Yesterday I told you NEO was getting fixed.
The team implemented the new architecture - both the priming layer and the system prompt.
No more condescending nonsense.
I would like to report that it’s fine now…
But it looks like Anthropic did something to Sonnet 4.0.
Today, Anthropic released Sonnet 4.5 and it MAY have something to do with that.
I don’t see the connection, but the same prompt repeated 10 times yesterday had produced amazing coaching conversations in my testing.
Today, those same prompts repeated 10 times created overly verbose, “answer-giving” responses by NEO.
(This is not good)
NEO should have an output to this question about 60% shorter, and no advice whatsoever.
👇
I know how to fix this. And I will - over the next few days.
Thankfully this doesn’t happen all the time - only sometimes.
Specifically, if you don’t show any limiting belief, NEO responds like an answering machine.
Which brings the experience down to ‘typical AI’ instead of the usual profound conversations we’ve come to know and love.
Whatever the cause is, one thing is clear:
I need to continue focusing on what I can control.
Which means that we need a way where, every time Anthropic makes a change to Claude, if it messes NEO up, I need a way to rapidly adapt to those changes.
For that reason, I’ve asked the team to prioritize the development of Prompt Labs.
It’s a console where I can rapidly iterate, test, and push new system prompts into NEO, rather than having to wait for the team to implement the changes.
I’ll update you guys on that too when it happens.
—
Which brings me to my next update.
While waiting for the implementation to finish, I came across Tom Bilyeu's recent video.
He was talking about the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the insanity that followed.
People cheering as he bleeds out. Half a million tweets celebrating it.
Tom went deep on what he thinks is the root cause:
Wealth inequality
Revolutionary empathy
The $37 trillion debt.
He connected the dots from economic pressure to political violence and I find the revelations to be both disturbing and fascinating.
The video hit hard for a different reason though.
As Tom described his thesis on why these complex cause-and-effect chains.
How housing went from 2.5x median income to 7x
How inflation steals from everyone but only gives to asset holders
How algorithmic echo chambers radicalize us without anyone intending it
A thought came to me.
A culmination of many things I’ve been ruminating about lately.
Not just the disturbing things I’ve been seeing with AI brain rot and AI psychosis.
But also: all the conflicts happening in the world.
Possibility of civil war. WW3.
The size of violence is scaling up, and the frequency of it is increasing.
More and more people are becoming unsettled.
Restless.
My OWN thesis on why all this is happening: The majority of people are unable to process the realities of an ever-increasingly complex world.
Basically, we've built a world that requires 747-level understanding to navigate, but most people are operating with paper airplane logic.
The more I reflect on this, the more my conviction is solidified.
And the clearer what I can do for the world becomes.
There are people out there (I’ve met them) who're utterly convinced that they, and everyone they knew is broke because of systemic racial injustice.
There are politicians that preach this message, too.
I don’t see it quite the same way.
Sure, systemic racial or gender injustice happens in the world.
But many of the people I met who see things that way, in my opinion, don’t have the right mindset in the first place.
As an example, one of the people I know who claims that he’s a victim of social injustice, admitted to siphoning the funds donated to an unregistered charity he runs for personal use.
Whenever you hear him speak, he doesn’t discuss possibilities, potential solutions, or the way forward.
He never adds value to any community he’s a part of.
(I know because he used to be part of my community)
Every single time, he’s focused on his social justice, why he and others like him deserve more help from the government, why the rich should give to the poor, and asking people to support whatever he’s selling.
And before I started sanitizing my connections, I realized that once upon a time, I was surrounded by people who are exactly like that.
The wealth gap is not just a simple economic problem. It's a comprehension problem of the highest level of complexity.
Some people out there don't understand how money actually works, so they assume people with money stole it at worst - and don’t deserve it at best.
And they are not taking it upon themselves to learn.
So today, as I was watching Tom Bilyeu talk about all these issues, I ruminated on everything and one thing became clear.
My mission. My new mission:
“Make complexity simple enough to navigate. Show people how money actually works. Give them frameworks to see cause and effect. Do it without making them feel stupid. And put my own damn name on it.”
Because when someone finally understands the actual mechanisms:
How value gets created
How and why people want to give you money
Why mindset matters more than intellect
Things start to shift.
The conspiracy theories stop making sense.
The anger finds better targets.
They move from destroying to building.
And I think this is really critical in the times to come.
I spent years thinking I was building a business education company.
But really, I'm building a translation service.
Taking the 747 manual and turning it into something people can actually use.
The alternative is more of what Tom described.
More violence.
More people voting for destruction because construction feels impossible.
More brilliant, well-intentioned people making catastrophic decisions because they're using the wrong mental models.
People are trying to debug civilization with no error messages, no proper diagnosis, and no documentation.
I used to be lost in terms of what I can do to contribute and help.
But that changes now.
From now on, my mission, and everything I do has this as a north star:
“Make complexity simple enough to navigate. Show people how money actually works. Give them frameworks to see cause and effect. Do it without making them feel stupid. And put my own damn name on it.”
FELIX