24: Linus Lee - Engineering for Aliveness

Linus Lee (⁠⁠Website⁠⁠, ⁠⁠X⁠⁠) is a builder, engineer, and writer who explores how software can amplify our abilities, humanity, and agency. He builds, researches, and advises on AI at ⁠⁠Thrive Capital⁠⁠, a venture capital firm, and continues to write and hack on personal projects.Previously, Linus held research or engineering roles at ⁠⁠Notion⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Betaworks⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Replit⁠⁠, and others, and has built over 100 personal ⁠⁠projects⁠⁠ on the side--including his own programming language and ⁠⁠most of the tools he uses day to day⁠⁠. Most of his work, writing, and projects revolve around language, knowledge work, thinking tools, machine intelligence, and latent space for creativity.We begin with how technology can concentrate or distribute power and amplify our diminish our agency. Then he breaks down his framework around instrumental and engaged interfaces, why representation is so critical in tools, and talks through what 'tools for thought' actually means. We also discuss the state of LLM tools and how they can become more robust, as well as how latent space could be codified to help us understand more qualitative domains. This bleeds into his approach to and work at Thrive, which we discuss in detail.Linus is attuned to the ways technology can make us more or less human, and that's reflected throughout. Technology is not determined: the future we imagine and create is entirely up to us.