Astra: Will It Blend? Yes, It Will.

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Happy Friday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is reporting that OpenAI agents used a coding forum as a message board when they were only supposed to have read-access to the internet.

Today’s Lineup

Partner at StepStone Group Hunter Somerville at 12:00 PM
Wonderful cofounder and CEO Bar Winkler at 12:25 PM
Axiom Math founder and CEO Carina Hong and Axiom Math founding mathematician Ken Ono at 12:55 PM
Northwood cofounder and CEO Bridgit Mendler at 1:10 PM

Run of Show

Astra: Will It Blend? Yes, It Will.

Amid a flurry of impressive benchmarks, GPT-6 Astra really impressed me with its use of Blender. Just check these out:

Realistically, I’m not really going to be able to “feel the AGI” when looking at benchmark scores for “FrontierMath Tier 4” or “Terminal-Bench Science 0.1,” but I’ve spent hundreds (maybe thousands) of hours working on 3D rendering and motion design (mostly in Cinema4D and Houdini). They are really fun tools, but every step of building a scene requires watching YouTube tutorials, looking up how different functions work, and then tweaking settings in 4 dimensions (when you include time) on a 2 dimensional model. It’s incredibly fun, but can also be insanely frustrating at times.

By the time I stopped spending time on motion graphics (around 2021), Blender was really taking off, it was clear that the open-source ecosystem was going to build a great community, but moving off of Cinema4D was sort of a hassle, so I never really caught the next wave. I was also able to hire folks who were able to do specific motion graphic animations as necessary, but each scene was a huge ask, because it might take a whole week.

As an example, I had an editor create this 3D battleship board to visualize US-China military competition for a YouTube video 3 years ago.

So the obvious impacts are, a lot more 3D renders, every Zillow listing becomes a 3D world you can fly through, normal “it’s over” reactions for motion designers who worry about job displacement, but I think we’ve seen Jevons Paradox play out enough now that we’ll just see more creation (see: marketing jobs haven’t declined even though ChatGPT can write a blog and generate images).

The “is this AGI?” question is swirling around again. It’s clearly artificial. It’s clearly intelligent. But how general is this? Blender can be RL’d against because it’s open source and there’s reports showing that “OpenAI purchased tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios to train computer-use agents.” So the real test might be going back to Cinema4D, Houdini, or even more obscure pieces of software. It certainly seems bullish to be a piece of software that lands in the bullseye of the frontier labs. See Meta is switching to Slack because it says it’s better for AI agents as an example.

Either way, with any new model launch, the vibe test remains the best test. Pick something you actually know intimately, turn the model on the task, and judge for yourself. Then go build something great. — John

US Adds 162,000 Jobs in August

The August jobs report is out, and it blew past expectations with the US adding 162,000 jobs. Economists polled by the WSJ said that the US would add just 53,000 jobs. This comes after both the June and July jobs reports were revised up to 31,000 and 21,000, respectively. The unemployment rate remained at 4.1%, a historically low level that indicates we have a generally healthy labor market.

The jobs added were fairly broad-based. From WSJ:

Food services and drinking places were a standout, with an increase of 59,000 jobs. The sector had shed 17,000 jobs over the prior two months.Similarly, local government education gained 42,000 jobs after losing 58,000 jobs the prior month.Manufacturing was among the sectors registering job gains, as was healthcare.The information and finance sectors shed jobs. While economists are divided over how artificial intelligence will affect the job market, those sectors are generally viewed as among the most exposed to the technology.

At minimum, the report is an argument against the Fed lowering rates in September — before the report, markets have been roughly divided on the prospect of a hike.

It also seems that the AI jobs apocalypse is still on hold, at least for another month.

We’ll be discussing on the show. — Brandon

Clip Spotlight: How Akshay Narisetti found PMF

When customers didn’t like his recording app, he made a hardware device to do what the app does. Now he has 300,000 users.

“Convenience beats intentions. So if your users have the intention to record, and you don’t make it convenient enough, they will not record.”

“But if you actually make it convenient enough to record, and they want to record even a little bit, they’ll 100% record.”

He explains how he figured all this out:

“We actually went and asked these people, ‘Why are you using the device 10x more than the app?’”

“One of the users was using a different phone that he bought specifically for recording conversations. And he had a battery attached to the phone, on top.”

“That’s kind of what Pocket ended up being. By just watching how people use these recording apps on the phone, there are a lot of limiting factors for recording.”

“There are people who get incoming phone calls all the time. So if you’re recording something, and you get an incoming phone call, it interrupts the recording. If you take the call, your recording stops essentially.”

“Apart from all of these technical reasons, the real reason is actually that the people who take 10, 15 meetings a day — doctors, consultants — a patient goes out, another comes in — the client goes out, the client comes in — and there’s 10-15 back-to-back meetings, they feel awkward in the first few seconds to take out their phone and start recording. They have to unlock their iPhone, set up the recording, and hope the operating system doesn’t kill apps running in the background.”

“So people just felt that, this is much more reliable. A quick-access thing that can immediately start recording. And I don’t need to feel awkward placing it on a desk. So it doesn’t take attention away from the meeting, like, ‘Why is this guy looking at his phone? We just met.’”