Anti-Slop Manifesto: How Flora Thinks About AI

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Weber Wong was supposed to be a venture capitalist. Then he realized he wouldn't back himself, so he quit, moved to New York, and got a job at a coffee shop.

Now he's building Flora, one of the most uniquely-positioned AI tools for creative teams.

We talked about why node-based tools have such a bad reputation (and how Flora's fixing it), what "anti-slop" actually means when you're building AI creative tools, and the moment Pentagram reached out and he realized he'd accidentally built something useful.

Flora: https://flora.ai
Weber Wong: https://x.com/weberwongwong

Chapters

[00:00] - "They've been cooking"

[02:11] - From VC to coffee shop to Flora

[05:37] - The pain cave vs. Plato's cave

[08:38] - Poetry as the entry point

[11:34] - First time using an LLM

[13:26] - "The world's most powerful creative operating system"

[16:21] - Commerce vs. art — does it have to be at odds?

[19:12] - A Berkeley professor and Cat's Cradle

[20:25] - Fine-tuning GPT-2 on his own poetry

[25:42] - Why node-based?

[28:50] - The iceberg: low barrier, high ceiling

[32:56] - What "anti-slop" actually means

[40:48] - When Pentagram reached out

[44:51] - Advice for the next generation of creatives

Anti-Slop Manifesto: How Flora Thinks About AI

Episodes