Crafting an alchemist’s paradise.

I help run Diff Jobs, The Diff’s recruiting arm, placing our readers at 50+ AI-native application layer startups, neolabs, and financial firms that buy businesses and rebuild them around AI. I started in mid-2024, weeks before o1 shipped, so I’ve seen how AI progress has repriced different flavors of labor in real time. Two questions have fallen out: 1) what is the current human-machine exchange rate in a given domain, and how is it changing? And 2) how can we use machine intelligence to better select for/develop/reach the human intelligence a domain actually requires? Answering these questions requires a deep obsession with understanding what makes people special. Beyond talking to 10+ talented people (e.g, engineers, founders, investors, academics) every week, I spend hours consuming personal websites, blogs, LinkedIn/X profiles, resumes, Github projects etc. to understand people’s unique intellectual synesthesia and what makes them tick.