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Reporting and discussion about AI & Work, with links to the original sources.
After losing an MIT recruit to a Princeton doctoral program, the Moonshots panel argued that the next two or three years are the last window in which humans steering fleets of AI agents will be unusually valuable — and that a PhD spends that window badly. Then the objection arrived from their own side of the table: everyone there holds the degrees they are telling young people to skip.
On the Moonshots podcast, Salim Ismail, Alex and Emad Mostaque describe the same problem from different desks: agents now produce more work than a person can review. Their answers range from designing escalation thresholds inside companies to Mostaque's decision to read his research agents' output only once a week.
On the Moonshots panel, Peter Diamandis runs a Grok Bot chief of staff called Skippy and Emad Mostaque runs 18 of them across his own machines, installing models and making art. Salim Ismail calls it the move from asking an AI to assigning work; Alex argues the messaging-app interface cannot possibly scale.
On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, the panel watched Sam Altman explain that he expected GPT-4 to put software businesses up for grabs far sooner than it did, and that the economy's inertia has made the transition "smoother and slower." Salim Ismail blamed institutions that move at a different speed from the technology, Alex pointed instead at the abstraction layers of the economy and prescribed vertical integration, and Emad Mostaque objected that the models simply were not good enough until recently.
On Training Data, Parallel Web Systems founder Parag Agrawal traces how agents multiply web searches — from a weekly credit-risk review across 10,000 small businesses to the meeting-prep agents that run hundreds of searches before his own calls — and forecasts a web that, in a couple of years, tells agents when something worth acting on has changed.