I'm writing a book!

Why I've been gone over a month, and how you can help

Cover is purely a mock-up, and the title is also completely preliminary. If you have suggestions, feel free to let me know!

Hi all,

I wanted to share an update on why I've been gone for over a month.

I’ve been writing a book! And the first draft is almost done, due to the publisher next month with a target publication date of August 2025. I have a longer teaser below, but as you can likely guess, it’s about AI.

It’s a comprehensive “primer” of AI’s history, technology, economics, and business implications. Think of it as a wide-spanning survey of “what you need to know about AI” that you can give to everyone from your friends who were shocked by ChatGPT and confused about the future—all the way to engineers or business executives who want to round out their knowledge.

How can you help?

• Please sign up for updates (and spread the word). I will be providing more focused updates here (including sample chapters) and at some point will do pre-sales for first edition signed copies!

• I need beta readers (and “early praise” quotes)—if you’re interested, please reach out to me either through email, messages, or click the checkbox on the form.

• I’m still looking to interview different voices in AI. Let me know if there’s people you’d suggest (including yourself!). I’ll actually be reaching out to some of you in the coming days.

What's coming next?

I will be sending updates, sample chapters, and info on the pre-sale that will be coming up. This has been super exciting, since I’ve interviewed everyone from philosophers of the mind, science fiction writers, AI researchers who have lived through the early waves, and AI entrepreneurs who are changing the world today.

This pause ended up far longer than I had planned—and I’m actually really moved that some of you noticed and reached out. I promise I’ll get back to it here at Weighty Thoughts and look forward to updating you all on the book as I go.

With deep gratitude to you all,

James

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Book Teaser

When people think of AI, they think AI from science fiction—scary, powerful, and with human-level intelligence or greater. In reality, AI is truly more powerful than ever. Is it close to science fiction? Not really. However, it can be hard to know. Those who haven’t followed developments in the field were shocked by ChatGPT’s debut in late 2022 and how the explosive progress in the field since.

I’ve been following this field for years as a technologist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Most critically, I’ve been one that has also invested in hardware, which AI is inescapably tied to with its compute, power, and even data center requirements. This is not the Internet all over again. While there are lessons we can learn, people misunderstand the fundamental nature of AI. 

It is barely at its infancy in hitting human-levels of performance. It is absolutely going to change the world—just not in the way people think. I’ll explain why humans will still be involved in most aspects of AI… but how the nature of work will still fundamentally shift.

AI has already changed how people make food, diagnose disease, and even manage money. But humans will still be critical. We won’t be facing mass unemployment—actually the opposite, since it’s coming just in time to mitigate our demographic disease. Learn about the critical underlying themes of what drove AI in history and its current technical architecture in order to understand its future. I don’t have a crystal ball to know what the future holds, but I can give you the tools for how to think about what’s coming next in an AI future, and how humans—and you—fit into it.