The Taste Premium and Reverse-engineering Creativity

Hello and happy Sunday! We published something a bit different this week—a deep dive on the startup-slash-artists-collective MSCHF by Evan Armstrong. The 3,3667-word piece yielded (at last count) 1,003 suggested edits in the draft, which may be an Every record. As always, let us know what you think in the comments. 

On to everything else we published this week, along with our take on the latest tech and business news.—Kate Lee

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

---

Our stories

"The Art of Scaling Taste" by Evan Armstrong/Napkin Math: MSCHF is one of those rare businesses that, after writing about it, makes us want to run Every differently. The artists collective has launched over 100 different products in the last five years while remaining true to their taste. Read this to learn how the MSCHF process works and how you can apply it to your business. 

🔏 "Supercharge Your Creativity With Inductive Coding and AI" by Michael Taylor: Prompt engineer Michael Taylor shows you how to use AI to analyze successful exemplars in your field and make strategic decisions about what to emulate and where to innovate. Read this if you want to learn how to use memetic analysis to rig the creative game in your favor. 

"How Language Models Work" by Dan Shipper/Chain of Thought: In this 100 percent jargon-free guide, Dan breaks down the key concepts of large language models—Super Words, attention mechanisms, and semantic maps—that make tools like GPT-4 tick. Read this for a straightforward explanation of LLMs, sans the tech lingo. 

🎥 "Introducing 'AI & I'" by Dan Shipper/Chain of Thought: We've got a new name, but it’s the same great show—just no longer bounded by ChatGPT. How Do You Use ChatGPT? is now AI & I. Watch the trailer on YouTube or Spotify, and subscribe now on YouTube or Spotify for next week's episode featuring bestselling author Steven Berlin Johnson. 🫣 Take a peek at the inspiration behind the show’s new name.