📋 Join SiSo’s Waitlist,☀️ ASU-GSV Summit, 🇨🇳 Chinese Vibe Shifts
Volume 22
Silicon Society is building the future of learning through AI-native job shadowing at scale.
Want to be an early SiSo user? Join our waitlist!
Need something built by our agency team? Grab a time to chat.
We’re building the future of learning, out loud.
➡️ After lots of thought, research, and probably too many light-related metaphors, we have landed on a name for Silicon Society’s cutting edge AI tutor. Meet Beacon 💡 👋. When you join a live or replayed Shadow, your personalized Beacon will be there to explain the content to you, at your level, with your learning goals in mind. And Beacon’s got personality. In the edited words of Amy Poehler - It’s not a regular AI… it’s a cool AI.
Join our growing Waitlist for early access and explore the future of upskilling & learning.
➡️ Silicon Society is heading to the ASU + GSV Summit in San Diego next week to meet with other innovators, investors, and builders in the EdTech space! You can find Rachel at the AI Show & Summit in her SiSo sweatshirt (weather permitting ☀️) .
We still have a few slots open for coffee chats on Monday & Tuesday. If you’ll be there, grab a time to meet up!
Curated media from the past few weeks:
Moving at the Speed of AI: The Reckoning
An illustrative example of the speed of AI innovation, with a cartoon meerkat at the center. This blog shows how AI tools can help build a business but also cause existential crises about building products and careers in 2025.
🗯️Quotable Bit: “That a single person with AI can work at the pace of two humans without it is astounding. But there's a double-edged sword to this superpower: Completely skewed expectations. For the AI-fluent among us, it's no longer good enough to just work at the speed of a single human. If you can't double your typical output, you can't keep up in organizations that have AI-charged every aspect of their business. Never mind the learning curve that's required to achieve such productivity gains; if you can't keep up, you're getting kicked out.”
DeepSeek and Destiny: A National Vibe Shift
When DeepSeek launched its new model, we were on it. But so much of the narrative in the US was about how this new LLM will upend our own AI industry. This article gives the perspective of DeepSeek as a way for Chinese technologists to showcase their abilities and contribute to the country’s reputational and technological ascension. It’s a quick and eye opening read.
🗯️Quotable Bit: “Most engineers are thrilled if their open source projects — a database, a container registry, etc-- are used by a foreign company, especially a silicon valley one. They’d tack on free labor on top of already free software, to fix bugs, resolve issues, all day all night. It’s all for the validation and approval.”
MCP - It's Hot, But Will It Win?
Sinofsky dishes the cold truth about Anthropic's shiny new Model Context Protocol (MCP), reminding us that middleware often struggles after the initial honeymoon phase. History shows MCP will either become a free-for-all that nobody can cash in on, or just another 'everyone-but-the-big-player' standard that hobbles along without true impact.
🗯️Quotable Bit: “This is why even when middleware works, the economics aren’t there. Or when it works, there’s always a set of key players—providers or consumers—that aren’t participating because they want to be “on top” and have the market power and customer base to do so. For every Oracle there’s a Microsoft SQL Server trying to be more open and win that way.”