Shop notes: Thielian secret
The reason I named Collaborator ‘Collaborator’ is to set a high and specific standard for what it should ultimately feel like to build things with AI.
(I’ve added quite a few new folks to this list. To you: welcome! These are my roughly-weekly notes on the thinking and process behind building Collaborator.)
If you ask ten creative people about their dream working relationship with other creators, a majority of them would say, “as collaborators”. Not as a boss, not as a report, not even necessarily within an exclusive partnership (artists are famously poly).
Creative people understand the value of a great team as much as anybody else. I hope the myth of the lone genius has been thoroughly debunked by now. But needing and wanting to work with others immediately raises the question: how?
The dominant model for both human–human and human–AI cooperation is hierarchical. Information and control flow from the top down; results and feedback flow from the bottom up.
This is the right model in many situations. I am not an anti-hierarchy anarchist. However, this is only one model, and it cannot achieve all desired outcomes.
A utopian egalitarianism is often presented as the only alternative to hierarchy, both by proponents and opponents of The System. This is a false dichotomy.
Collaborators don’t discard clear directions of control; they just unbundle them from individuals. Collaborations are the result of mutual awe and respect between differentiated peers with common creative goals.
Collaboration is a “dream” working relationship because (between humans) it requires a rare coincidence-of-circumstances to begin, and is an unstable equilibrium that tips toward hierarchy if successful, or dissolution if not.
These constraints are not necessarily true of human–AI working relationships.
In fact, my Thielian ‘secret’ is that collaboration will be the dominant future form of all cooperation due to AI.
Speaking of collaboration: this past week, contributors and early fans of Collaborator have already built a fully-functional Windows version of the app. Users have been sharing screenshots of their custom mods to the UI, representing desire paths that I will incorporate into the first-party design. The GitHub repo crossed 2k stars.
I am looking for intros to angels who would be excited about Collaborator and the vision toward which the current product is an important first step.
If you can help with this, please just reply and I’ll share an easily-forwardable. Or just forward this email.
Until we meet next,
—Yiliu