Who Even ARE You People? Part 1

I’m Ian Belknap, human writer.

John Cain and Peter Binggeser are the founding principals of ZeroWidth, a company that resolves to change the way we think about and use AI. They have hired me to help figure out what to say about all this.

“All right, then, PROVE it,” you might find yourself saying, a little too loudly. To which we say: we will. We will prove it. In upcoming Distributed Cognition posts. So maybe dial it down a little, bud?

In THIS post, we’ll tell you about John and Pete and why they work so well together. Here are some elements they share in common:

Both began their professional lives in one discipline - Industrial Design for Cain and Architecture for Binggeser - and have since greatly expanded their palette of inquiry to include many other arenas of thought.

Both wear corrective lenses.

Neither of them keeps weird pets - your iguanas, your skinks, your tarantulas - these are mammal guys. And not ferrets or chinchillas or cats - we’re talking about primo mammals, here - which means we’re talking about dogs.

Each is “holy crap” smart in his own way. And it’s the way these “holy crap” smarts braid together, in such arresting ways, that sets ZeroWidth apart in this now-crowded field.

Both have little patience and zero reverence for precedent - both believe that just because something has been done some way forever is no reason to keep doing it that way. This extends to beliefs and stories around the way we do things - if these are not effective, hit the eject button.

Both also have little patience and zero inclination for trend-hopping, the “stampede after latest glittering object” impulse that drives too much of LLM activity (we’ll have a series of posts about some common fallacies that contribute to this phenomenon.) If you’re chasing something simply because it’s new without some compelling justification for wanting it, hit the eject button.

Each carries an eject button with them at all times.

Both demonstrate a restlessness of mind, an abiding curiosity that drives them to master new skills and grapple with new modes of thinking. ‘Member how during lockdown everybody seemed to be learning crochet and baking bread and studying Mandarin? These two are like that all the time. Which, for a bucket of sloth meat such as myself, is exhausting.

Neither of them was instrumental in getting Breakdance included as an event in the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. So take your backlash elsewhere.

Both are semi-respectable family men. Meaning their wives and children half-respect them. Zing, boys. Zing.

Both have wide-ranging professional experience, alternating between large (air quotes) prestigious corporations, scrappy startups, and educational institutions.

In addition to these separated-at-birth similarities between Pete and John, there are also several significant-yet-complementary differences between them. Distilled to its essence, I’d say it like this: Cain is a Puzzler, Binggeser is a Tinkerer. And, sure, in the Venn diagram between Puzzler and Tinkerer, there is substantial overlap - each having tendencies and qualities in common. But what I’d call their primary affinity, the predominant, inciting orientation that defines them as makers and thinkers, would be this: John wants to figure out how humans function, their rituals and routines, beliefs and convictions, processes and procedures, as relates to the material world and our place/role within it. Pete wants to figure out how everything works - mechanical objects, workflow systems, virtual environments - all of it. If Cain wants to understand how we think things, Binggeser wants to understand how we do stuff and make things.

John has said of Pete: “He’s the guy who, after an afternoon’s worth of brainstorming, can go off and figure out what to make that will address the problem.” John, in my observation, is the guy who helps deepen and sharpen the brainstorming session - asking the probing questions that help identify the nature of the problem.

These prevailing sensibilities complement each other phenomenally well - Pete and John riff off each other in conversation like twins - that almost uncanny shorthand of communication, each with a deep grasp of where the other is headed and how to accelerate and amplify any idea they’re collaborating on. Each has a sophisticated spatial sense, a deep appreciation of materials, a deft capacity for observing thought, method, pace, flow, and rhythm in the way people perform tasks, reason through things, and design processes. Both are able to take in and synthesize lots of information and impressions to arrive at elegant interpretive snapshots of things, identify bottlenecks, and devise solutions. Watching John and Pete collaborate is like witnessing two guys in high-level discussion of a complex topic - building an energy-efficient house in a desert, say, or inefficiencies of process within an insurance conglomerate - while, without looking, they solve a Rubik’s Cube they’re tossing back and forth to each other.

Each has a way of seizing upon the other’s insights and building upon, modifying, expanding, intensifying, and tweaking them - each improves and broadens the thinking of the other.

They do NOT, however, finish each other’s sentences. That’s not rapport. That’s just interrupting, which is rude. Plus, it’s one of the biggest cliches there is in describing compatibility. So it’s beneath us all to resort to it. Watching them is like a bromance, without any of the maudlin, forced-feeling sentiment.

I interviewed each of them to learn more about how they came to converge on Large Language Models as the arena to tussle with, about the circuitous-seeming paths each has taken to get here, and what they hope ZeroWidth will be able to contribute to the field. The results of those interviews will appear in our next two posts.