The end of summer always makes me feel a little reflective.
Here are 3 notes I’d like to share from an incredible event I attended in Florence this summer: the Stanford International Alumni Weekend, aka #SIAW26.
Note #1: Do AI to others as you would like others to do AI to you
Clay’s AI writing policy recently went viral all over our usual AI/VC/tech bubble. While Clay’s policy mostly covers AI-written text that other people will read, the slightly older, less viral “Guiding Principles for AI” from Stanford covers every AI system the university buys, builds, or uses.
Russ Altman chaired Stanford’s advisory committee on AI, and in Florence he shared the committee’s output. I found it extremely relevant for the wider startup and VC context:
(1) Human oversight: every AI system needs a named person who answers for it, from the day it’s bought or built to the day it’s switched off.
(2) Human alignment: AI should serve the organisation’s mission and values, and the people it affects should be consulted before it goes live.
(3) Human professionalism: you’re still responsible for the quality of your work, so you don’t get to blame the AI.
(4) Ethical and safe use: use AI where it actually improves things, and if you can’t say what it will do, evaluate it before you rely on it.
(5) Guarding privacy: before AI touches personal data, check that it’s legal and think about the impact on the people whose data it is.
(6) Data quality: know where the data behind a system came from, make sure it was collected legally and ethically, and keep a record.
Basically, it all comes down to Stanford's golden rule of AI: “Do AI to others as you would like others to do AI to you”.
Russ Altman also emphasised that AI will not replace you as long as you stay the author of your own thinking. The most critical skill right now is maintaining agency over your own intelligence. AI makes original thinking even more urgent than before.
And that brings us to the second note from Florence…
Note #2: AGI will never be a creative genius
Riccardo Di Molfetta of Prelude Labs (an applied research lab focused on understanding the nature of human creative genius, and building machines capable of expressing it) made a very compelling point. Creative genius is a hard limit for AI.
AI keeps getting better at problems where someone can check the answer, because scaling pulls it towards whatever the data agrees on.
Creative genius runs on a completely different axis. More data and more compute simply doesn’t work for creativity.
"Scaling trains on consensus across huge datasets, so it biases toward the conventional and converges fast on the optimal answer. Creativity lives in the tails of the distribution; the training objective pulls to the centre.”
The same logic applies to novel startups ideas, which, to me, sit at the intersection of creative genius and execution.
Note #3: You should be cheering for Translated9 in the Ocean Globe Race 2027
The most inspiring sailing story I’ve heard since watching Maiden (must watch! especially if you’re a woman in a male-dominated field!)
In 2023, Isabelle Andrieu and Marco Trombetti, together with their company Translated, entered the Ocean Globe Race (a fully crewed, retro-style round-the-world sailing race) with a boat called Translated 9 and the motto “We believe in humans”.
The race bans GPS, and 70% of his crew came from outside professional sailing. They won the first two legs.
During Leg 3, the hull cracked. Because they accepted outside assistance, they were disqualified from Leg 3, instantly destroying their chances of an overall race victory.
Unwilling to quit, the team spent weeks in the Falklands executing a massive repair.
Incredibly, Translated 9 fought her way straight back to the front of the pack. By early April, they were once again leading Leg 4 in the IRC rankings.
On Leg Four, the cracks opened again, so they diverted towards Portugal and repaired in Madeira. They still sailed into the finish line anyway and won the Spirit of OGR award.
Translated 9 is returning to take on the challenge once again in 2027.
In Florence, I fell in love with the story itself, as well as the resilience and warmth Mark and his wife bring to the sailing world!
You can follow Translated9 on Instagram here.
The chart is redrawn + simplified, based on the slide Riccardo Di Molfetta showed during his talk at SIAW26