasing its new list of plug-ins, the conversation got more serious. So here’s how you can build a moat using proprietary user data.
The give-to-get model, where users earn points by contributing data and spend points to access services based on that data is the route you should think about taking. Incentivizing users to crowdsource data can be a cost-effective way to acquire large amounts of data, as it leverages the efforts of a community rather than relying on paid data collection services. It’s the same reason why startups actually pay their initial cohort of users to use their product than the other way around.
Here 5 ways that you can go about building your native databases:
Surveys: Ask users to complete a form and incentivize them with a free trial or a limited supply of credits. The more data they give you, the more you should reward them. (eg. 2 min survey = 10 credits; 10 min survey = 50 credits)
Landing Pages: Before you launch a product, create a landing page. This is a great way to build up hype and collect a list of users who can test out your product even before you’ve launched it.
Social Media: DMs, comments, polls on every channel - you know the drill. The more data the better.
Go Manual: Individually cold call / email / get in front of your users. Its time consuming but maybe your sweet voice and great attitude will gain you a customer loyal for life
The use cases are endless. Here are some company-specific ideas we’re already tinkering with.
Apple: Siri sucks. And she doesn’t remember anything. Apple could potentially turn her into the most powerful assistant ever if they play their cards right. And imagine the data they’d get a hold of if they did
Spotify: Type in a sentence on how you’re feeling and Spotify will generate a playlist for you. “Making coffee and need to get into productive mode on a Sunday morning” - here are 30 songs generated just for you based on your listening habits and prompt.
Meta: Targeted advertisements that actually make you buy - Facebook Marketplace would be a great place to start. Can you believe people still use Craigslist today? Also, imagine if you could potentially turn your Whatsapp messages and communication threads into actual actionable items. So a message saying I’ll ring you at 3pm automatically populates into your calendar.
Hinge: Just like the Black Mirror episode - find you your soul mate based on your interests and all the information they have on you with all the guys you had text relationships with
What do you want to see your favorite companies build? Leave a comment below.
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