> [!tldr] a source of innovation and insight Simple ideas taken to extraordinary lengths are fascinating. They lead to [[Emergent Behavior]] and maintain [[Conceptual Integrity]], which is cool - but they sometimes lead to absolute breakthroughs. I'm fascinated by how brilliant innovations often stem from incredibly simple ideas explored with unusual depth and rigor. Two examples: **[[Notion]]**: Built on the idea of a block — a unit that can contain metadata, be operated on, hold content spans, and point to child blocks. Add generic capabilities (reminders, user-based data, hierarchies, flat lists) and you get a multimillion-dollar product potentially approaching $1B valuation. **[[Large Language Models|ChatGPT]]**: The GPT is a generative pre-trained transformer that digests a massive corpus (websites, books, articles, messages, magazines, recipes), breaks text into semantically meaningful tokens, generates predictions for the most likely next tokens given context, samples probabilistically, slides the context window to include the new token, and repeats hundreds of times. The result: summaries, stories, entirely new modes of human-machine interaction — akin to the printing press, electricity, or the automobile. I have a few simple ideas. [[Simple Interchange Grammar for Identity and Linking|S.I.G.I.L.]] is the one that lead to this note. They probably will never coalesce into anything so fanciful. **** # More ## Source - self