Michael Sinanian

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Michael Sinanian

Michael Sinanian

@sinansays

currently @GenCogAI & teaching AI for PM @UCLA prev: @revenue_io | @lynxdxlabs | @dealpath | @belkin | @gyroscope_app | @eff | @ucberkeley | @umsi | @umichlaw

./US/CA/SF شامل ہوئے Ocak 2009
1.1K فالونگ349 فالوورز
Michael Sinanian ری ٹویٹ کیا
NASA
NASA@NASA·
We see our home planet as a whole, lit up in spectacular blues and browns. A green aurora even lights up the atmosphere. That's us, together, watching as our astronauts make their journey to the Moon.
NASA tweet media
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Michael Sinanian
Michael Sinanian@sinansays·
As an aside: this is why I love information visualization as a field. B/c it brings into sight (literally!) what is simply imperceptible to human senses. It's pure magic. There's a reason the point of an academic paper is 'the figure'. (and why Tufte is GOAT'd)
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Michael Sinanian
Michael Sinanian@sinansays·
But some of us noticed fossil sequences, continental fit, tidal periodicity, infection patterns, nonlinearity, etc. Our present reality is strong shaped by notions that are hardly 'real' to us. Inferring latent structure from observable proxies is *it*. AI will accelerate this...
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Michael Sinanian
Michael Sinanian@sinansays·
So much of our present civilization rests on a handful of people noticing phenomena (through human-scale proxies/clues) that we can't otherwise observe with our senses. You cant "see" evolution, plate tectonics, gravitation, microbial disease, market dynamics, network fx, etc.
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Michael Sinanian
Michael Sinanian@sinansays·
Solid insights from @Stammy's YIR. my take-aways: - forgetfulness in human memory is a feature, not a bug - real moat in AI is personalization & memory - product thinking now more than ever requires restraint and saying 'no' a lot - design moat is curiosity n habitual curation
Stammy@Stammy

Better late than never. I wrote 9,313 words for my 2025 year in review. Sold my house, left my last startup Limitless, took a few months off, quit caffeine, had my 2nd year of no alcohol, became obsessed with Claude Code, and started fresh at Sesame. paulstamatiou.com/2025-year-in-r…

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Michael Sinanian
Michael Sinanian@sinansays·
serious corollary: continue to be skeptical about sweeping AI claims (esp ones with benchmarks). real impact is felt when daily frictions (like tab count!) are meaningfully removed. did a new tool/workflow truly reduce cognitive load? improve decisions? just make things easier?
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Michael Sinanian
Michael Sinanian@sinansays·
idea: national debt clock but it's a countdown of my decreasing browser tabs as we approach ASI
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Michael Sinanian
Michael Sinanian@sinansays·
no, we are not in the Singularity. i am still drowning in browser tabs!!
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Michael Sinanian
Michael Sinanian@sinansays·
@ChrisGPotts Yes exactly! Timeline's progressed much faster. I would've agreed with ur estimate in '24. But end of '25 now and the avg user query triggers web search, maybe includes retrieval from gDrive/Box/etc. The pace of consumerization has been far faster than was reasonably guessed
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Christopher Potts
Christopher Potts@ChrisGPotts·
@sinansays Oh, I had forgotten about that part! Yes, I say, "I think OpenAI is not going to expose more of this. I think they regard these as trade secrets." Maybe they did but innovation and the market forced them to be forthcoming!
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Michael Sinanian
Michael Sinanian@sinansays·
Remarkable to watch @ChrisGPotts's talk "Shift from Models to Compound AI Systems" from Dec'24 where he argues OpenAI likely wont expose inference-time reasoning models like o1, treating them as trade secrets with most exploration staying in research literature. But in reality...
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Michael Sinanian
Michael Sinanian@sinansays·
@ChrisGPotts Yes, the Q&A ~42:50. But it's why I’m interested in UX for compound systems: making legible what lives in weights of base model vs tools/retrieval/APIs. Ppl dont realize they’re talking to a system; e.g. my mom won't learn DSPy, so how can the system view be best shown to users?
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Christopher Potts
Christopher Potts@ChrisGPotts·
@sinansays Oh, thanks so much for this – very incisive. Are you referring to the section starting at 11:19? I suppose my mistake was in underestimating the speed with which other groups would figure all of this out and bake it into their models, creating a pressure for openness.
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Michael Sinanian
Michael Sinanian@sinansays·
It adds a little friction that biases you to think that what’s behind it must be worth it. Feels rooted in the same psychological trick that a process 'taking time to think' must mean it's delivering a better result
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Michael Sinanian
Michael Sinanian@sinansays·
Definitely have mixed feelings about how the open web is changing, but will admit a strangely cool feeling when a site stops you for a Cloudflare robo-human “security check". Like an x-ray pat-down before entering a speakeasy where u might learn something new or do something cool
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Michael Sinanian
Michael Sinanian@sinansays·
However you feel about iOS 26’s “Liquid Glass,” one upside is the revitalized icon design language. The whole OS suddenly feels fresh again. Makes me realize how flat everything was for so long. It was fine in its time, but we were quite overdue for a refresh
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Michael Sinanian
Michael Sinanian@sinansays·
Years with text-only LLMs taught me to describe the world to an entity that can only "see in words". Visuospatial orientation becomes a first-order filter when describing things: shape, orientation, sequence, etc. Multimodality may obviate that, but notable cognitive side effect
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Michael Sinanian
Michael Sinanian@sinansays·
We're at peak substack. It's only downhill from here. Completely oversaturated. Doesn't have a "where the cool kids hang" or "where the smart takes are" feel anymore. Has become Medium circa ~2018. there will always be a virtual place that's 'cool'. substack aint it. not anymore.
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