They'll just extend the forecast horizon when questioned:

"Oh, those projections were over the life the expected costs,forecast out 10/15/20 years into the future. Everyone knows this is how you calculate such savings..."

When you have hard problems with unclear optimal solutions, taking this approach of a public show & tell will often (always?) solicit lots of interesting ideas the team may have not yet considered :)

Any similar AI based services/agents that can take images/creative assets (eg Figma, Sketch, Adobe PS, etc files) and create production-ready emails and landing pages in HTML?

Never having worked for a company in a position like OpenAI, how does this manifest in the real world as actual comp?

Like I get 50,000 shares deposited in to my Fidelity account, worth $2 each, but i can't sell them or do anything with them?

I can't speak to OpenAI's specific setup, but a lot of startups will use a third party service like Carta to manage their cap table. So there's a website, you have an account, you can log in and it tells you that you have a grant of X shares that vests over Y months. You have to sign a form to accept the grant. There might be some option to do an 83b election if you have stock options rather than RSUs. But that's about it.

In my experience owning private stock, you basically own part of a pool. (Hopefully the exact same classes of shares as the board has or else it's a scam.) The board controls the pool, and whenever they do dividends or transfer ownership, each person's share is affected proportionally. You can petition the board to buy back your shares or transfer them to another shareholder but that's probably unusual for a rank-and-file employee.

The shares are valued by an accounting firm auditor of some type. This determines the basis value if you're paying taxes up-front. After that the tax situation should be the same as getting publicly traded options/shares, there's some choices in how you want to handle the taxes but generally you file a special tax form at the year of grant.

Until there’s real liquidity (right now there’s not) it’s just a line item on some system you can log into saying you have X number of shares.

For all practical purposes it’s worth nothing until there is a liquid market. Given current financials, and preferred cap table terms for those investing cash, shares the average employee has likely aren’t worth much or maybe even anything at the moment.

It's just an entry on some computer. Maybe you can sell it on a secondary market, maybe you can't. You have to wait for an exit event - being acquired by someone else, or an IPO.

You got the right idea there. They wouldn't actually show up in your Fidelity account but there would be a different website where you can log in and see your shares. You wouldn't be able to sell them or transfer them anywhere unless the company arranges a sale and invites you to participate in it.

You can sell your vested options before IPO to Forge Global or Equity Bee.

I feel like the AI industry is basically recreating "workflow engines" again and again and again, in different forms, with different input mechanisms.

Temporal.io has been good for orchestrating agentic workflows, or workflows in general

This is a killer use case guys - excited to try it out over the next couple weeks!

"Negotiate with the service provider/insurance co/cable company/etc" as a service is going to be massive.

This sounds great up until the AI agent agrees to something the human would not agree to, and now they're on the hook for money.

Siri is literally a joke!

My son (he's 11 years old now and fairly skilled with all the main AI tools, eg chatgpt, gemini, etc) and I retry her every month or so, and this past time we just laughed. Can't handle basic questions - hears the question wrong, starts, stops, takes us to some random ass webpage, etc, etc.

"She's so jacked up!" he said.

Apple needs to get this under control and figured out, stat!

What's left to conquer in email land?

Most of the large marketing ecommerce/enterprise market was captured via ExactTarget/Salesforce, Oracle/Responsys/Eloqua, IBM/SilverPop/Acoustic, Adobe/Neolane/Marketo by the mid 2010's.

SendGrid/Twilio was another a few years later, Amazon SES is ok, then you have some of the smaller market players (MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc).

Hard to scale/grow a startup in any real way when there are so many fairly well entrenched solutions across industries and company sizes.

Turning your email newsletter into structured data. A db of events you get emailed, articles you should read, discounted to review, etc

Something I’d die for someone to tackle.

There’s still a huge opportunity for AI. The way it’s used currently (sorting & drafting replies) is barely scratching the surface. Until you can literally turn your mailbox over to AI the way you would with a human assistant, email UX is not a solved problem.

I'm far from an expert but I would say there will always be people who hate the current enshitified solutions and are looking for the new cool kid in town

What is the timeline/next steps to make this a usable therapy in humans?

Not familiar with state of the art techniques in this realm currently.

Best way to get free tickets is to ask the sponsoring vendors/companies directly I've found - can play either the 'I'm a current customer' card, or the 'I'm considering your solution seriously' card.

Have gotten many free tickets, dinners, sports tix, etc that way over the years!

How exactly do you contact them and ask? Can you give an example

Sales people are always happy to talk to you. :)

Sure, but why would a sales person give me a free ticket to a conference? Am I going to come by their booth and buy something?

For major conferences, they probably have a fairly limited number of free tickets.

You might think of them the next time you need their product