J. M.

The depth of our questioning determines the potential for our knowing.

Expecting this would happen is why @arunbahl and I chose to build @AloeInc in Canada. 🍁 How are you supposed to build the best team in the world if you can't access the best talent in the world? (Our team is 50% immigrants.) @SusanSvrluga @build_canada

"It doesn't have to be this way" is basically a mantra at @AloeInc. h/t @MadisonMills22 for raising awareness of the justifiable backlash to the choices industry is making today. Tools we can trust is the whole thing. Why build anything else? Channeling @ericries for a moment: "Trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in all of business."

A VC the other day told us consumers "obviously don't care about trust." 😂 Imagine thinking people don't need to trust their tech... "The percentage of respondents ages 14 to 29 who said they felt hopeful about A.I. declined sharply since last year, down to 18 percent from 27." @AloeInc started out as a consumer company, but we pivoted because we faced reality: none of the existing models were trustworthy enough. Now we've built a science-grounded stack already outperforming the largest frontier models on the benchmarks that matter for trust. At a fraction of the compute cost 😎

@The4thWayYT "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!”

coming soon to an astral projector near you

@AloeInc has been making this non-consensus bet all along: Use computation to learn the empirical world and its consequences. By focusing on ever larger datasets of indiscriminate human-generated knowledge tokens, LLM scalers get this backwards. #bitterlesson @RichardSSutton

Most value out of AI thus far

Yesterday's panel by @Vancity/@FrontierBC on "The AI Question: What do we actually want from it and who gets to decide?" -- moderated by Gurpreet Jhaj, with @GaryMarcus, @MadisonMills22 (@axios), and @arunbahl (@AloeInc) -- cut right to the heart of the question of how humans will exert or hand over our agency in this technological transition. Closing remark couldn't have put a finer point on it: Gurpreet: "What is one thing you want the founders and investors in this room to do differently when it comes to AI starting today?" Arun: "You still have a lot of choice. The other machine that directs our behavior is the economy. Yet humans can exercise their decision making, and build things in line with their own values. So do that."

If anyone builds it, everyone thrives. Over the past decade, a lot of important work on AI alignment has focused on avoiding harm. But freedom from harm isn't the same as freedom to flourish. In this paper, we introduce 'Positive Alignment'. A positively aligned agent is one that helps us navigate our own value trade-offs, builds our resilience, and acts as a scaffold for human flourishing. Doing this without slipping into top-down, technocratic paternalism is the great design challenge of our time. We think a lot more research is now needed to explore this frontier: how do we align models that actively help us thrive? Amazing work by @RubenLaukkonen, @drmichaellevin, @weballergy, @verena_rieser, @AdamCElwood, @996roma, @FranklinMatija, @shamilch, @_fernando_rosas, @scychan_brains, @matybohacek, @sudoraohacker, and others. arxiv.org/abs/2605.10310

@sebkrier Our team was literally just discussing this over dinner last night. One of those wonderful synchronicities. Good work, @RubenLaukkonen

To generate wisdom requires knowing oneself deeply, particularly one’s fears. Fear is the opposite of wisdom.

@mauvaismoments @VCBrags

The computer told me I'm the smartest boy and that I solved Marx when I was 18 and also it said I was handsome and good at kissing

You reshape your beliefs by questioning them.

@adamshuaib Refreshing clarity

You’d think “Easily legible bets don’t return funds” would be Venture 101 and yet

The only way to really see what is in front of you is to first let go of every story you’ve told yourself about what it is

@nikunj x.com/jmjjohnson/sta…

M&A is hitting a fever pitch.. at this rate, it’ll soon eclipse fundraising announcements. Why? > seed to series A gap keeps getting worse - never been easier to raise to start, never been harder to scale. > zombiecorns from 2021 finally coming to roost. expect a lot of founders to leave or sell the company for under the pref stack. > big token factories gobbling up talent and talent wanting to work at big token factories. > public market sentiment continue to stay bearish besides the big ~4 IPOs expected. So, why face the brunt of markets when you go join a breakout startup that keeps getting marked up (or acquired). > flatter organizations will lead to a lot more people quitting (or being fired) to start companies and continuing to exacerbate the seed - Series A gap I was at a dinner yesterday and said this line who I definitely stole from someone I don’t remember which is there is a lot of founders but very few entrepreneurs. Don’t become a founder for the sake of being one - do it because you literally can’t do anything else.

A number of problems would be significantly ameliorated by more people taking greater ownership over their information chain of custody.

Wisdom is long-term thinking. The opposite of fear. The opposite of loser attitude, black/white thinking.