The Mozart of the Attention Economy
"That doesn't mean you should let AI take over your life though. For example, you shouldn't let it do your writing for you. Writing is thinking, and you need to be able to do that for yourself." - Paul Graham
AI 2027: A week before release, OpenBrain gave Agent-3-mini to a set of external evaluators for safety testing. Preliminary results suggest that it’s extremely dangerous. A third-party evaluator finetunes it on publicly available biological weapons data68 and sets it to provide detailed instructions for human amateurs designing a bioweapon—it looks to be scarily effective at doing so. If the model weights fell into terrorist hands, the government believes there is a significant chance it could succeed at destroying civilization.
The Mozart of the Attention Economy: Mr. Beast: When you watch a MrBeast video, you are watching the result of a deep and meticulous engagement with YouTube’s audience-retention data. “The cool thing about YouTube,” as Donaldson writes in the memo, “is they give us super-detailed graphs for every video that show the exact second we lose a viewer.” The first minute is typically where the majority of viewer loss happens, and this is why, in the opening seconds of a MrBeast video, you feel as though someone has filled your skull with popping candy and is beating you about the head and face with a foam bat.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/jun/03/mrbeast-jimmy-donaldson-youtube-videos-star
You're a Crazy Person: I meet a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, and when I ask them what they’d rather do instead, about 75% say something like, “Oh, I dunno, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.” If I’m feeling mischievous that day, I ask them one question: “Where would you get the coffee beans?”... On the other hand, when people match their crazy to the right outlet, they become terrifyingly powerful. A friend from college recently reminded me of this guy I’ll call Danny, who was crazy in a way that was particularly useful for politics, namely, he was incapable of feeling humiliated. When Danny got to campus freshman year, he announced his candidacy for student body president by printing out like a thousand copies of his CV—including his SAT score!—and plastering them all over campus. He was, of course, widely mocked. And then the next year, he won. It turns out that people vote for the name that they recognize, and it doesn’t really matter why they recognize it.
