Sudeep Sharma

I went to an event in San Francisco last week that Quiver hosted with a16z, showing what Arrow 1.1 and Arrow 1.1 Max can do. Quiver is interesting because it seems to do for graphic, visual, and brand designers what AI has already started to do for product designers. Not replace them, but increase their range. That is usually how powerful tools work. They don’t remove the need for taste; they make taste matter more. The real promise of AI in design is speed in the deepest sense: the ability to go from idea to visible form almost as fast as the idea occurs. You think of something and you can see it on a canvas, in an interface, or even in the physical world. With software and app front ends, we’re already well into that future. But outside image generation tools like Midjourney, graphic and brand design haven’t changed nearly as much. One demo stayed with me. Quiver took the a16z logo, including the rising arches in the A, and generated a full typeface from it. I looked at the font afterward. It was good. What made that impressive was not just the execution, it was the interpretation. Determining the concept behind a custom typeface is the hardest part of the process. The a16z concept is not obvious; they talk about American dynamism and a new golden age of technology, but those ideas could be expressed in many ways, but they chose this one. And they chose it because it said something they wanted to say. It speaks to the founders’ libertarian bent, their well-known affection for The Fountainhead. In other words, there was human judgment embedded in the design. Quiver was able to pick up that judgment and extend it into a usable typeface instantly. That matters because there are a lot of things we leave out of brand projects, not because they are unimportant, but because they are too expensive, too slow, or too hard to justify. I often tell clients they should invest in custom type. A few agencies do this well. Most clients pass. They would rather spend money on narrative, because narrative applies more broadly and budgets are limited. But tools like Quiver will make custom type both faster and cheaper to produce... and we'll see a lot more of it as a result. There is an important caveat: If you don’t know what you’re doing, Quiver will not save you. And if your plan is to use font generation as a way to avoid involving designers, you are misunderstanding the tool. You still have to think. Just now, what you think can become real just as quickly. More people will be able to create vector graphics and type work than before. So the question becomes more important, not less: what should we make that is actually distinctive? If Quiver succeeds, design becomes more accessible. That seems worth celebrating. Congrats to @joanrod_ai and team.

Shoe company pivots overnight to AI company, stock price spikes. It's not April Fool's Day? This isn't The Onion?

Here’s @dhh (Creator of Ruby on Rails & Omarchy, cofounder of 37 Signals) on why using AI agents does not feel like being a Project Manager: “When I was on that Lex interview last summer, I was saying: I don't want to be a project manager for agents because I had the mental model of a project manager of humans, and that's not what I enjoy. I don't want to be that far away from the production. I want to be in the mix. I want to have my hands in the code. What I failed to realise at the time was that running a bunch of agents feels less like being a project manager for agents and more like stepping into this super mech suit, where suddenly I don't just have two arms, I have 12. I can now look at seven screens at the same time, running five keyboards. I'm still the one doing it, even if I'm not typing ‘this’ as a keyword in a program. I have been hyper accelerated as a programmer. It's a different kind of programmer, but it still has the same affinity to aesthetics, at least when I'm producing Ruby code, and I'm able to combine that while being vastly more productive on a bunch of things.”

Am I the only one who believes that human desire has no ceiling? We will be playing new status games, seeking new types of luxuries that suddenly becoming necessities, eyeing vacation homes on mars and complaining about indignities that our ancestors would pray for.. It's never enough and it won't be this time either..

”You're not gonna win, there's no fighting AI” Diplo's take on AI is spot on, and he's ahead of 99% of creatives, across all disciplines > it's inevitable, and you're dumb if you don't use it > it's a tool, just like many other things before it > taste and references matter A LOT amazing interview by @DanielSWall

Friendly reminder that if you use AI to write you’re not a writer, if you use AI to make “music” you’re not a musician, if you use AI to make “art” you’re not an artist, if you use AI to make “films” you’re not a filmmaker :)

Why has AI psychosis affected primarily high level executives? Is it because they have no easy way to empirically see the limitations?