The Format #049
The art of the secret, AI vs Pineapple's, the threat of the vibes and the API of the new world?
Happy Friday! 🌞
It’s been (yet) another very hectic fortnight, and this is another rather late issue of The Format. My bad.
But, in fairness, the reason for all the busyness is that we’ve been deep in product mode. Building. Solving problems for users. And working on a series of super exciting releases which we’ll be rolling out over the next few weeks.
So in short, we’ve been cooking and we can’t wait to share. Watch this space.
Anyway let’s jump in…
Your new mission is to join the right WhatsApp chats
For better or worse, this little thing called AI has made the information that sits in the public domain more accessible than ever before.
Almost everything that was online before the training cut off date for any of the LLM’s (like Chat GPT 4.5) is injested by the model and is then just a prompt away.
And with tools like OpenAI and Gemini’s deep research even the information after that cut-off date can be found and used in responses.
I’m not saying that from now on all public information is pointless. There is definitely still a huge amount of value in having access to the right data (at the right time ideally!)
But the real ‘alpha’, and the biggest arbitrage opportunities are now coming from the deeper, more private places.
Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Andreesen Horowitz, is someone who over the years has massively leveraged this. He is a curator of WhatsApp group chats with everyone from the brightest minds in Silicon Valley to the leaders of very fringe and ‘potentially nothing’ tech movements e.g. the recent web3 AI agent bull run.
So the game now is to find the secrets. The secrets that even AI doesn’t know…
Solving the resource problem
Right now only a handful of companies in the world have the resources and wealth to make a truly competitive foundational large language model.
This number is slowly growing as teams (like DeepSeek) come up with innovative ways to ‘scale hack’ the performance of these models, but the amount of resources required is prohibitive for almost everyone.
With AI promising to be the future of information, innovation and opportunity, these constrains and the resultant oligopoly is… rather concerning.
So what’s the alternative?
Well up until now there have been several somewhat successful attempts at using blockchain and the incentivisation methods of web3 to help decentralise the model training and running processes.
But the problem has been that even in these decentralised open source systems, all of the models weights (it’s secret sauce) have had to be stored on every machine that’s involved.
Pluralis have came up with a solution:
A decentralized training protocol where model designers can come to the protocol with their model ideas while compute and data providers can contribute the resources necessary to train models.
Very interesting…
A Deep Dive Into MCP (Model Context Protocol) and the Future of AI Tooling
Siddharth Ahuja used an Ableton MCP so that he could create music with prompts directly from Claude. 🤯
Min Choi used the Blender MCP to turn his 2D AI generated images into a fully modelled 3D scene. 🎨
Eric Ciarla (rather terrifyingly) created an MCP that can scrape a website and clone it in Windsurf in seconds. 👀
Sounds great right. But you’re probably wondering wtf actually is MCP? And how can you use it?
MCP is an open protocol that allows systems to provide context to AI models in a manner that’s generalizable across integrations.
Essentially is makes it super easy to give AI agents tools, and for them to decide which tools to use, in what order, and how to chain them together to accomplish a task.
And it seems that literally everyone on twitter has been talking about it over the past week or so. With many saying that this is the API moment for AI agents.
Other articles + videos we’ve found interesting this week…
Your favourite songs at affordable cost. → In a world where you can get all the music in the world for just $11.99, why would a fan ever consider paying to collect and own onchain music? Good question. CoopahTroopah believes the answer to this is curation, speculation and dynamic music releases. Giving artists of any size the chance to earn.
We’re attacking the same big problem from a different angle by powering Amplify World to Create Meaningful Artist-fan Communities. 🎵
A Note For The Vibe Coder's. → After Y Combinator revealed that 95% of their cohorts codebase is generated by AI, people are kinda starting to take vibe coding seriously. And trust me I LOVE the vibes, but as a builder with more vibes than experience it can be all too easy to make big rookie mistakes. This thread is a bit of a 101 on how to avoid getting wrecked by the vibes. 🤘
What are airdrops? → They are a reward, in the form of a token, that are given to users, usually those who have backed a project in the early stages. These rewards can be given retroactively based on things like onchain transactions or owning a specific NFT.
OR, using some of the tech we’ve been working on at Open Format, airdrops could become part of an ongoing way to reward the people who are actually adding real value to your community or company. As it should be. 🪂
A high schooler built a website that lets you challenge AI models to a Minecraft build-off → AI ‘intelligence’. They can absolutely annihilate the academic evaluation benchmarks, and then insist “strawberry” has two R’s. So what better way to test this intelligence than dropping them into Minecraft and seeing what they build… best pineapple wins. 🍍
Writing for LLM Attention → We live in an attention economy. Right now that’s a human attention economy, but as mere humans we only have so much attention to give. AI has near infinite attention. Given that Andrej Karpathy raises the question: why are we still writing technical docs for humans. Is it not time to give AI the documentation of it’s dreams, and forget about the human? 👀
That’s all for this week.
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Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽
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Image generated by Dall-E 2 using the prompt: “A Minecraft-style scene showing an airdrop happening in a pixelated world. A floating chest parachutes down from the sky, surrounded by pixel clouds. Below, blocky grass terrain with a few trees. On the ground, a pixelated character holds a phone with the WhatsApp logo on the screen, looking excited. Around them, pixelated particles represent 'vibes'—colorful, floating emoji-like symbols such as hearts, sparkles, and music notes. The entire scene is rendered in a classic Minecraft visual style with blocky textures and vibrant colors.”