How I accidentally went viral — Kelford Labs Daily

I accidentally went a little viral on LinkedIn last week.

Here’s what happened:

On Thursday, OpenAI released a preview for their wildly hyped and anticipated new model, o1.

I spent that afternoon reading and researching about its new capabilities and experimenting with it myself.

I realized that very few people seemed to be talking about the thing that I thought was by far the most interesting: A component of the model is “unaligned”—that is, it has no safety or content constraints on it.

That means it is able to “think” to the greatest of its abilities, for many seconds or minutes, in the background. And then a safety-aligned model interprets its output and presents a safe version to the user.

OpenAI is attempting to get around the problem of aligned models being less creative and capable than unaligned ones, while keeping unsafe outputs from their users—all while giving it more time to compute.

I find this fascinating, in part because it also means that, yet again, the “Open” AI company is doing something closed and secretive. You don’t get to see the tokens produced in that secret chain of thought, even though you do pay for them.

So, I made a video. I set up my phone as a Continuity Camera on my Mac, filmed myself talking at the lens extemporaneously for a few minutes, and then edited it into a 90 second piece.

I took that video, used Aiko to generate a transcript, added subtitles with Captionista, and uploaded the final version to LinkedIn. From start to finish, it took less than two hours.

Now, three days later, it has over 230,000 impressions. That’s not the millions that many popular posters get, but considering a few months ago my account was effectively stagnant, that’s a fair jump.

And, obviously, this is a bit of a fluke—I didn’t expect or plan for it to get this much attention. But there is a tiny lesson tucked away in here:

What you find interesting is probably interesting to other people.

When you make content, remember:

Focus on the “boring” stuff that you know better than others, that you care about more than everyone else. Be excited, be interested, and you’ll be interesting.

You might even catch an algorithmic break—thanks to jumping on a breaking story—and gain a few dozen new followers and connections.

And even if you don’t, you did something you liked doing.

Which is how you keep going.

Here’s the video (click to open in your browser):

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