Chad Thiele

Last night I launched my new training product. I'm running an early adopter special. Follow, like, and DM me I'll pass it to you. This thing is a huge value bomb of 6+ years working with AI both through my own AI tools, but also in high-stakes enterprise environments. If you have managers saying "we need to use AI more" but no guidance, this is for you. You'll look like the AI rockstar on your team in no time.

Everyone wants to skip to agents. Most people at work haven’t learned to get a chatbot to draft a decent email yet. Can’t get a useful summary out of a meeting transcript. Can’t tell when the model’s bullshitting them. And we’re pitching them autonomous agents. We’re skipping reps and wondering why nothing sticks in the org. open.substack.com/pub/chadthiele…

Will the AI/robotics companies be taxed at such a high level that this becomes possible? Or are they going to produce the goods and services for free? how do they cover costs? What will incentivize exploration into new products and services? Maybe some day this could happen, but this is like a 100 year change. If that. IMO obvisouly. I'm just some schmo on the internet.

@OmriBuilds And the willpower to keep showing up every day to build it. Then there's that wall right before you're about done with it and you start doubting yourself. What a crazy rollercoaster ride isn't it?

The hardest part of building solo isn't the work. It's trusting your own judgment when nobody's there to confirm it.

I made something Chamath. Launched it yesterday. This is great advice. Even the best of us can run into that resistance beast Steven Pressfield describes in his book the War of Art. From here on X it looks like everyone is creating but it's such a small number of people who do.

Stop being cynical. Go out and make something.

@landforce Oh yea, I'm the "* Engineer", bow down before me! 😜

“Distribution engineer” lmao tech is going to implode when they find out about ROAS and MER

@TeslaModelDoge Don, don, don... don-ki... lol

This store in Japan literally has everything… …but how do I get this song out of my head? 😂

Palmer gets it. It's especially happening in the AI space. The hype is pushing people to create things that don't work for the worker/business. As someone who works in one of the largest enterprises in the world the struggle I see staff trying to make it work is real. So I launched some training I think helps solve that gap. Launched it just yesterday. The first area a business can win with AI is also one of the easiest - give your staff the tools to solve their day to day challenges. Those tiny wins stack up.

Palmer Luckey might be the only billionaire in Silicon Valley willing to say this out loud.

@IDerech Oooh, that’s coool. Nice shot. And I didn’t know it was actually called the blue hour. Thanks.

@ChibiChaddeus Mt Fuji during blue hour 😍 Shooting it on expired film gave it the perfect imperfections to make it unique.

Thoughts about Japan: I am sitting at a very old Kisstaten cafe in Ebisu, the smell of coffee and smoke, small conversations in Japanese, old friends laughing here and there. The owner of the cafe is brewing coffee on a siphon with his own curated coffee blend. Every move is perfectly calculated. He is in deep focus, almost a meditative state. The coffee looks dark like a pitch-black night. This left me thinking about why are Japanese so good at their craft. Art, food, clothes, architecture, and so much more. They are intentional. In a fast world where most things are fastly manufactured and replaceable, they choose to slow down and create something that lasts. When someone decides to do something, they mean to do it the best way possible. Then, they spend a lifetime perfecting that one thing. As an artist I resonate deeply with this way of living. I was born to create art from the moment I wake up until I go to sleep. Japan is an inspiration for everyone. Thank you Japan.

Interesting. I recently started on Substack and found the vibe there to be very comfortable and people seem to have more camaraderie. I wonder if X can become more like that over time. I like the changes made so far. But I haven't been a competitive content creator for X payouts. I bet they feel differently.

Reshares (formerly known as retweets) are dead. An end of an era in social media.

One of things I’ve noticed that slows down productive use of AI for real tasks day to day is not knowing how to instruct the model to produce not only the output needed, but in the exact format. Workers can get results but then spend time reworking them into the way it’s needed. I’m not referring to things like JSON versus markdown. I’m talking the exact layout/structure that the end result needs to be useful. Have you faced this challenge?

Of course it depends on how you use AI. If you let it do the thinking for you, you’ll experience cognitive decay (and likely a boatload of AI psychosis too). Instead, do the thinking. Let AI fill gaps. And when it does don’t just accept it straight-away. Put some thought into those gaps too. You can even ask questions of the assumptions made. Ask it to explain. Then use that to formulate your thoughts more. At the end of the day the real thing hasn’t changed much: effort. Put in the effort to always be learning and you’ll learn (even in the AI era).

I think it’s AI hype fatigue. Of course, as LLMs improve they will uncover cybersecurity vulnerabilities and risks that weren’t obvious before. It’s an invaluable tool. “Impressed by their own accomplishments” is part of it too. LLMs don’t think. They don’t have emotions. But the AI labs throw in terms like “reasoning” or worse “emergent behavior.” LLMs create one token after another based on the tokens input and the parameters/weights. A calculation. It’s a crazy good technology (I’m very pro AI) but it has a marketing problem because they’re scaring the crap out of people.

I am catching glimpses in my feed that there is a backlash against Mythos as "marketing hype," and it is a little confusing. I don't think anyone who has used the latest agentic coding tools, would think that expecting large-scale cybersecurity implications of increasingly good AI models is unbelievable, especially after reading the red team reports. It feels like a better place to start is to assume that there are new risks, and then we can all laugh at Anthropic and pat each other on the back if there are not. Also, while the AI labs certainly are impressed by their own accomplishments and benchmarks are flawed, I would note that both publicly and privately, Mythos seems to be taken seriously at a lot of large institutions and organizations filled with smart people who would rather not be worried about a new cybersecurity risk. Finally, I am not sure "our product is dangerous and we need to alert the government to that" is the sales pitch to the corporate world that critics seem to think it is.

@Scobleizer I haven’t even looked at growth and such on my account at all lately. It’s not why I use X. I mean, growth would be great. But I don’t post/respond for growth/payout like that. Maybe I’m weird. :)

Is X dying? My feed is dramatically better than it was months ago. And my lists are busier. I went to threads and it just isn’t as good. And I can’t make this on threads: alignednews.com/ai So I am not leaving. And yes reach is down. Why? Grok is getting pickier. Which is why my feed is better. Which pisses off people because they used to get more reach. Me included. But my feed is better. Which tells me the service is improving. Which tells me that soon the numbers will start going up. Which is why I am not leaving.

@evolvee33 Always be learning.

I once paid $500 for a coding course to fix my anxiety about our startup failing. I didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. I thought: "If I learn to code, I won't need the developers who keep failing us. Problem solved." But the real problem wasn't the developers. It was the panic I felt every time something went wrong. And the coding course was just the mind looking for an operational fix to an emotional problem. A ton of entrepreneurs do this. Revenue anxiety → buy a new marketing course. Team frustration → hire a new project manager. Launch fear → redesign the whole offer. Looks productive. Feels like progress. But the emotion is still there. So next month, different situation, same reaction. Here's the filter I use now: Before I buy anything, change anything, or "fix" anything — I ask: "Am I solving a real problem, or am I trying to make a feeling go away?" If it's the feeling, no course or hire in the world is going to fix it. 60 seconds with the feeling will.

It’s 5AM in Tokyo. Been up all night. Can’t sleep. An early bird offer for my DIY AI Edge launches in a few days. If your manager keeps saying @we need to use AI more” but never really teach how… I got your back. I’ll show you how to create a system to get AI to produce real results that make your work easier. That means it knows you, your work, what you need done, how to do it, and what it produces needs very little editing. Can’t wait to get this done. It’s what billion dollar enterprises pay tens of thousands of dollars to consultants to produce. Aiming for Wednesday.

Many people blame the AI when output sounds generic. It’s not the AI. It’s what the AI knows about you. Which is nothing. You’re asking a stranger to write in your voice. To create exactly what you need… in precisely the format you need. There’s a fix. It takes about 30 minutes of setup. One time. After that, the stranger (AI) becomes someone who actually knows how you think. And you begin getting the results you want.

What a legend. My uncle in law passed away a couple weeks ago (my wife is Japanese, I’ve lived in Tokyo since 1997). He loved Americana. He’d play the Eagles of his 8-track! 😊 Walls plastered with Route 66 stuff, western memorabilia, American flag and stuff like that. He was such a cool dude. It sounds like Hank was too. RIP

All of the Japan/America twitter discourse has me thinking about Hank Sasaki, "The Cowboy from Japan". Born in a small village on Kyushu Island, he fell in love with American country western music as a teenager and taught himself to play using a guitar his mother gave him. The name "Hank" was given to him by American GIs stationed in Fukuoka who encouraged him to stop playing what he heard on the radio and start writing and performing his own songs. He moved to Nashville and did just that! He returned to Japan twenty years later and spent his later years touring Japan, strongly promoting unity between our two countries and striving to bring us close together. I always intended to attend one of his performances during my frequent Oculus-era trips to Tokyo, but Hank passed away in late 2015 just days after his last song. I wish I would have made the time. God bless America and Hank Sasaki.

It’s about time we stop hoping for great results from our AI tools. And start commanding them. It’s a subtle shift in mindset. The hype has pushed us to believe AI is effortless. That it will “just do things” for us. Except that isn’t true. If you’ve tried you know. I’m launching something soon. If you’re tired of AI not producing what you need. That you’re constantly rewriting the results and not saving much time. DM me. I’m thinking about offering a pre-launch early access deal. It’s a system I’ve developed from over 6 years of deeply working with LLMs and thousands of people. From bloggers, authors, universities, to huge global enterprises… I’ve helped them all. AI is not effortless. But it’s worthwhile and produces real results when done right. Let me show you. DM me for more info.