pat ✈️ CVPR

Bob McGrew has a framework I keep thinking about: in the AI future there are only two jobs. The Lone Genius and the Manager. That's it. Everything else gets absorbed. The Lone Genius is the person sitting alone at a computer, amplified 1000x by AI. One person with taste, vision, and relentless focus who can now do what used to take a team of 50. The Manager is the person who becomes CEO of their own "firm" where most of the employees are AI agents. They define the goals. They decide what matters. They coordinate. The AI does the execution. The Marxists will hear "two jobs" and panic. "What about everyone else?!" But here's what they're missing: AI doesn't shrink these two categories. It explodes them open. More people get to be geniuses. More people get to be managers. The barrier to entry for both just collapsed. What actually gets eliminated? David Graeber called them "bullshit jobs." Graeber was no libertarian! He inspired Occupy Wall Street. His words: "Huge swaths of people spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe don't really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul." Graeber said bullshit jobs are "a form of spiritual violence directed at the essence of what it means to be a human being." They induce "hopelessness, depression, and self-loathing." This is who the left should be fighting for. Not to preserve those jobs. To liberate people from them and give them better ones. The dirty secret of the modern economy: millions of people sit in roles so pointless that even they can't justify their existence. Compliance layers. Reporting layers. Coordination layers. Meeting-about-the-meeting layers. They know it's meaningless. It eats them alive. AI eats those layers. Good. That's a jailbreak. What I love about Bob's framework is where it points. The Lone Genius used to require a PhD, a lab, institutional backing. Now a 19-year-old with taste and Codex can ship what took a research team a year. The genius bottleneck was never talent. It was access. The Manager used to mean you needed to hire 50 people, raise money, build an org chart. Now you can orchestrate a fleet of AI agents from your laptop. The management bottleneck was never skill. It was capital. AI doesn't concentrate genius and management into fewer hands. It distributes them into more hands. The working class kid in West Virginia. The single mom in Ohio. The 55-year-old who got laid off and now builds software for the first time. Those are some of Bob's future geniuses and managers. The best founders I see at YC are already living this. They toggle between both modes in the same day. Morning: lone genius, creative insight, the thing nobody else sees. Afternoon: manager, spinning up agents, steering, shipping. The cycle time between genius and manager IS the new productivity metric. So when someone tells you AI means "only two jobs and everyone else starves," quote Graeber to them, they’ll get it. Graeber knew the real violence was making people do meaningless work and pretending it was dignity. AI ends that. More genius. More agency. Fewer spiritual prisons.

OpenAI for Singapore 🇸🇬

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.