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On Curiosity — Sharif Shameem, Lexica
Original: On Curiosity — Sharif Shameem, Lexica
Takeaway
Building demos driven by curiosity is the primary way to discover what frontier models can actually do.
Summary
- Lexica founder argues curiosity is how AI engineers excavate hidden model capabilities; demos are the flashlight.
- Tells the story of his viral 2020 GPT-3 React-component demo and a 2021 agent that bought AirPods on Chrome via a custom HTML→tiny-context parser.
- Cites a Gemini 2.5 Pro basketball-tracker demo to argue video-first AI experiences are still under-explored.
- Even researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic don't fully understand their models' capabilities — model capabilities must be discovered by external builders.
- Echoes Hamming: AI engineering is closer to excavation than traditional engineering; teleological planning is the wrong frame.
demosproductexploration
Original description
Creating and sharing demos is the easiest way to influence the future. It gets people to think about what's possible. A good tech demo doesn't have to be fully fleshed out. It doesn't even have to be fully functional. The purpose of a demo is to inspire. A good demo makes you feel like someone jumped into the future and pulled back an idea to the present. About Sharif Shameem I'm the founder of Lexica – we're building creative tools backed by state-of-the-art generative models (P.S. we're hiring). I previously worked on a low-code tool powered by language models called Debuild. Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter