Finding Clarity, Technology Waves, and the End of EA

Happy Sunday!

If you're looking for a new work opportunity be sure to check out the Every job board for jobs hand-curated by the Every team. And if your company is hiring, remember that you can post jobs for the collective to check out as well. 

Now, on to this week’s posts! 

Let’s dive in! 

How to Find Clarity When You're at a Career Crossroads

Simone Stolzoff

There are no signposts when you're at a crossroads in your career.

Other people's advice justifies their own choices, and may not fit your definition of success. You thought as you got older you'd find a sense direction—but all you've found so far is a healthy serving of existential angst.

Simone Stolzoff has been there, and in this essay he shares research-backed strategies for how to find clarity when you need it most.

Read.

Technology Waves and How to Ride Them

Nathan Baschez / Divinations

How do you build a viral technology product? Nathan has one good answer: ride a technology wave.

Technology waves shift the underlying bedrock of economic activity and make old businesses less competitive—leaving room for new ones to emerge. Catching a wave at the right time can be the difference between building a weekend side project, and building a generational company.

In this essay, Nathan explores what waves are and how to catch them.

Read.

The End of Effective Altruism

Dan Shipper / Superorganizers

Rationality and effective altruism brought us to this: FTX's blow up and the overnight destruction of Sam Bankman-Fried's empire.

This is an existential moment for philosophy. How much good is it if it keeps being co-opted by stupid people to do bad things? Can we make a philosophy that doesn’t have those problems?

Dan examines what responsibility philosophy has in the events of the last few weeks—and where it needs to go from here.

Read.

🎧 Cross-Functional and Friendly: Cross-Team Goal Setting

In episode #3, Stella, Nikita, and Kristen weigh in on how goal setting works across teams—how they change based on product, marketing, and sales objectives, and more importantly: how they can coalesce around a broader organisational goal.

Are OKRs actually effective? Are monthly reviews better than quarterly ones? If these are the questions you’re dealing with as a founder or cross-functional leader, this episode is for you. Tune in! 

How Does AI Actually Work?

The Generative AI space is moving so fast it's hard to keep everything straight.

At Every, we've found ourselves furiously researching the space to try to understand the technology behind this explosion in creativity. Here are three of our favorite resources to understand the most important parts of this technology wave: neural networks, transformer models, and diffusion models.

What is a Neural Network | 3Blue1Brown

Want to understand the fundamental building blocks of deep learning models? Watch this YouTube series to get some intuition for how neural networks work—and why they're so powerful.

Go deeper: Read this free online book, Neural Networks and Deep Learning by Michael Nielsen to get your hands dirty building a simple neural network yourself.

The Illustrated Transformer | Jay Alammar

Transformer models are the innovation that led to GPT-3 and the current explosion of innovation in AI. Read this article to understand how they work—and how they use something called "self-attention" to operate.

What are Diffusion Models? | Lilian Weng

Stable Diffusion and DALL·E are based on so-called diffusion models that turn text-based prompts into any image you can imagine. But how does that actually work? This article explores the technology behind diffusion and explains why it's so powerful.