As I navigate my career change after Ai2, I wanted to share my views of how this blog relates to my missions and broader work. In my farewell post, I summarized my three goals right now as:

1. Provide clarity in the evolution of frontier models.

2. Create a vibrant and diverse open (model) ecosystem.

3. To build institutions that make these goals possible.

Within this, Interconnects is at its core a bit different than many of the highly-polished, professional newsletters on this platform – and this is becoming intentional.

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How Interconnects fits into my career goals

Interconnects is the tip of the spear of all of my missions in AI. It is meant to start a conversation and to let the reader into the mind of someone at the frontier. This insight makes the writing sometimes a bit raw, sometimes a bit too technical, but it is the map of how I progress my thinking in the ever changing world.

This style of writing has helped me create very strong relationships with the core group of readers, many of who listen to the voiceovers I do for these posts. The plan is to keep operating and refining the Interconnects experience around those loyal fans. These are to a large part people building the frontier AI ecosystem — researchers at labs, top investors, policymakers obsessed with the frontier, and students aspiring to have one of those roles.

I’m very happy with this sort of raw, high-voice outcome for the blog. It is not something I sought out, but rather accepted as I saw it coming and realized it would be disproportionately successful in a near-future of vast AI slop media. With years of trying to squeeze writing into a busy schedule, the only sort of writing I had time for was that which had a style very closely matching how I think.

I’m also very happy to be an independent voice. As a person I don’t do well with some power structures like having a boss, and I think there are very few people without extreme financial conflicts of interest that are willing and allowed to write. Through a wide job search, few companies were genuinely excited about me continuing writing.

Over the past few months, I considered taking Interconnects in more of a direction like SemiAnalysis or Stratechery, where it is my full-time gig and number one priority, but it didn’t seem like the right fit for what I am trying to achieve. I’m trying to build an open ecosystem and a movement for true open-science at the frontier of AI. These areas are very narrowly populated and trying to influence them with only commentary, analysis, and related research products wouldn’t work for me.

These sorts of full-time outcomes are definitely still one of my dreams, and I will do it at some point. The dream of this is also one of the reasons I take conflicts of interest seriously. Though, in this era of AI I can’t be fully on the outside.

In this vein, I wanted to disclose two advising agreements I recently signed. I don’t view them as a compromise of the above independence, as I’ll happily quit if I feel like I can’t speak my mind, but as a form of support in accomplishing my missions.

If I want to make a true open-science ecosystem I have some catching up to do with how the frontier labs approach post-training. The two companies I’m advising, whose leadership I’ve become friends with, are Arcee AI and Mercor. Arcee should be fairly obvious as the no-nonsense player building open-weight models. Mercor will make more sense over time, but they’re a close ally to a lot of my goals in transparent evaluations, open post-training, and neutrality with respect to the leading labs. These advising agreements are based on me wanting to learn more, and I don’t suspect I will ever engage in the very cursory advising roles that are more of name-stamping.

I keep an up-to-date disclosures statement at the end of the Interconnects about page: https://www.interconnects.ai/about.

Otherwise, my full-time job should still be in the non-profit sector as long as I get the next few months of logistics right.

Some operations & audience notes

Interconnects has cultivated an excellent, niche, and largely technical audience with representatives of all the top companies and labs (recently crossed 70K subscribers). I intend to protect this niche audience rather than trying to expand to bigger pastures. I think this success in audience alignment is reflected in my ~900 paid subscribers supporting it with infrequent paywalled content. I appreciate the support greatly, as the money has let me expand Interconnects operations and quality over the last 18 months.

I created Interconnects AI, LLC last January along with business bank accounts. Since then I’ve made some money, but I’ve reinvested it (and more) back into the business and the various AI services I need to try to write these articles. So, at this moment going full-time on Interconnects is a pretty risky financial proposition for me. In fact the Interconnects bank account has hovered around $0 for months (I’m personally fine having another job). This made me hesitate in going all-in on it, but in reflections I concluded that I would have more impact in AI by building these systems than focusing on commentary.

Second, as AI services get more expensive (e.g. Fable becoming API only), I’m going to need to spend more out of pocket to make this happen. I’m happy to do this in the near term, but I’m starting to optimize the blog to have more consistent financial growth, so when I want to go all in on writing in a few years I have a safety net.

I don’t do special offers, free trials, etc. for Interconnects paid subscribers (mostly to mitigate noise in the Discord community), but if you have the means to support this project it would mean a lot to me as I center my career around it. Joining a lab or a well-paying startup would be a much simpler path for me and my family but it’s never felt like the right thing to do.

I have a very arbitrary goal of reaching the 1000 paid subscribers orange checkmark on Substack this summer. So you can help and/or just watch my attempts to make it happen.

In this vein, I wanted to be direct in sharing how I view a few core operational components of Interconnects, and what you can expect going forward.

1. All comments will be paywalled. Whenever I have a popular post without paywalled comments I get a flood of low-quality posts — many of which are obviously AI generated. This is a detriment of the highly selective audience we’ve built. If Substack supports a feature like “only users with a paid subscription somewhere on the platform can engage,” I’d implement it. The blog comments, Substack chat, and Discord will be spaces where I perform active curation to maintain a 0% AI slop rate.

2. Slightly more articles will be paywalled. I want to keep experimenting with what is the right way to do this, but the only metric I can rely on for increasing influence of the blog is revenue. Views, likes, etc. are all vanity metrics which don’t reliably measure this type of content. Cultivating a highly engaged audience is existential to me in attempting to maintain an AGI-proof expertise.

3. Slightly more in-person events. With a small community that I respect, I have to opportunity to translate that to excellent real-world experiences. I expect to keep these small, but I want to be more proactive at organizing them so loyal readers know what to expect. The few coming soonest will be for my book launch, which should be in the next month or two. Plus, I know people always want to meet likeminded folks in AI!

Together these should make it easier and more enjoyable to be a loyal fan for Interconnects. I’m looking forward to continuing convincing my fans that the support is worthwhile.

Thanks for reading! My career wouldn’t be possible without all of the support.