Scaling without SlopWe've been quiet — announcing our 2026 plans! The State of Latent Space is here.Welcome to Latent.Space Don’t recognize this sender? Unsubscribe with one click Latent.Space recently imported your email address from another platform to Substack. You'll now receive their posts via email or the Substack app. To set up your profile and discover more on Substack, click here. First off, a few major announcements:
At every AIE conference I run, I give myself the challenge of doing the shortest keynote for a “State of the Nation” type address. For AIE Code, I declared War on Slop. This was partially inspired by seeing the motivating factors behind products like Codemaps and Review, and partially a reaction to the “Canadian Girlfriend AI Coding” performative productivity porn that took over the timeline: I didn’t expect Slop to then be picked up as word of the year by Merriam-Webster and the Economist and the American Dialect Society¹, but clearly the theme of fighting Slop is resonating as generative AI rips the authenticity from creation, piles up open source maintainer workload, fills up academic conference submissions, taking up 20% of YouTube videos (earning millions per year) and running entire Instagram channels and the Apple App Store, slowly deadening the Internet. There are a few gut reactions to Slop that are reasonable:
However, they feel variously dissatisfying in their general defeatism and pessimistic view of human taste being scalable. First off, I’ll reiterate the obvious point that plenty of Slop has been made by humans, both well-meaning and cynical, for centuries — AI does not have a monopoly on making Slop. However, AI does make it easy to scale thoughtless output and it is harder to signal intent, effort and quality — an emphasis of my recent writing retreat. If you creatively/skillfully wield AI as "a new brush”, then AI Kino is very possible. But more importantly, if your solution to AI slop basically means you cut back on your own human output, that doesn’t solve the fact that AI slop will continue to far outpace human output, and therefore simply overwhelm you and your community by sheer brute force and our own recsys’ inability to keep up with our tastes. Humanity slowly starves to death gorging on its own excrement spewed from artificial intestines. The most important problem in media now is scaling without slop, period, whether or not AI generated or entirely human-origin. Actually I lied, it’s not just a media problem: any act of creation and exercise of free will is is subject to the quality-quantity tradeoff, whether you’re building a new product or texting your adult kids. Any experienced creator will tell you that there can be very little relationship between effort and result - the thing you slaved on for a month gets overdone and incoherent, whereas the throwaway tweet of frustration done in 3 seconds gets viral and used as an example for decades to come. Sometimes -you- can’t tell what’s slop, sometimes one man’s slop is another man’s kino. The central problem to solve is the changing the slope of slop, not giving up on humans. This is the problem I am working on now for both AI Engineer and Latent Space. The case studies of increasing quantity AND quality have been fascinating. Scaling AI EngineerAI Engineer grew from one event a year in 2023 and 2024 to 4 (AIE NYC, AIE WF, AIE Paris, AIE CODE) in 2025, and there will be at least 7 AIEs around the world in 2026.
Viewership did not just 3x, but more than 10x’ed: And anecdotally, quality has also improved: I remember a former 2024 speaker who is known for speaking his mind, and being privately pretty cynical about AIE, in 2025 coming back to me to say that conversations and talks felt a lot more authentic and serious this time around. I say this not as a brag, but I think there are a lot of conscious and subconscious decisions made that contribute toward building a leading IRL and online community for serious, grounded AI discussion without resorting to fearmongering or hyperbole. Slop has definitely crept in, but here we have kept closer to “Scaling Law X” than Scaling Law 0 and I’m happy about that. Scaling Latent SpaceLatent Space (now joined with AINews) has been a tougher beast. The value of media cycles often fit to Sonal Choksi’s McClusky Curve — flanked on the left by TBPN, and on the right by Dwarkesh. We did AMAZING as a podcast - regularly in the 30-50th ranks of the overall US Tech podcasts in Apple, and considered by many to be a top 3 AI podcast, being featured on the GPT5 launch, and featuring conversations with Greg Brockman and Fei-Fei Li and Mark Zuckerberg and Noam Brown and Bret Taylor and Chris Lattner and the Claude Code team and more household names to come. While our YouTube numbers are still wanting (pls like and subscribe! we started YouTube way, way too late in this game), audio subscribers are still incredibly strong, and Flightcast estimates us at about 1.5m all time unique listeners now. But we fell behind on writing, evidenced by 2025’s Agent Labs Thesis far underperforming the AI Engineer Reading List (which we’ve continued to maintain, but slowly left behind as less and less frontier knowledge is published). There’s only so much that one person can do. I am very inspired by creative networks that build a platform for multiple people to shine and contribute their talents, like Dropout TV and Morning Brew and SemiAnalysis. This is part of the movement that a16z has termed New Media, and perhaps unlike most on that list, I want to try to build a platform clearly bigger than me and hopefully bigger than the some of its parts. The game plan for 2026’s Latent Space is threefold:
The Elements of Curation: Tuning High TasteThe common thread among AIE and LS is that we have to curate very well, and then scale one person’s curation to many, hopefully by crowdsourcing but also taking audience/community feedback very seriously. The most visible output of this is “saying no a lot”, and this is hard job saying no to friends and to sponsors, but even that is too broad a brush. There is no “school for curators”, no Maven or Udemy course for curating. You have to have a point of view, you have to know your audience better than they know themselves, and you have to have the freedom to make mistakes and survive making experiments with a high failure rate. Fortunately, we have enough backing and support (read: donations, partially from generous investors (who have been explicitly told we will never sell or sell out), but operating expenses actually come from Substack subscribers! thank you!) that we don’t have to couple this with any sort of business model. We just want to Make Good Shit at Scale. Welcome to 2026. It’s gonna be a fun ride. 1 where it was a runner-up last year, and coined 2 years ago perhaps by @deepfates You're currently a free subscriber to Latent.Space. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |





