从 Dot 到 Hivemind：AI 设计的创意之旅

我们交付的每一件产品，都是之前 99 次拒绝的蒸馏。我们做的一切，目标就是问：这个想法最真实、最简单的表达是什么？这是自 Mercury OS 以来我感受到的最具创造力的复兴。因为从那以后我做的一切，无论在公司还是外部，虽然我热爱每一件作品，但都是在问世界想要什么。对我来说，Dot 就是世界想要的，对吧？世界想要一个个人助理。而 Hivemind 则是我相信为真的东西。

Every single thing we shipped is the distillation of the 99 nos that preceded it. Everything we make, our goal is then to say, what is the most true and simple expression of this idea? This is the most creatively reinvigorated I felt since Mercury OS. Because everything I've made since then, while I loved every work I've created, whether in a company or outside, has been about what does the world want. Dot for me was this is what the world wants, right? The world wants a personal assistant. And where Hivemind is, this is what I believe to be true.

欢迎来到 Dive Club。我是 Rid，这里是设计师永不停止学习的地方。本周的嘉宾是 Jason Yuan，他为我们带来了从旧产品 DOT 到 Hivemind 的多年创作历程的终极幕后故事。Hivemind 是一种新型社交智能 AI，能同时与多人对话，以寻找新型故事。这一集可能是我捕捉到的最纯粹的创作过程窗口。那么，让我们直接开始吧。

Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid and this is where designers never stop learning. This week's episode is with Jason Yuan, who gives us the ultimate behind the scenes into his multi-year creative journey going from his old product DOT to Hivemind, which is a new type of social intelligence AI that carries conversations with many people at once in order to seek out new types of stories. This episode might be the purest window into the creative process that I've ever captured. So, let's dive right in.

让我们回到 2023 年。你可能还记得 New Computer。这是我们上一家公司。这个名字来自域名。我们当时想发布招聘信息，然后想，我们从哪里开始？我们没有公司名字。而这个域名恰好可用。不知为什么没人注册。

Let's all go back in time to 2023. You may remember New Computer. This was our last company. This name came from the domain name. We were trying to put job postings online and we were like, where do we start? We don't have a name for the company. And this just happened to be available. Like no one owned it for some reason.

于是我就说，我想我们就叫 New Computer 吧。有趣的是，new 和 computer 之间有一个点，那个句号，标点符号。然后我们就从中获得了 Dot 这个名字的灵感。我们并不清楚应该叫什么。我们考虑过《黑暗物质》中的 Damon，考虑过 Atlas，像扛着世界的 Atlas。我们还考虑过直接叫 NC1，很机器人、Teenage Engineering 的风格。但标点符号才是连接 New Computer 的东西，而点（dot）应该连接你生活中的故事。

And so we just I was like, I guess we're called New Computer. And what's really interesting is there's a dot in between new and computer, the period, the punctuation mark. And then that's where we got the inspiration for the name Dot. It was not obvious to us what we should call it. We considered Damon from His Dark Materials. We considered Atlas like an Atlas with the world. We considered just calling it NC1, very robot teenage engineering types. But the punctuation was what connects new computer is dot and a dot is supposed to connect stories in your life.

这很有趣。我们做了这个演示。我们想，如果它能学习关于一个人的一切，理论上你可以走向某人，碰一下你们的 iPhone，它就能告诉你们有什么共同点。这只是一个幻灯片，但当时的演示是：你们都爱冷门事物，因为你喜欢地下排版，而她喜欢地下土耳其电子乐。我当时想，这很酷，但我不知道拿这个信息怎么办。真是个有趣的特性，我可能永远也做不出来。所以这是三年前的事，这基本上就是 Hivemind 的种子，通过 Dot 本身，通过第一个版本。

It just was funny. And we made this demo. We were thinking like if this is learning everything about someone, you can theoretically go up to someone and bump your iPhones together and it could tell you something you have in common. And this is sort of just a slide, but the demo back then was like you both love underdogs because you love underground typography and she loves underground Turkish techno music. And I was like that's cool but I don't know what to do with this information. Like what an interesting feature that I will never probably get to build. So this was 3 years ago and this was sort of where the seeds of Hivemind started basically through Dot itself through the very first version.

我的核心灵感之一来自《模拟人生》。我一直很喜欢《模拟人生 3》的 UI。它非常异想天开，真正强调了生活的趣味性，我很喜欢。我会说电子游戏。在整个旅程中你会看到很多对电子游戏的引用。

One of my core inspirations was The Sims. I've always loved the UI on The Sims 3. It was so whimsical and it really emphasized the playfulness of life, which I loved. I would say video games. You'll see lots of references to video games throughout this journey.

快速插播一条消息，然后我们继续。Framer AI 智能体刚刚发布，这正是我想要的构建专业网站的方式。你可以获得与 AI 智能体协作的能力，而且直接在一个专为发布生产站点定制的画布中。例如，我为 Dive 用了五个不同的 CMS，这可不是我最喜欢处理的事，但现在我可以让 Framer 智能体直接在 Framer 内部处理所有 CMS 相关的事情。当然，你还能获得 SEO、暂存链接、本地化以及你期望的一切。但说实话，归根结底，我最喜欢的是能够在 Framer 内部用智能体探索、设计和构建。如果你访问 dive.com/framer，可以享受 Framer Pro 七折优惠，立即开始构建。

Real quick message and then we can jump back into it. Framer AI agents just launched and it is exactly how I want to build pro websites. You can get the power of working with AI agents but directly in a canvas that is tailor made for shipping production sites. For example, I have like five different CMSs for dive which isn't exactly my favorite thing to deal with, but now I can have the Framer agent do everything related to CMS management directly inside of Framer. And of course you get SEO, staging links, localization, and everything else that you'd expect. But honestly, at the end of the day, the thing that I love most is just being able to explore, design, and build with agents all inside of Framer. And if you head to dive.com/framer, you can get 30% off Framer Pro to start building today.

最近我通过人才网络看了很多作品集，其中最好的那些都有一个共同点：设计师们使用 Jitter 通过动效让作品活起来，这是迄今为止让你的设计拥有高级感的最简单方法。Jitter 让一切变得简单。没有 After Effects 或 Figma 中那些复杂的关键帧或其他你不需要的功能。它只是一个非常直观的产品，我多年来一直用它来为作品制作动画，我强烈推荐。今天就可以开始。只需访问 dive.club/jitter。现在回到正题。

So, I've been looking at a lot of portfolios through the talent network lately, and many of the best ones all have one thing in common. The designers are using Jitter to bring their work to life with motion, which is by far the easiest way to give your designs that premium feel. And Jitter makes it simple. There are no complex key frames that you get in After Effects or Figma or other features that you don't need. It's just a really intuitive product that I've been using for years to animate my work, and I cannot recommend it enough. You can get started today. Just head to dive.club/jitter. Now on to the episode.

我会展示很多 Dot 开发版本的截图以及概念艺术。这些并非我一人完成。我当时与团队合作，多年来团队成员包括 Alex Vua（他最近为 Hi 做了 Siri AI 着色器）、Louis Arbo、Julian Kelly（我相信他现在在 Shopify）。还有我自己，以及我们出色的开发者 Devon、Daniel、Luca 和 Sam。我很难确切说出谁做了哪些部分，但这些是我能展示的设计事实。

I'll show you lots of screenshots from development versions of Dot as well as concept art. And this was I didn't personally make everything. I worked with our team at the time which consisted throughout the years of Alex Vua who did recent most recently did the Siri AI shaders for Hi, Louis Arbo, Julian Kelly who I believe was at Shopify now. Myself and our wonderful developers Devon and Daniel and Luca and Sam. Like this is hard for me to say exactly who did which parts but we just these are the designer facts I can show.

当时的记忆功能，我们既从后端架构的认知角度设计，也从视觉 UI 角度设计。在这个播客中，我将重点放在 UI 部分。模型花了一段时间才弄清楚什么是记忆，什么不是它想记住的。而且因为当时这是一个全新的概念，用户不确定它什么时候会记住事情，什么时候不会。

Memory back then we were designing it both cognitively in terms of the backend architecture and also in terms of visual UI. For this particular podcast I'll focus on the UI part. It took a while for the model to register what was a memory and what was not what it wanted to remember. And because it was such a novel concept at the time users weren't sure when it would remember things and when it wouldn't.

我们想真正突出它会制造记忆。所以在最左边，你可以看到我们当时直接把《模拟人生》的截图复制粘贴到了 UI 中，还有一些有趣的细节：当你连续发送多条消息时，它们会互相碰撞。挺有趣的。我想，如果它偶尔才记录一次记忆，它应该显示一些小气泡，就像《模拟人生》中的小想法一样。哦，Dot 了解到 Hermes 是一只猫。

And we wanted to really highlight that it would be making memories. So on the very left you see like we had I literally just copy pasted like screenshot from the Sims into our UI at the time and we had some fun details where at the time when you sent lots of sequential messages they would kind of bump against each other. It's kind of fun. And I'm like you know I think if it registers a memory if it's only doing occasionally it should sort of show little bubbles that almost like little Sims thoughts. Oh dot learn that Hermes is a cat.

当时记忆的单位就像一行事实，对吧？所以我们想，“哦，是的，我们可以显示有多少事实，然后写下来。”然后我们有了一个想法，“哦，对于更大的记忆，它可以创建更大的事实，也就是更大的气泡或叙述。也许有一天我甚至可以开始把它们存储为文件。”它就这样演变而来。显然，现在我不认为人们应该在工程和设计上这样思考记忆。但当时，我们认为这是对的。

Back then the unit of memory was like one line of a fact right? So we were like, "Oh yeah, we can just show however many facts there are and write about it." And then we had the idea of like, "Oh, and then for like bigger memories, it can create these bigger facts that were bigger bubbles or narratives. And maybe one day I can even start storing them as files, you know, and it sort of evolved from here. Obviously, this is not what how I think people should think about memory both in engineering and design now. But back then, this is what we thought was right."

然后当然，我们想，这些记忆去了哪里？嗯，也许有个想法。

Then of course, we were like, where do these memories go? Well, maybe there's an idea.

也许存在这样一种心智空间，你当前思考的事物被组织成精美的编辑页面，它可能告诉你某些优势和劣势，这些也是一种记忆类型，我们对你的事实进行推理，并构建一个心智理论。当时我们称之为“深度点”，因为如果你记住像“Rid 有个孩子”、“Rid 是某某”这类事实，那没问题，但这并不能真正教会你如何思考 Rid，对吧？所以我们想，我们可以教模型如何思考一个人。我们可以教模型读懂言外之意，不仅按字面理解，还要思考他们没说什么。我们探索了很多概念。右边这个想法是，如果我们能存储事实，给用户一个浏览所有事实的地方，你可以为事实创建类别，我们可以重新组织它们。我们称之为“模式”，一个动态文件系统。如你所见，那时我们仍将记忆视为信息行。Jason 带他的猫去看兽医。Daniel 不喜欢波本威士忌。Jason 的保险 ID 号码是假号码。这就是我们当时的思考方式。当然，这最终演变为，如果我们能以这种方式展示记忆，我们就能以这种方式展示任何信息。你会看到这看起来有点熟悉，对吧？因为我们想，也许为了更沉浸的聊天体验，偶尔我们可以在画布上生成这些 UI 卡片，打破来回聊天的单调，而且这些卡片可能是可交互的，你可以点进去阅读更多。所以慢慢地，这些故事的想法开始影响设计中的其他部分，而不仅仅是记忆。

Maybe there's this idea of a headspace where you have things you're currently thinking about organized in these beautiful editorials, and then maybe it's telling you you have these certain strengths and weaknesses, and maybe these are types of memories too where we run inference on your facts and we create a theory of mind. We called it this deep dot at the time because if you remember things like Rid has a child, Rid is blah blah blah, that's fine, but that doesn't really teach you how to think about Rid, right? So we were like, we can teach the model how to think about someone. We can teach the model to read between the lines and not just take what they say at face value, but also think about what they haven't said. So we explored lots of concepts. This one on the right was, what if we could store facts and give users a place to browse all their facts, and you could create categories for the facts and we can reorganize them. We call these schemas, a dynamic file system. And as you can see, back then we were still thinking of memory as lines of information. Jason took his cat to the vet. Daniel does not like bourbon. Jason's insurance ID number is the fake number. That was just how we were thinking about at the time. And of course eventually this evolved into, well if we can show you memories in this way, we can show you any kind of information in this way. And you'll see this looks kind of familiar, right? Because we're like, oh maybe for more immersive experiences in the chat, occasionally we can generate these sort of UI tiles on the canvas, and that should break up the monotony of just back and forth chat, and also maybe these are interactable, maybe you can go into this editorial and read it more. So slowly this idea of these stories began to influence other parts of the design beyond just memories.

现在这像是一个未来功能：未来你应该去看看原宿街头服饰。你应该试着向这个人询问想法。这些想法开始传播到我们设计的其他部分。我们甚至考虑允许用户通过手势点击不同的提示，轻松发现应用中的新功能。所以，当然，当我们宣布时，我们构建的东西看起来像这样，针对结构化的重要记忆。它会生成一张精美的卡片，作为一件制品呈现给你，展示它关于那个人、物体、食谱、地点或事件所知的一切。这只会针对重要记忆，因为 2023 年 11 月，我们想，它应该一直记住事情。所以我们不可能每次你说什么时都显示一行“点记住这个”。那太烦人了。所以只在关键时刻让它显得突出，其他时候保持环境感。我们确实构建了所有这些，尽管由于我将解释的原因，它没有进入最终版本。但这非常有趣。想法是，当你查看一段记忆并再次与点对话时，你现在是在上下文中谈论那段记忆。现在我们开始思考这些视觉制品是什么，对吧？如果你通过过去的视角看它们，它们是记忆；通过现在的视角看，它们是心头事；通过未来的视角看，它们是指南，通往未来的指南。这引出了我将重点介绍的第二个功能，同样我们从未发布，部分原因是技术问题，实际上主要是技术原因，但我们称之为“点日报”或“点指南”。这些现在确实存在于世界中，只是看起来像 Chat 的 Pulse。几乎和 Chat 的 Pulse 一模一样。但请记住，那是 2023 年，GPT-4 只有 8000 上下文窗口，写作能力很差。就是这样。指南的想法是，我们采用这种编辑格式，让 AI 智能体去深入研究它认为你可能喜欢的事物，并以精美的格式呈现。如果我们夜间执行，它有更多时间进行推理和研究，这样我们就不必在即时生成时感到压力。我们可以慢慢来，给你真正好的东西。

Now this is like a future thing: in the future you should check out the streetwear Harajuku. You should try asking this person about ideas. The ideas started pollinating to other parts of our design. We were even thinking we could allow users by tapping on different prompts through some gestures to easily discover new features in the app. So, of course, when we announced it, what we had built was something that looked like this, which is for significant memories that are structured. It would generate this beautiful card and present it to you as an artifact that really demonstrates everything it knows about that person or object or recipe or place or event. This would only be for significant memories because November 2023, we were like, well, it should really just be remembering things all the time. So we can't possibly show you a line of 'dot remember this' every single time you say something. That's so annoying. So let's just have heroic moments when they should be heroic and everything else should feel ambient. And we actually did build all of this even though this doesn't make it into the final build for reasons I will explain. But this was super fun. The idea is once you're looking at a memory and you start talking to dot again, you're now contextually talking about that memory. Now we start thinking about what are these visual artifacts, right? If you look at them through the lens of what happened in the past, they're memories; if you look at them through the lens of what's happening now, they're top of mind; if you look at them through the lens of what will happen, they're guides, guides into the future. This led us into our second feature that I'll focus on, which again we never shipped, and some of it is technological, actually most of it is due to technology, but we call these dot dailies or dot guides. These do exist in the world now, they just look like Chat's Pulse. It's almost exactly what Chat did with Pulse. But again, keep in mind back then this was 2023, GPT-4 with 8,000 context length, terrible at writing. That was the soda. The idea for guides was we would take this editorial format and we would have the AI agent go and do deep research on things that it thinks you might like and present them in a beautiful format. And the idea is if we do this overnight, it has more time to go run inference and do research such that we're not pressured to generate things in the moment. We can take our time and give you something really good.

现在我们进入了点的更 beta 或 alpha 阶段，我们想，也许用户可以要求点制作指南，比如给我做一个如何报税的指南，想法是你可以随时重新查看它，作为一个独立的制品，无需再次聊天。这是 2023 年 9 月。我认为当时的技术还不足以大规模实现这一点，但这是一个有趣的空想。我们想，这不仅仅是关于如何做某事，对吧？比如生日可以做什么的点子。如果点知道你想滑雪，我们可以给你一个滑雪指南。我们可以给你关于如何处理你最喜欢的建筑的信息。我们认为这会非常有趣，作为一种向用户展示 AI 即使在他们不与之交谈时也在思考他们的方式。我们探索了这些编辑页面的不同视觉风格。这现在更接近我们实际生产的内容。我们甚至可以赋予它个性，让它有点毒舌。到 2024 年初，我们想，点可以玩得开心点。不必那么实用驱动，对吧？你会注意到这些指南带有图片。我们想，人类是视觉动物。当然我们需要——没有人上 Instagram 看文字，对吧？我们应该给你看的东西。我们有这些出色的图像模型。让它们为你创造东西。让我们把每个指南视为给用户的礼物。所以这个甚至不是关于如何约会的指南。它只是说，“哈哈，我们要稍微吐槽你一下。”我们在后台实验了所有这些个性。我们有闺蜜点、混乱点、婴儿潮点用于财务建议。就像——

Now we're getting into the more beta or alpha territory of dot where we were like, maybe users can ask dot to make guides, like make me a guide on how to do taxes, and the idea is you can revisit this at any time even as an artifact in and of itself without needing to chat about it again. This was September 2023. I don't think the tech was good enough for this at scale back then, definitely, but it was a fun pipe dream. And we were like, it's more than just how to do something, right? It's like ideas for what you can do on your birthday. If Dot knows you want to ski, we can give you a guide on skiing. We can give you information on how to handle your favorite architecture. We thought this would be really interesting as a way to show the users that the AI was thinking about them even when they weren't talking to it. We explored different visual styles of these editorials. This is now closer to what we actually created in production. And we could even give it a personality and make it kind of like sassy. By early 2024, we were like, dot can sort of have fun with this. It doesn't have to be so utility-driven, right? And you'll notice that these guides come with images. And we thought, well, humans are visual animals. Surely we need—no one goes on Instagram to look at text, right? We should give you things to look at. And we have these wonderful image models. Let's have them create things for you. Let's think of each guide as a gift to the user. So this one was not even a guide on how to date. It was just like, 'Haha, we're going to roast you a little bit.' And we had all these personalities in the background that we experimented with. We had like bestie dot, chaos dot, boomer dot for financial advice. Like it was—

我也喜欢探索的深度。几乎在每个轴向上都进行了难以置信的大量探索。然后你发布的产品相当简单，对吧？你把它提炼成简单的东西。但看到这些幕后工作以及你思考了多少——太酷了。我们发布的每一样东西都是之前 99 次尝试的提炼。我们做的每件事，目标就是问：这个想法最真实、最简单的表达是什么？

I love the depth of exploration, too. Like an unbelievable amount of exploration in almost every single direction on every single axis. And then what you shipped was pretty simple product, right? Like you distilled it down to something that was simple. But just getting this behind the scenes and how much you were thinking about—it's so cool. Every single thing we shipped is the distillation of a 99-nose that preceded it. Everything we make, our goal is then to say what is the most true and simple expression of this idea.

我们甚至探索过，也许这些可以是互动式作品，对吧？这甚至是在云作品出现之前。所以我们想，如果 DOT 可以通过给你真/假卡片来自我训练，让你在空闲时像刷 Tinder 一样滑动，那会怎样？这超级有趣。人们喜欢这个。我也喜欢。有时它会有点毒舌。而且很棒的是，这不仅有趣，让你感觉被看见，也是一种快速训练模型来消除对你生活错误假设的方式。这是一张关于团队中某人的故事的真实截图。我们了解到，哦，这个人玩很多电子游戏，所以他出于某种原因感到内疚。我看着这些视觉效果，心想，如果我们真的要推出这样的东西，我们必须把视觉效果做好。我们不能只是推出垃圾。我们不能用随机的渐变。那太 2016 了。我们不能那样做。

We even explored maybe these can be interactive artifacts, right? This was before cloud artifacts even. So we were like, what if DOT can train itself by giving you true/false cards that you can Tinder swipe in your spare time? This was super fun. People loved this. I loved this. Sometimes it would get a bit roasty. And what's great is that not only is this fun and it makes you feel seen, it's also a really fast way to train the model to dispel any incorrect assumptions about your life. This was a real screenshot of one of these stories about one of the people on the team. And we were learning, oh, this person plays lots of video games, so he feels guilty about it for some reason. I was looking at the visuals and I'm like, we really need to make the visuals good if we're going to ship something like this. We can't just ship slop. We can't have random gradients. That's so 2016. We can't do that.

我联系上了我的朋友 Max。他是一位出色的艺术总监和艺术家，常驻德国。我相信他从 2022 年开始就在创作 AI 原生艺术。我们在 Hivemind 上再次与他合作。我们说，Max，你能帮我们合作，为 dot 创建一个编辑方向吗？如果把它看作一本杂志，我们如何创造无限的插图？这些都是当时用模型生成的。图像模型并不好。所以，我们说，让我们做点抽象的东西。让我们探索拼贴的主题，你生活中的拼贴，你的书。让我们探索抽象形状、墨迹，因为墨迹不需要精确。而且 dot 的 logo 本身就是两个墨点相互旋转，对吧？所以，书法、墨迹、摄影与抽象形状的拼贴，这种近乎日本版画的风格。我们研究了早期的平面设计。我们研究了波兰海报，然后创作了这些美丽的图像。

I got connected to my friend Max. He's this brilliant art director and artist based in Germany. And he was making AI native art since 2022, I believe. And we worked with him again on Hivemind. And we said, Max, can you help collaborate with us and create an editorial direction for dot? If you looked at it as a magazine, how would we create infinite illustrations? These were all generated using models at the time. The image models weren't great. So, we said, let's do something abstract. Let's explore themes of collage, collage in your life, your book. Let's explore abstract shapes, ink blots, because ink doesn't have to be precise. And also the logo of dot itself is two ink blobs swirling each other, right? So, calligraphy, ink, collage of photography and abstract shapes, this almost Japanese block print style. We looked at early graphic design. We looked at Polish posters and we just created these beautiful images.

我相信这一篇原本是关于——实际上，我不确定。我想这可能关于骑马，而这一篇可能关于探索某个城市之类的。你已经可以看到这些图像中有一种荒诞怪异的元素，我出于某种原因对此非常着迷，并想进一步推进。这原本应该是关于旧金山最佳餐厅或日本餐厅的指南。我的意思是，这些又都是生成的。这就像是一个城市的遛狗指南。我们玩得很开心。然后我们还探索了更当代的方向，比如这个。这有点受 Filipe Panton 作品的启发。它更当代。这个，我相信，是关于日本某个公园的指南。这个我甚至不记得了。这个显然是关于运动和网球的。这个，我想，是在反思一段关系。我们开始真正倾向于怀旧的主题。这些过度曝光、颗粒感的照片与当代平面设计混合在一起。我们训练模型大规模生成这些。我们最终没有推出这些指南的原因，坦率地说，是技术不够好。它不足以持续生成出色的图像。我们仍然需要人类从一万张中筛选出十张。我说，我不想仅仅因为我们可以，就用低质量的东西骚扰人们。我认为技术还没有准备好。

I believe this one was meant to be an editorial about — actually, I'm not sure. I think this might have been about horse riding, and this one might have been about exploring a city or something. And you can already see there's an element of absurdist grotesque to these images, and I was super intrigued for some reason about this and wanted to push it further. This was supposed to be for a guide on best restaurants in San Francisco or restaurants in Japan. I mean, these are again all generated. This is like a dog walking guide for a city. We had so much fun with these. And then we also explored more contemporary directions, like this. This is a little bit inspired by Filipe Panton's work. It's more contemporary. This, I believe, was a guide on some park in Japan. This one I don't even remember anymore. This one obviously is about sports and tennis. This one, I think, is reflecting on a relationship. We started really leaning into the theme of nostalgia. These overexposed, grainy photos mixed with contemporary graphic design. We trained models to actually generate these at scale. The reason why we never ended up shipping any of these guides is, candidly, the technology wasn't good enough. It wasn't good enough to consistently create great images. We still needed humans to edit them down from 10,000 to 10. And I'm like, I don't want to spam people with poor quality things just because we can. I think the technology is not ready yet.

如果你还记得 dot，我们把缩小的视图重新利用，变成了我们所说的 chronicles。

If you remember dot, we repurposed the zooming out view into what we call chronicles.

是的。

Yeah.

而 chronicles 就像你生活的维基百科条目。对我们来说，所有这些关于记忆、脑海、指南的工作催生了 chronicles。对我来说，这是最简单、最优雅的解决方案，我们实际上可以做到，至少足够好，直到我们能把它做得更好，对吧？

And chronicles are like Wikipedia entries of your life. And to us, that was what all of this work of memories, top of mind, guides birthed chronicles. That to me was the simplest, most elegant solution that we could actually make that would be at least good until we could make it great, right?

所以这就是投入在那一个功能上的所有工作。我们砍掉了所有视觉相关的东西。这让我很心痛。真的很伤心。我喜欢它。我们仅仅在视觉上就花了六个月。

So this is all the work that went into just that one feature. And we killed everything about it that was visual. And that killed me. It was really sad. I loved it. We spent six months doing even just the visuals.

不过，在播客的这个时候，我要插一句：“老兄，Chronicles 太棒了。”它真的很好。我有一个非常具体的记忆，坐在 Lowe's 里消磨时间，因为我妻子在忙别的事。她在跟人聊植物，我记不清了。我就坐在那里，滚动着 Chronicles，重温记忆，以及我在孩子生命头六个月里和她一起做的事情。那真的很特别。我坐在 Lowe's 里一把待售的户外躺椅上，就那样滚动着 chronicles，太美了。

This is the point in the podcast though where I'm going to interject and say, "Man, Chronicles was dope." Like, it was so good. I have a very specific memory of sitting in a Lowe's and I was killing time because my wife was doing something. She was talking to somebody about plants. I can't remember. And I was just sitting there and I was scrolling the Chronicles and reliving memories and things I did with my kid in her first six months of life. And it was really special. And I sat in one of the for-sale outdoor reclining chairs in a Lowe's and I just scrolled chronicles and it was beautiful.

那是——我很高兴你发现你很喜欢它。所以你刚才看到的一切显然为我们的灵感奠定了基础。dot 2.0 的主题是当你连接这些点时会发生什么。基本上，我们在 App Store 上线后的第二天，我就想，好吧，我们接下来往哪走？一方面，它可以朝着个人助理的方向发展，对吧？那到今天就会变成像 open claw 这样的东西。但我的直觉是，人们并没有那么忙。科技圈的人很忙。硅谷的人、学生，我们都很忙，但中西部一个每周只参加一次 PTA 会议的足球妈妈，并不需要一个个人助理来管理她的生活。像预订去巴哈马的旅行或预约餐厅这样的事情，很多人喜欢做这些事。计划一次旅行的想法很有趣。它让你对未来充满憧憬。我就想，这真的是我们应该投入大量工程去自动化的事情吗？那似乎不是正确的方向。所以，我们想，好吧，也许现在是时候探索连接这些点了，因为 2023 年的那个想法有一些非常特别的东西。

That's — I'm glad that you found that you had love for it. So everything you just saw obviously laid a foundation for our inspirations. The theme for dot 2.0 was what happens when you connect the dots. So basically the day after we launched on the App Store, I was like, okay, where do we take this? On one hand, it can be in a personal assistant direction, right? And that would have ended up today as something like an open claw. But my intuition was that people are not that busy. Like people in tech are busy. People in Silicon Valley and students and we are busy, but a soccer mom in the Midwest with one PTA meeting a week is not going to need a personal assistant to manage their life. Things like booking a trip to the Bahamas or making a restaurant reservation. Lots of people like doing those things. The idea of planning a trip is fun. It makes you dream about the future. And I'm like, is that really something we should be investing so much engineering into automating? That doesn't seem like the right direction. So, we thought, okay, maybe this is the time we can explore connecting the dots because there was something really special about that idea from 2023.

我们去世界各地收集了很多灵感。我们研究了像《逆转裁判》这样的冒险视频游戏。这之后在 Hivemind 中会相关。我们研究了“精致的尸体”这个概念，对吧？每个人只看到前一部分，然后画出图片的不同部分。我们研究了棱镜折射的想法，对吧？身份不就是将你的生活折射成不同故事的不同方式吗？我们研究了 Wii U 和 Wii 的 Miiverse。显然，我们也想到了《模拟人生》。这也许是我一生中见过的最看似不连贯，却又微妙地 cohesive 的情绪板。

We went and collected lots of inspiration from around the world. We looked at adventure video games like Ace Attorney. And this is going to be relevant for Hivemind as you'll see later. We looked at the idea of an exquisite corpse, right? When every person draws a different section of a picture having only seen the previous section. We looked at ideas of prismatic refractions, right? What is identity if not different ways to refract your life into different stories? We looked at the Miiverse from Wii U and Wii. Obviously, we thought about the Sims as well. This is maybe the most seemingly disconnected and yet somehow subtly cohesive mood board I've ever seen in my entire life.

哦，等着瞧。

Oh, just wait.

跟我说说。真的吗？你是怎么想的？到达这些灵感的过程是怎样的？我的意思是，这太天马行空了，老兄。

Talk to me. Really? Like how do you even think? What's the process to arrive at these types of inspirations? I mean, this is way out there, man.

当我在苹果设计产品时，那一周的产出是我们写的一首诗。

When I was designing the product I was designing at Apple, the output of that week was a poem that we wrote.

天哪。

Oh my gosh.

对我来说，设计在任何技艺的最高层面——无论是设计、研究还是工程——都更像艺术。我会说 Ilya Sutskever 是我们这一代最伟大的艺术家之一，尽管人们认为他是研究者。我认为任何事做到极致都是艺术。对我们来说，关键是想表达一种什么样的感觉，让它显得真实。那种身份在多重性和多元性中真实的感觉。我是中国人，也是加拿大人，对吧？你既是设计师，也是父亲，还是播客主持人。这些身份同时都是真实的。什么让我想起现实中的多重性？嗯，棱镜——棱镜有很多面。你从不同方向照射光线，会折射出不同的焦散和颜色。手影戏：这只手如果从不同方向打光，可以创造出很多形状。我们观察过人群、聚集空间、市政厅。至于《逆转裁判》那个东西——我会在 Hivemind 的上下文中解释，因为那样更合理。但我只是有种感觉，法庭的某些东西对这个项目非常有趣。我无法真正说清楚。有时我创作时，只是——我描述直觉的方式大多是，我肚子里有一个指南针，指向我认为更真实的方向。

And to me, design at its highest echelons of any craft—whether it's design, research, or engineering—looks more like art. I would say Ilya Sutskever is one of the greatest artists of our generation, even though people consider him a researcher. I think everything is art when you do it well. For us, it's like: what is the feeling that we want to express in the world that feels true? The feeling that identity is true in its multiplicity, in its plurality. I am Chinese and I'm Canadian, right? You are a designer and you are a dad and you are a podcast host. Those are all true simultaneously. What reminds me of multiplicity in real life? Well, a prism—a prism has many sides. You shine a light through it in different directions, different caustics and colors come out. Hand puppetry: this hand can create so many shapes if you shine a light through different directions. We looked at crowds, gathering spaces, town halls. And then for the Ace Attorney thing—I'll explain this in the context of Hivemind, because that makes more sense then. But I just had a feeling that there was something about the court that was very interesting for this. I can't really articulate it. Sometimes when I make work, it's just—most of how I describe my intuition is that I have a compass inside my stomach pointing towards what I perceive to be more true.

我喜欢这个回答，老兄。采访你时我最喜欢的一点是，那些指导原则和推动你向不同方向前进的东西，总是——你总是能迅速归结到核心的人性真相，或者作为一个人在这个世界上意味着什么的最真实、最简单的元素。然后就像，好吧，从这个角度出发，我们会怎么做？绝大多数听众可能不会超越界面灵感。我就是喜欢听你这样谈论你的创作过程。

I love that answer, man. One of my favorite things about interviewing you is the guiding principles and the things that move you and push you in different directions are always—you're so quick to derive down to the core human truth or the most real, simplistic element of what it means to be a person in the world. And it's like, okay, from this standpoint, what would we do? The vast majority of people listening probably don't go beyond interface inspiration. I just love listening to you talk about your creative process in that way.

真的，对我来说，这个过程之所以可能，是因为我做过戏剧。在戏剧中，你要做的是在舞台上找到人性的真相，并把它体现出来。所有伟大的故事都是真实的故事，即使它们是虚构的——我相信这一点。剧作家从哪里获得灵感？显然他们读其他剧本和文学作品，但他们也体验生活。他们经历心碎。我曾经观察人们走在街上。我观察他们的步态或脊柱，然后想：他们经历了什么才会这样弯腰驼背？这个人看起来像是生活压在他们身上。你观察一个人的皱纹。这就是为什么我不知道我是否会打肉毒杆菌，因为皱纹——如果你看到很多额头皱纹，那意味着这个人经常扬起眉毛，这意味着他们非常开放。如果你在年轻时非常仔细地观察人，我认为你会意识到，人类经历中存在普遍的真理，这些真理通过你制作的每一件作品表达出来，你只需要找到它们。所以我们广泛地寻找灵感，然后回来。我相信 Julian 做了这个 demo，然后我们想，好吧，也许可以有一个朋友地图，当你悬停在每个人上面时，会显示他们当前在想什么的摘要状态，这有点匿名化，所以我们不会说“Jason 正在考虑离职”，你懂的。但这有点有趣——感觉像 AIM，像 MSN Messenger。也许我们可以把不同人的故事融合起来，放进这个禅意空间。这不仅仅是你的编年史，而是你和朋友的编年史。我喜欢这个艺术方向，因为它很大程度上受到怀旧的启发。这感觉既未来又怀旧。这是我做的一个概念，我们称之为“虚空”。想法是在不同的社区里，你可以创建一个虚空，人们只是匿名地向虚空里唠叨，然后文字会从虚空或迷雾中浮现。有时是别人创造的词，有时是 AI，但你永远不知道是 AI 还是别人。这是我们思考的结果：如果和 AI 说话同时也是在和别人说话，但你永远不知道是哪一个？理论上听起来很酷。实际上，我认为要做好它需要很多工作，我们一直没时间去做。我们会用打印品和想法填满工作室，这样我们就能生活在作品之中。这是我从艺术学校学到的，也是我从上一份工作中学到的。你必须让作品和你的办公室以及工作本身生活在同一个空间里。你被作品包围，这最大限度地增加了你对作品的接触和连接 dots 的能力。我们为 dot 做了很多这种新社交形态的 demo。我们做得非常广泛，到了某个时候我想，你知道真正有趣的是一个非常简单的想法。不是连接你的 dot 和我的 dot，而是我们都有一个共享的 dot。

Really, to me, this process was made possible because I did theater. In theater, what you're supposed to do is find the human truth on stage, and you embody it. All great stories are true stories, even if they're fiction—that's what I believe. Where does a playwright go for inspiration? Obviously they read other plays and literature, but they experience life. They experience heartbreak. I used to watch people walk down the street. I used to observe their gait or their spine and think: what must have happened to them such that they're hunched over like this? This person looks like life is weighing on them. You observe someone's wrinkles. This is why I don't know that I'll ever get Botox, because wrinkles—if you see lots of forehead wrinkles, it implies someone has raised their eyebrows a lot, which implies they're very open-minded. If you spend your youth observing people very closely, I think you realize that there are universal truths through human experience that are expressed through every single artifact you've ever made, and you just have to find them. So we went really wide for our inspirations, and we came back. I believe Julian made this demo, and we were like, okay, well maybe there's a map of friends, and we give a summarized status when you hover over each of them of what they're currently thinking about, which anonymizes a little bit so we're not like 'Jason's thinking of leaving his job', you know. But this is kind of interesting—it feels like AIM, it feels like MSN Messenger. Maybe we coalesce different people's stories and put them into this zen. And it's not just your chronicles, it's you and your friends' chronicles. I loved this art direction because it was very much inspired by nostalgia. And this felt futuristic and nostalgic at the same time. This was a concept I had made that we call it 'the void'. The idea is in different communities you can create a void where people are just anonymously yapping into the void, and then words will surface out of the void or the mist. Sometimes it's words created by someone else, sometimes it's the AI, but you never know if it's AI or someone else. This was us thinking: what if talking to the AI was also talking to other people, but you never know which one it is? Sounds really cool in theory. In practice, I think to make it good it would have been lots of work, and we just never got around to doing that. We would fill our studio with printouts and ideas so that we could live amongst the work. This was something I learned from art school, something I picked up from my previous job as well. You have to just let the work live in the same space as your office and doing the work. You surround yourself with the work, and that maximizes your exposure to the work and your ability to connect the dots, so to speak. We made so many of these demos of new social form factors for dot. We went super wide, and at some point I was like, you know what's really fun is this idea that's really simple. It's not connecting your dot to my dot. It's that we all have a shared dot.

我们有一个共享的蜂巢思维。

We have a shared hive mind.

原型化这个想法最快的方式是什么？好吧，我们在 iMessage 上做，在 SMS 上做。所以我们创建了这个原始的蜂巢思维，团队只是和一个 dot 对话，它有点像在暴露信息和闲聊。我们真正把它从 dot 到 dots 再到虚空推到了极限。然后我们开始原型化一个我们称之为“lore keeper”的东西，那是 2025 年初，只是一个 iMessage 机器人。这是后端的截图：每个人由一个球体代表；当人们向它唠叨时，球体会产生新的小东西，有点像关于正在发生的事情的推文。我们在 South Park Commons 的一个 demo 展会上试了这个，那是一个孵化器/加速器。显然我们当时说，“跟它聊聊，我不太确定这是干什么用的”，老实说。人们显然用它来找投资者和联合创始人，大多不成功，因为技术还没到位。但我想，好吧，你当然会那样用它——废话，那太无聊了。然后我在纽约市试了第二个 lore keeper，这次规模大得多。真正有趣的是，我开始注意到人们之间的这种关系，以及人们如何互相认识。我开始想，哦，这很有趣，因为 dot 的一个瓶颈是它只通过你个人的视角了解你，但这个是通过你周围每个人的视角了解你，这更诚实。

What's the fastest way to prototype that? Well, let's make it on iMessage. Let's make it on SMS. So we created this primitive hive mind where the team was just talking to one dot, and it was sort of baring information and gossiping. We really pushed the limits of it from dot to dots to void. We then started prototyping what we call a 'lore keeper', and this was from early 2025 now, which was just the iMessage bot. This is a screenshot of the back end: each person was represented by a sphere; as people yap to it, the sphere would spawn new little almost like tweets of what's going on. We tried this at a demo fair at South Park Commons, which is an incubator/accelerator. Obviously we were like, 'Just talk to it, I'm not quite sure what this is for,' to be honest. And people used it obviously to find investors and co-founders, mostly unsuccessfully because the tech wasn't quite there yet. But I was like, okay, of course you're going to use it like that—duh, that's so boring. Then I tried a second lore keeper in New York City, and this was much bigger. What's really interesting is I started noticing these sort of relationships between people and how people know each other. And I started thinking, oh, that's interesting, because one of the bottlenecks of dot is that it only ever got to know you through a lens of you, but this one gets to know you through a lens of everyone around you, which is more honest.

我会说 >> 我觉得这很迷人，因为这是用户研究，但实际上只是你在做社会实验。

I would say >> I find this fascinating because it's user research, but it's actually just you running like social experiments.

是的，完全正确。

Yes, totally.

多么棒的概念。我的意思是，我不太做传统意义上的用户研究，因为我认为用户不知道他们想要什么。你的工作是弄清楚这一点。所以，你应该给人们机会，在不直接告诉你的情况下告诉你一些事情。

What a concept. I mean, I don't really do user research in a traditional sense because I don't think users know what they want. Your job is to figure it out. So, you should just give people opportunities to tell you things without telling you things.

这个特定演示非常有趣的一点是——我其实保留了很多我们的发现，因为现在它们对 Hivemind 很相关——那些不喜欢谈论自己的人往往只想谈论别人。就是这样，很简单。于是我们想，‘好吧，这很有趣。让我们深入一下。我们做个东西吧，名字改了很多次。一开始叫 Takes，就像‘你有观点’。然后我们叫它 Seniors，这是 Brian Eno 用来指集体天才的术语。然后我们想，也许叫 Small Talk，挺有趣的。这大约是在 Lorekeeper 之后一个月左右。这个概念开始向今天的 Hivemind 汇聚。

What was really interesting about this particular demo, um, and I've sort of withheld a lot of some of our learnings because now it's relevant for hive mind is the people that don't like talking about themselves will often just want to talk about other people. That's really all there is. And that's quite simple. So then we were like, 'Okay, this is interesting. Let's like lean in. Let's let's make a thing called we we switched the name so many times. It was called takes like you have a take.' Then we called it seniors, which is a Brian Eno term for a collective genius. Then we were like, maybe it's small talk, which is kind of fun. And this was about a month or so after lorekeeper. The concept now started converging towards the hive mind of today.

但为了让它对人们来说易于理解，我开始思考如何视觉化地表达它。我开始对小报感兴趣，确切地说是机构八卦，我觉得这很有趣——报纸和杂志是怎么做的？我注意到，当时这种美学在高端设计中也很流行，低俗文化变成了高雅文化。我一直觉得文化有趣的一点是，低俗和高俗在持续对话。所以我想，好吧，社论报纸、TMZ，这真的很有趣。我们又回到了‘精致尸体’的概念，但这次我们开始实际生成图像。我的意思是，Max 帮我们做了这个。这就像不同食物和香槟的‘精致尸体’。我们觉得这很有趣，因为叙事不就是‘精致尸体’吗？当我四处问人们‘Shopify 到底发生了什么’时，每个人都有自己的观点，我们的工作就是把它们拼在一起。

But for the purposes of how do we make this legible to people, you know, I started looking at how do we express it visually? I started becoming interested in tabloids literally institutional gossip which was as a thing I was like that's interesting like how do newspapers how do magazines do this you know I started noticing like okay this feels very brat at the time this aesthetic actually was quite in vogue in high design as well like lowbrow culture became highbrow this is the thing that I always think is funny about culture is that lowbrow and highbrow are in constant dialogue so I was like okay editorial newspapers TMZ that's really interesting again we went back to the idea of exquisite corpse But then this time we started actually generating images. I mean Max helped us create this. It's this is like an exquisite corpse of different foods and champagne. And we're like that's interesting because what is a narrative if not an exquisite corpse, right? When I go around and ask people like what really happened at um I don't know, Shopify, whatever. It's an it's like everyone has their point of view and our job is to put them together.

说得好。

Good point.

我们觉得那就是‘精致尸体’。然后我们想，好吧，我们做这件事本身也挺搞笑的。当时科技界的很多故事都非常有趣，而且相当荒诞。所以我们决定拥抱荒诞主义。我们受到上世纪中期平面广告的启发，那些广告既有摄影感，又明显经过编辑和插画处理，然后我们加入了荒诞元素——比如一个故事讲的是某家科技独角兽公司其实一文不值，所以有一只塑料独角兽在我们中间行走。我们对荒诞变为现实非常感兴趣，于是把那种异想天开的荒诞与狗仔队新闻的怪诞特质混合在一起。所以我们用了超级荒诞的镜头拉近，捕捉人们的情绪，让人感觉你在偷听某段对话。

And we're like that's that's an exquisite corpse. So then we were like okay. It's also kind of funny that we're doing this at all. And a lot of the stories in tech at the time were extremely funny and it's quite absurdist. So we're like, let's lean into absurdism. Let's think about like we were inspired by mid mid-century sort of print ads where they were kind of photographic but also kind clearly edited and illustrated and then we inserted like absurdest elements like I think this was a story about some tech unicorn company that was actually worth nothing. So this was a plastic unicorn walking amongst us. So we were really interested in how absurd that the absurd was coming to life and you know we mixed that um whimsical absurdity with almost the grotesque nature of paparazzi journalism. So we were like let's have super absurdest like super absurd zoomins. Let's capture people emotion. Let's make it feel like you're eavesdropping on some conversation.

从这种荒诞故事的角度，我们到达了 Hivemind 的第一个迭代。现在，我们在某种程度上已经研究了两年关于记忆、真相、故事和求真。在艺术上，我将其提炼为一些核心主题：真相与宣传、个体的大众媒体（即点）与集体的点、社论化——这从我们的点日报、报纸和社交媒体一路传承下来。所以，从这一点出发，我们开始思考，如果我们要做一个叫 Hivemind 的东西，它应该感觉像一家媒体公司，有 Vox 或那种味道。

I would say from this angle of absurdist sort of stories we we arrived at the first iteration of Hivemind. Now it's been two years of working on on memory and truth and stories and truth seeking in a way. Artistically I had distilled it into some core themes that we were interested in looking at artistically of like truth and propaganda mass media of the individual which is the dot versus the collective which is the dots editorialization which which it was a lineage all the way from our dot dailies and newspapers and and social media. So from from from this we started looking at okay well if we were to do something called Hivemind then it should feel almost like a media company have that flavor of like a vox or

是的，我们一看到这个就想到了 Vox。

Yeah, Vox was definitely what came to mind as soon as we saw this.

所以我们想，‘好吧，Hivemind。’然后我在想，‘哦，让我们把一切整合起来。让我们拥抱它的荒诞性，因为人们会称它为监控资本主义，对吧？人们会这么说。让我们做一个荒诞、恐怖和有趣的‘精致尸体’。使用这些刺眼的三原色相互碰撞，灵感来自我们在纽约和洛杉矶看到的麦浆海报。’所以当时 Hivemind 的产品概念是：创建一个讲述真相的故事讲述者，从很多人那里获取故事——这几乎就是它现在在做的事情。从 Dot 到 Hivemind，你可以看到模型越来越好，图像模型越来越好，我们自己的艺术意图越来越具体。我们为应用或网站构思了一些想法，它们会发布这些带有社论的故事。我在这上面玩得很开心。我想，‘哦，哈哈。这感觉就像 Dot 长大了，你知道，’

So we were like, 'Okay, hive mind.' And then I was thinking like, 'Oh, let's like bring it all together. Let's let's lean into how absurd it is because people will call it surveillance capitalism, right? People will call it all this stuff. Let's make an exquisite corpse of the absurd and the terrifying and the funny. Let's use these jarring primary colors against each other inspired by almost the the wheat paste posters we see in New York City and LA.' So at the time our our product concept for Hivemind was was like let's let's create like a truthtelling storyteller that sources stories from lots of people which is almost exactly what it is doing now. From dot until this you could see the lineage of the models getting better the image models getting better that our our own artistic intent getting more and more specific. We created ideas for like apps or websites where it would just publish these stories with these editorials. I had some fun with this one. I was like, 'Oh, lol. This this feels like dot grew up, you know,'

这就像我们在问，‘哦，这是什么？这是社交媒体吗？这是 Reddit 吗？这是什么？’我不认为这是一个很好的探索方向，因为我觉得当时设计 UI 非常分散注意力，而且我们不需要这么做。

And this was us trying to go like, 'Oh, what is this? Is this the social media? Is this Reddit? Is this a what is this?' I don't really think this was a very good line of inquiry in that like I think designing the UI at this time was very distracting and I don't think we needed to do it.

好的。为什么它会分散注意力？稍微展开一下。我觉得这很有趣。

Okay. Why was it distracting? Unpack that a little bit. I think that's interesting.

因为这里的创新不是视觉 UI，而是故事本身的来源，对吧？所以如果我被 UI 分散注意力，那就像是我太拘泥于自己以前作为设计师的工作，不再忠于我的职业方向或产品当时的需求了。

Because the innovation here isn't the visual UI, it's the it's the sourcing of the story itself, right? So by just but if I were to distract myself with the UI, it's sort of like I think that was me being too tethered to what I used to do as a designer and it wasn't honest anymore to the form of where my career or what the product had needed at the time.

有一个我无法停止问自己的问题。如果公司申请与你交谈，而不是反过来呢？这个问题是全新 Dive Talent Network 的基础，而且它正在发挥作用。就像现在，我正在帮助我所知道的最令人兴奋的初创公司，雇佣收听这个节目的设计师和构建者。所以，如果你好奇外面有什么机会，如果你想加入我的名单，或者你甚至正在寻找你的下一个设计招聘，请访问 dive.club/talent 立即加入。

There's one question that I can't stop asking myself. What if companies applied to talk to you rather than the other way around? And that question is the foundation for the all-new Dive Talent Network and it's working. Like right now, I'm helping many of the most exciting startups that I know to hire the designers and builders who listen to this show. So, if you're curious what might be out there, and if you want to get on my list, or maybe you're even looking for your next design hire, head to dive.club/talent to join today.

如果你重新做这件事，你认为你会创建什么样的工件，即使只是能够向人们展示、获得反馈并集体思考？

If you were to do this over again, what do you think the artifacts would look like that you would create, even when it comes to just being able to show it to people and get feedback and think about it collectively?

我认为我们只需要展示故事本身的输出。你知道，我之前给你看过，我们有一个即将推出的东西，我认为它会帮助人们非常生动地理解。

I think we just have to show the outputs of the stories themselves. And you know, I showed I showed you this earlier that we have a thing coming out that will help people understand very vividly I think.

所以这让我想到了现在的 Hivemind。你知道，这次我真的投入了。

So which brings me to present day hive mind. You know this time I really committed to it.

公司、名字，现在一切都叫 Hive Mind。为什么我管它叫 Hive Mind，而不是 dot where dots would take 或者 seniors where small talk 或者其他名字？因为在过去两年里，只有这个词能让别人一听就懂。我说 seniors 是 blah blah blah，别人就问“那是什么鬼？”我说“呃，这是一个 hive mind”，他们就“哦，我懂了”。所以我觉得这很有意思。这个词能唤起人们的情感，有时负面，有时正面，但总能引起好奇。这就是我整合所有从做 dots 中学到的东西的过程。现在当你认真想到 Hive Mind，你会想到蜜蜂，对吧？每个人都会想到蜜蜂，哦，是蜂巢，蜜蜂为蜂后工作——这太明显了。我讨厌做太明显的事，因为我觉得那是对人的居高临下。我讨厌读那些作者觉得孩子傻的儿童书。我觉得孩子非常聪明、敏锐，只是他们用不同的语言和成人交流。我从来不想对我为之创作的人居高临下。所以我说：不要蜜蜂，不要蜂巢，不要黄色，太明显了。但为了缩小产品的感觉，作为创作者，我常常通过制作相关的创意作品来获得关于产品和公司应该是什么样的洞见。我给你讲个轶事。我在帮我们发布的那部电影配乐时，一直觉得它必须是摇摆乐，必须是爵士，必须是切分音，也许是复节奏。我以前为音乐剧作曲时，做的全是摇摆大乐队爵士。我就想，为什么？为什么感觉必须是爵士？为什么必须是即兴爵士？直到我们和出色的音乐家们完成配乐后，我才恍然大悟：哦，因为即兴爵士就是 hive mind 的语言。爵士三重奏的三个乐手坐在房间里，共同栖居于他们为那首音乐创造的共享现实层面。那是一个 hive mind，在精神上对这个概念是诚实的。第二点，即兴爵士让我想起犯罪惊悚片、黑色电影、侦探和那种俏皮的萨克斯风。我心想：“啊哈。”Hive Mind 不是朋友，不是教练，而是一个真相探寻者，就像夏洛克·福尔摩斯。所以，通过制作音乐，我意识到产品应该是什么。

The company and the name and everything is now Hive Mind. Why did I call it Hive Mind instead of dot where dots would take or seniors where small talk or any of these other names? Because this was the only phrase in the last 2 years of my life that I had been able to use for people to get it. I would be like seniors is blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and people would be like what the is that? I'm like uh it's it's a hive mind and like oh I get it. So I'm like this is interesting. This is a word that evokes an emotion in people maybe sometimes negative sometimes positive but always intrigued. So now this is the process behind synthesizing or integrating everything I've learned through doing dots to now where when you think of hive mind earnestly you think bees right everyone is thinking of a bee like oh it's a hive it's a beehive the bees are working together for the queen that's too obvious I hate doing the thing that's too obvious I've never liked doing the thing that's too obvious because too obvious to me feels condescending to people I hate reading children's books or children's novels that are written because the author thinks children are dumb do you know what I mean I think children are incredibly intelligent and perceptive. They just speak a different language than adults and I never like to talk down to the people I make work for. So I was like no bees, no hives, no none of the yellow and no no it's too obvious. But in order to narrow down the feeling of the product as a creative, I often get insights about what the product and company should be through making the creative work around it. So I'll give you an anecdote. When I was helping score our film that we launched with, I kept going like, I think it has to be swing, it has to be jazz, it has to be syncopated, maybe it's polyrhythmic. Back when I used to compose music for musical theater, I used to do everything I did was very like swing big band jazz. And I was like, why? Why does it feel like it has to be jazz? And why does it feel like it has to be improv jazz specifically? And it wasn't until after we scored it with our wonderful musicians that I was like, oh, it's because improv jazz is the language of a hive mind. It's three musicians in a jazz trio sitting in a room inhabiting a shared plane of reality that they've created for that music. That's a hive mind that feels spiritually honest with this concept. And then the second thing about improv and about jazz in particular is that it reminded me of crime thrillers. It reminded me of film noir. It reminded me of detectives and this like sassy saxophone. I was like, 'Aha.' Like hive mind is not a friend. It's not a coach. It's a truth seeker. The likes of Sherlock Holmes. That's what it is. So, through making the music, I realized what the product needed to be.

这不奇怪吗？

Isn't that weird?

是啊。我从来没能用语言表达出来，直到我通过音乐连接上了。

Yeah. I had never been able to put into words until I connected with the musically.

所以，我对 Hivemind 最早想做的事情之一就是在视觉上建立连接，因为图像创作是我成长的另一条脉络。我邀请了 Max 和其他一些艺术家，帮我创建了所谓的 Hivemind 电影宇宙。这些图像是否公开使用对我来说几乎无关紧要。我只是想创造一个可以栖居的宇宙，这样我就能更高效地弄清楚这个项目是什么。所以我们从鸟的想法开始。为什么是鸟？嗯，我不知道。我们创作的这张图像感觉有点酷。对我来说，我受到 Alexander McQueen 的多样性的启发。那些是燕子，它们成群结队。他一直喜欢玩鸟和鸟类意象。有一种特别的鸟叫椋鸟。这些椋鸟喜欢像这张真实照片里那样聚集在一起，形成所谓的 murmuration。椋鸟之间以极高的频率交流，在 murmuration 内部有极高的带宽通信，让所有椋鸟聚集在一起形成 murmuration，我觉得这是自然界中一个迷人的现象。当然，我也受到 Twitter（最初的会说话的鸟）的启发。我一直在想：天空中的鸟，天空中的鸟。为什么天空中的鸟这么有趣？不仅仅是因为 Twitter，那太明显了。我想是因为鸟从高处能看到比我们多得多的东西。从高处，它能感知真相，看到点如何连接。这就是为什么我对鸟的想法感兴趣，尤其是大量的鸟和多样性。

So, one of the earliest things I wanted to do with Hivemind was to connect with it visually because that's sort of the other lineage I grew up in is image making. So, I enlisted Max and also some other artists to help us create what I call the cinematic universe of Hivemind. Whether or not we use any of these images publicly was almost irrelevant to me. I just wanted to create the universe to live in so that I could figure out what the project is more efficiently. So we started with this idea of birds. Why birds? Well, I don't know. There's something about this image that we created that felt cool. I think to me I was inspired by the multiplicity of these for Alexander McQueen. These were the swallows and they were up in you know swarms of swallow. He always loved playing with birds and avian imagery. And there's a specific kind of bird called a starling. And these starlings like to flock together in this real photograph like this, in what's called a murmuration. And the starlings will communicate each other at extremely high frequency. Like it's extremely high bandwidth communication within a murmuration to get all these starlings together to assemble into like a murmuration, which I thought was a fascinating occurrence in nature. And of course, I was inspired by Twitter, the original talking bird. I was very much thinking like birds in the sky, birds in the sky. Why birds in the sky? Why is this so interesting? It's not just because of Twitter. That would be too obvious. I think it's because the bird from above can see so much more than we will ever see. And from above, it can perceive the truth and how the dots connect. And that's why I was interested in the idea of birds, especially lots of birds, and multiplicity.

我喜欢你的过程中有多少是在试图解读为什么你的内在指南针指向某个方向。就像你感觉到了，然后问“为什么我会有这种感觉？”这始终是我的整个过程，因为我常常觉得我在知道原因之前就到达了一个解决方案或结论。所以大部分工作就是弄清楚为什么。如果我能弄清楚为什么，我就能让其他人加入，对吧？

I love how much of your process is trying to decipher why your internal compass is pointing a certain direction. Like you feel it, like why why do I feel this? That's my entire process always because I often feel like I arrive at a solution or conclusion before I know why. And so most of the work is figuring out why. And if I can figure out why, I can bring other people on board, right?

然后我在思考感知和扭曲。我觉得鱼眼镜头很有意思。这是一张 ESPA（一个 K-pop 团体）摄影的截图，是 Max 之前为某个项目做的。我在想，鱼眼镜头比传统镜头捕捉更多信息，但同时也扭曲了图像。这很有趣：通过感知更多，你也在某种程度上感知到真相的扭曲，这对我们来说是一个有趣的张力来源。我研究了禁忌之物，暗示禁忌的东西。比如 Madonna 1990 年出版的性书，用那种皱巴巴的、我觉得是铝质感的材料寄给人们，感觉非常禁忌。我喜欢 Alexander McQueen 和 Puma 在 2016 年左右的合作，你明显能看出这是 Alexander McQueen 的轮廓，但他们把它全部审查了，我觉得超级有趣。然后我说，好吧，继续，一路到底。让我们看看神秘学，看看禁忌的神秘学秘密社团意象，因为那是终极禁忌，对吧？我也受到 Lady Gaga 当时发布《Abracadabra》的启发，她真的在追求那种维多利亚式的女巫意象。我一直喜欢神秘学象征，比如光明会阴谋论。《女巫布莱尔》很出色。电影早期你到处看到那个符号，但直到电影结束你才知道它是什么。这是骷髅会的骷髅和骨头符号，骷髅会是西方世界已知的最古老的秘密社团之一。

So then I was thinking about perception and distortion. I was thinking there's something really interesting about fisheye. And this is a screenshot from an ESPA photo shoot which is a K-pop group. And this is an image that Max had made for a previous engagement. And I was thinking like a fisheye lens captures more information than a traditional lens, but it also distorts the image in doing so. And that's really interesting that by perceiving more, you're also perceiving a distortion of the truth in some way, which is a fun source of tension for us. I looked at things of taboo, things that imply taboo. So I looked at the sex book Madonna published in 1990 shipped to people in this crinkly I want to say aluminium feeling material. Felt very forbidden. I loved the Alexander McQueen MCQ Puma collaboration from like 2016 where you can clearly tell this is Alexander McQueen and Silhouette, but they sort of censor all of it, which I think is super fun. Then I was like, okay, let's keep going. Let's go all the way. Let's look at occult. Let's look at taboo occult secret society imagery because that is the ultimate taboo, right? And I was kind of also inspired because Lady Gaga at the time had released Abracadabra and she was really going for this like Victorian I want to say like witchcraft imagery and then I'd always loved occult symbolism like Illuminati conspiracy theories. The Blair Witch Project was brilliant. Early on the film you see the sigil everywhere but you don't know what it is until after the film ends. This is a skull and bones sigil from Skull and Bones is one of the oldest secret societies I think in the world that we are aware of in the Western world at least.

这可能是我在 YouTube 上最喜欢的兔子洞了。

It's probably my favorite rabbit hole on YouTube.

是啊，这太有趣了。我们研究了光明会。我个人一直痴迷于不可知的事物，因为我年轻时曾痴迷于埃及陵墓、弦理论和外太空，正是因为这个原因——我永远无法感知黑洞。至少现在还不行，也许 AGI 能帮我做到。但正因如此它才有趣：它是谜。然后我想，好吧，继续深挖。秘密社团由什么构成？它们由权力、有权势的人构成，对吧？所以这很有意思。在 19 世纪末 20 世纪初的美国，每年都会出版一本书叫《社会名册》。它本质上就像一本电话簿，列出了所有富裕和有影响力的家族及其联系方式。

Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting. We looked at Illuminati. I'd always personally been obsessed with unknowable things because when I was young, I used to be obsessed with Egyptian tombs, string theory, and outer space for this very reason. I will never be able to perceive a black hole. At least not yet. Maybe AGI will help me do that. But that's why it's so interesting: it's mystery. Then I thought, okay, let's keep digging. What are secret societies made of? They're made of power, powerful people, right? So it's really interesting. In the late 1800s, early 1900s in the United States, there was a book published every year called the Social Register. It's essentially like a telephone book of all the wealthy and influential families and their contact information.

就像 Facebook 对吧？或者 LinkedIn。

It was like a Facebook, right? Like a LinkedIn.

这挺有意思的。这东西真的存在过。然后这是 Dior 2005 年的一个图像，他们在玩级长徽章。我上的是英国学校，所以有级长，有级长徽章。我觉得徽章赋予权威这一点非常有趣。就像童子军徽章：我有这个徽章，我就很酷，你懂的。我觉得人们做这件事很有意思。所以我喜欢看这些徽章。然后我们想，好吧，一探到底。让我们把权力作为意象的来源。看看丑闻、权力、水门事件、宣传、以及《绯闻女孩》如何营销自己。有件很有趣的事：我注意到了蝴蝶结字体。我注意到当你掩盖某物时，它反而让人更想仔细看。这开始让我想起我们早期的一些作品。最后，我研究了作者身份和文学的主题，当然还有古腾堡圣经。世界上最有力量的寓言、童话或故事是什么？是创世故事本身。僧侣们在写什么？他们在写黑体字，哥特黑体字。有趣的是，现在的报纸，比如《纽约时报》的报头，也在用黑体字来传达权威。所以我觉得这很有趣。然后我们开始创造一个电影宇宙，而且我们是在创造任何标志之前就创造了这个电影宇宙，顺便说一句。

It was kind of interesting. This actually existed. Then this is an image from Dior 2005. They were playing with prefect badges. I went to a British school, so we had prefects, we had prefect badges. I thought it was so interesting how this badge confers authority. Like a Boy Scout badge: I have this badge, I am cool, you know. I thought that was a really interesting thing that people did. So I loved looking at these badges. Then we thought, okay, let's go all the way. Let's look at power as a source of imagery. Let's look at scandal, power, Watergate, propaganda, how Gossip Girl marketed itself. Something very interesting: I noticed bow typography. I noticed that when you cover something up, it makes you want to look harder. This started to remind me of some of the early work we had done. Finally, I looked at themes of authorship and literature, and of course the Gutenberg Bible. What is a fable, a fairy tale, or a story that has the most power in the world? It's the story of creation itself. What were the monks writing? They were writing in black letter, in Gothic black letter. What's so interesting is that newspapers now with their mastheads, like the New York Times, they're also using black letter to confer authority. So I thought that was really fun. Then we started creating a cinematic universe, and we created the cinematic universe before we even created any logos, by the way.

当然还有这张我一直很喜欢的标志性鸟类图像。我看到这张图时立刻就觉得：就是它了。鸟儿们几乎在审判或俯视世界，其中一只回头看着你，发出“嗯”的声音，这太有趣了。我喜欢它。鸟儿实际上并不像人类那样互相交谈。它们不会围成一圈八卦。但把它们放在这个情境中太有趣了。我只是觉得这太荒谬了。这太有趣了，而且非常契合蜂巢思维的精神。它们的喙很锋利，对吧？这不是一个柔和的图像。如果你真的眯起眼睛，你会看到一个形状的雏形从这里透出来，我们稍后会讲到。然后我们创作了这样的东西，我想：好吧，对人也做同样的事。让我们做这个巨大的狂欢面孔堆，因为有时蜂巢思维就是这种感觉。它有一种身体恐怖的元素。有一种身份丧失感，人们对此感到恐惧，我也感到恐惧，但我也非常着迷。这非常有趣。我觉得在物理上不可能把这么多张脸扭曲到一个镜头里，但每个人都对着一个巨型耳语低语的想法很有意思。

And of course there's this iconic image of the birds that I had always loved. I saw this image and immediately I was like, this is it. There's something so funny about birds almost judging or looking down into the world, and one of them looks back at you and goes, 'Mhm.' I loved it. It was like birds don't actually talk to each other like humans do. They don't stand in a circle and spill tea. But putting them in this situation was so funny. I just thought it was so absurd. This is so funny and so apt for the spirit of hive mind. And their beaks are sharp, right? It's not a soft image. And if you really squint, you see the beginning of a shape coming through here, which we'll get into later. Then we created things like this where I'm like, okay, let's do the same for people. Let's make this giant orgy face pile because that's what a hive mind feels like sometimes. There's a body horror aspect to it. There's a loss of identity that people feel terrified by, that I feel terrified by, but I'm also very intrigued by. This is very interesting. It's like I don't really think it's physically possible to contort your face into this many faces into one shot, but this idea that everyone is whispering into one mega whisper.

然后当然还有我们发布的第三张图像。这是一条触手，以身体恐怖的方式变成一颗草莓，如果你再缩小，它实际上也是蛋黄，因为我当时想……

Then of course this third image that we launched. This is a tentacle that's body-horroring into a strawberry that, if you then zoom out, is actually also the yolk of an egg because I was like...

我之前没注意到蛋黄部分，直到……

I didn't notice the egg part until...

是的。我当时想，我要我们创造出有史以来最禁忌的肉。我想要食物，但要以一种让它既性感又令人不安的方式呈现。

Yeah. I was like, I want us to create the most forbidden flesh ever. I want food, but I want food in a way that makes it kind of horny but unsettled.

这就是一击即中。这是我与发布关联的图像。你知道创造真正美丽的东西有多难，你看到它就会说“哇，太棒了”。更难的是创造一种让你觉得“我无法停止看它，我甚至不知道我是否喜欢它”的东西。我 20 岁了，我仍然不知道我是否喜欢它。而那就是天花板，对吧？那是你可以追求的最高境界。

This was strike. This is the image that I associate with the launch. You know how it's hard to create something that is truly beautiful, where you just see it and you're like, 'Wow, that's amazing.' It's even more difficult to create something where I'm like, 'I can't stop looking at this. I don't even know if I like it yet.' I'm 20 and I still don't know if I like it. And that is the ceiling, right? That is the ultimate thing you can strive for.

而你做到了。

And you nailed it.

我们花了几个月才达到这个效果。几个月来制作那些不够好的东西，然后扔掉。还有其他东西我现在给你看。我喜欢这张我们从未用过的图像。我想我永远不会用了。但这一张我配了一句孔子的话，大意是“德不孤，必有邻”。意思是如果你是一个好人，有德行，你就不会孤独。我看到这张图：像血月，有这么多鸟儿飞过。看着它感觉很有儒家意味。它让我想起我从小沉浸其中的许多中国和日本艺术。所以我忍不住这样配文。这也是我们的产品理念之一。我深信如果你过着善意、有德行的生活，你不应该孤独。这也是 Hivemind 存在的原因之一。

We took months to get here. Months of making things that weren't quite there, that we threw out. There were other things I'll show you now. I love this image that we never used. I don't think I ever will. But this one I captioned with a Confucian saying that translates loosely to 'Virtue is not lonely. Virtue has neighbors.' The idea is if you are a good person, if you're virtuous, you will not be alone. I saw this image: it was like a blood moon with all these birds flying through it. It felt very Confucian, you know, looking at this image. It reminded me of a lot of the Chinese and Japanese art I grew up immersed in. So I felt compelled to caption it this way. And this is one of our product philosophies, too. I deeply believe if you live a good intentioned, virtuous life, you should not be alone. And that's one of the reasons why Hivemind exists.

还有这张我不确定我们会不会用的图像。我想我会用它做点什么。但关于帝王蝶，人们对蜂巢思维接管的想法感到不安，但也许有一种美丽的版本：这些蝴蝶轻轻落在你头上，你可以选择倾听它们。

There's this image that I'm not sure we'll use. I think I will use it for something. But this idea that monarch butterflies, people are very unsettled by the idea of the hive mind taking over, but maybe there's a beautiful version of these butterflies landing on your head gently that you can choose to listen to.

是的，我喜欢这个作为平衡。

Yeah, I love this as the counterbalance.

我的一位基督徒朋友说，她相信守护天使以关心你的人的形态出现。所以我一直在想这个。我还想起一位朋友曾对我说的话：“我希望你能通过你所爱之人的眼睛看到自己。”所以如果我要把它视觉化，就是蝴蝶在保护你、为你加冕。

One of my friends who's a Christian, she said she believes guardian angels arrive in the form of people who care about you. So I was thinking about that. I was also thinking about something a friend said to me once: 'I wish you could see yourself through the eyes of people you love.' So if I were to visualize it, it's butterflies that are sort of protecting and crowning you.

这也是我们对荆棘冠冕的诠释。它是蝴蝶冠冕。对于你看到的每一张图像，我们都做了大概 40 张没用过的。

And this is also our interpretation of what is our version of a crown of thorns. It's a crown of butterflies. For every image you see, we've made like 40 different images we didn't use.

于是我们想：“好了，该做标志了。Logo 是什么？图形是什么？怎么设计？”一开始我们做了类似这样的东西，那还是鸟的时期。我们想：“好吧，鸟鸟。”不是一只鸟，而是很多鸟。鸟、鱼眼、鸟瞰视角。看起来有点像蜂巢思维。有点意思。但后来我放大一看，心想这到底是什么？这看起来像是点状 Logo 的混乱版，对吧？就像 Influx 那样。我觉得这不可能是最终方案。感觉不对。这太精致了。它没有我们想要的那种锋芒。这是我和一位设计师的对话。半夜里我看到一张图，心想天哪，标志应该是一个星号。这是审查的语言，你知道。F 星号星号星号。如果你仔细看那部电影，每次我们屏蔽一个词时，用的不是星号，而是蜂巢思维的标志。

So then we were like, "Okay, I think we're ready to do a mark. What is the logo? What is the mark? How do we design the mark?" So initially we created something like this, you know, and this was back in the bird days. We're like, "Okay, bird bird." Instead of one bird, many birds. Bird, fisheye, bird's eye view. Looks like kind of a hive mind. Kind of interesting. But then I'm like, what even is this? Like I zoom out and I'm like, this looks like a messier version of the dot logo, right? Like the influx. I was kind of like, this can't possibly be it. Like this doesn't feel right. This is too nice. There's something that it doesn't have the teeth that we want. And this was a text with one of the designers I worked with. I just like middle of the night I was like I saw this image and I was like oh my god I think the sigil should be an asterisk. It's the language of censorship, you know. F asterisk aster aster. And if you look closely at the film, every time we censor a word we use instead of an asterisk we use the hive mind mark.

嗯。

Yeah.

我当时就想：就是它了。一个星号。你知道星号还有什么妙处吗？它也是“注意”的语言。之前我们做“为剧情”时，我们的模型就是“注意”。在排版中，你要加粗某段文字时，会在前后加星号。星号还有一个很酷的地方：它暗示故事还有更多内容。

And I was like that's it. It's an asterisk. And you know what's great about the asterisk? It's also the language of paying attention. Before we did for the plot originally, our model was pay attention. And when you bold something in typography, you put asterisk before and after it. And what's also cool about asterisks is it implies that there's more to the story.

哦，我喜欢这个。

Oh, I love that.

对吧。蜂巢思维就是故事还有更多内容。有公开的故事，还有更多不公开的故事。这个星号，这个标点符号，就捕捉到了这一点。我觉得特别有意思的是，Dot 是一个点，现在我们有了一个星号。在我的工作中，我不断回到文学、排版和标点符号。我喜欢标点符号。我认为标点符号是一种神奇的语言形式，不知何故超越了英语和中文。两种语言都使用逗号。

Right. Hive mind is there's more to the story. There's the public story and then there's the story that there's more that's not public. And that's captured by this asterisk, by this punctuation. And what I found so interesting is that dot was a dot and now we have an asterisk. And in our work, I keep going back to literature and typography and punctuation. I love punctuation marks. I think punctuation marks are an amazing form of language that has somehow transcended both English and Chinese. And we use commas in both languages.

真不敢相信你竟然无意中找到了 Dot 这个名字。而且它完美契合。完美到 Dot 是如此亲密和独特。当然它是个句号，因为它是有限的，我传达的一切都在那里结束。星号则是：是的，你传达了你的部分，但现在有无数个视角为故事添砖加瓦。我简直不敢相信它如此契合。

I can't believe that you stumbled backward into dot as a name. And it works perfectly for this. It's perfect down to the fact that dot was so intimate and singular. And of course it's the period because it's finite because everything that I've communicated that's where it ends. The asterisk is the yes you've communicated your part but now there are the n number of perspectives that add on to the story. I cannot believe how well it works.

那一刻我就想：就是它了。我知道必须是星号。不知道为什么，但必须是星号。于是我们想：“好吧，这个星号有点好笑，因为首先有个笑话，说所有 AI 公司的 Logo 都是个屁眼，这个确实看起来像。”

And this was one of those moments where I was like this is it. I know it has to be an asterisk. I don't know why, it just has to be an asterisk. So then we're like, "Okay, this asterisk is kind of funny because first of all, there's that joke that all AI company logos are a butthole and this certainly does look like one."

我觉得没问题，所以无所谓。

And I think it's fine, so whatever.

我们看了很多版本。这几乎是我们创造的一个史前星号。我觉得有点意思，看起来有点外星感，但我觉得还不够。我们甚至做了一个看起来像蜂巢本身的，但我觉得太明显了。我不喜欢做显而易见的东西。我喜欢把不明显的东西变得明显。你明白我的意思吗？这是我一生中的主题：努力把不明显的东西变得明显。然后我们和一个人合作，他说：“好吧，我看到了这些参考，我们交流时只是互相发参考。我们聊天，然后互相发图片。”我给他发了很多图片，比如古腾堡圣经之类的。他画了一个黑体字风格的“hivesmind”字样。这个看起来有点像年份，我觉得挺有意思。然后他加了一个星号，说这很有趣，因为在古腾堡圣经时代没有星号这个符号，所以这很违和。我觉得这太棒了，因为 Hivemind 就是要融合神圣与世俗，融合众多与单一，融合那些本不该融合的东西。我喜欢把这种黑体书法传统与现代标点符号的诠释融合在一起。

We looked at so many versions of this. This was like almost a prehistoric asterisk that we created. I thought it was kind of interesting. It looked kind of alien, but I didn't think it was quite there yet. We even created one to look like a hive in of itself, but again, I thought it was too obvious. I don't like making things that are obvious. I like to make the unobvious obvious. Do you know what I mean? And that's the theme in all of my life: trying to make the unobvious obvious. And then we worked with this one guy who was like, "Okay, I see these references and when we communicate, we just send each other references. We talk and then we send each other images." And I had sent him a lot of images with like Gutenberg Bible and stuff. And he drew this black letter sort of interpretation of the word hivesmind. This one kind of looks like a year I thought was kind of interesting. And then he had put an asterisk and he was like this is really interesting because back in the day of the Gutenberg Bible they didn't have this asterisk mark. So this is quite anachronistic. And I was like that's brilliant because Hivemind is all about merging the sacred and profane, merging the many and the singular, merging the things that shouldn't be merged. And I love taking this tradition of black letter calligraphy and merging it with this modern interpretation of a punctuation mark.

我们有一个非常前卫的版本。如果你仔细看这个星号，它意在象征一个三维嵌入空间，有 x 轴、z 轴、y 轴。也许有一天我们还会以某种方式用到它，但我对这个标志特别感兴趣。这个标志我反复看，觉得它是一个七角星。现在已经很少见了。总之，我把一些更图形化的设计标志叠加在这些图像上，然后心想：“就是它了，就是它了。”当然，我们最终发布的版本略有不同，更精致了，但这个东西感觉既现代又古老。我们今天还在读《罗密欧与朱丽叶》和《哈姆雷特》，还在读希腊悲剧，还在传颂圣经故事、创世故事、神话传说，是因为它们有真实的东西。于是，我想对 Hivemind 表达的就清晰了：我们为剧情而存在，为人类的故事而存在。当然，用这种近乎现代的俗语搭配非常老派的字体渲染，有一种违和感。所以我们稍微完善了这个标志，它就成了我们的星号，或者说我们的上升或下降之星。我喜欢它的锋利，而 Dot 是圆润的；这是 Kiki。Hivemind 有点尖刺感。我想传达的是：这是一项技术，一个大规模的社会实验。我们不会对你撒谎。我们不会承诺这是世界上最安全的实体，尽管我们会尽力做到。现在它是有棱角的，对吧？真相往往既柔软又坚硬，这个东西有点禁忌的感觉。有点像钥匙孔。它还让我想起一只带刺的蜜蜂。

We had a really out there version. This one was meant to, if you really squint at this asterisk, it's meant to symbolize a three-dimensional embedding space where you have x-axis, z-axis, y-axis. And we might still use some of this one day in some ways, but I was particularly interested in this mark. There's something about this one that I just kept looking at where I'm like, it's a seven-pointed star. You don't really see that anymore. So anyway, I then superimposed some of the more graphic design marks against these images and then I was like, "This is it. This is it." I mean obviously what we ended up shipping is slightly different. It's more refined, but there's something about this that felt so contemporary and so ancient. There's a reason why we still read Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet to this day, that we still read the Greek tragedies, that we pass on the story of the Bible, the stories of creation, the stories of myth, mythology, because there's something true about them. So then it became clear what I wanted to say about Hivemind was that we exist for the plot, for the story of humanity. And of course there was something quite anachronistic of using this sort of almost modern vernacular against this very old school rendering of typography. So we refined the mark a little bit and this became our asterisk or our rising or falling star. I loved that it was sharp whereas dot was boba; this is kiki. There is something a little spiky about Hivemind. I wanted to communicate this is a technology, a social experiment at scale. We're not going to lie to you. We're not going to promise that this is like the world's safest entity ever, even though we're going to try our very best to make it so. Right now it has edges, right? The truth often can be soft and hard and there's something that felt a little forbidden about this. Something that's like a keyhole. There's something about this that also reminded me of a bee with the sting at the end.

让我微笑的是，我几乎能从你的许多作品中画出一条贯穿线，回到 Mercury，那里的一切都那么柔软流畅，而这恰恰相反，以最令人兴奋的方式。

I think what has me smiling about this is almost like I'm able to kind of draw a through line through a lot of your work that ties back to Mercury where everything's so soft and fluid and this is just the polar opposite in the most exciting way.

这是自 Mercury OS 以来，我感觉最具创意活力的一次。因为自那以后，我做的每一件事——无论是在公司内部还是外部——都在思考“世界想要我做什么”。比如 dot 对我来说就是“世界想要这个”，对吧？世界想要一个个人助理，世界想要 Mercury OS，世界想要这个。而 Hivemind 则是“我相信这是真的”。所以这是两种不同的动机，催生了两种不同的结果。两者各有千秋，但 Mercury 真的是直到现在为止，最后一次我思考“独立于世界认为它想要什么，我自己认为什么是真的”。如果你看看我在艺术和设计领域的个人守护天使名单：Alexander McQueen、Michael Jackson、Madonna、Es Devlin（她负责舞台设计，是当今在世最优秀的设计师），Es Devlin 是激励我成为设计师的人。他们不害怕创造真实的东西，这正是他们的设计之所以伟大的原因。让我对 Hivemind 感到兴奋的是，即使在我们制作的小预告片以及今年夏天及以后为大家准备的所有内容中，它是我个人有机会与他人一起创造的最诚实的作品。它之所以诚实，是因为我花了很多年时间，经历了痛苦但美丽的创作过程，为这一个“是”制造了 99 个“不”。甚至在我们发布视频的第二天，我就想：“啊哈，我现在对产品有了新的认识，这启发了我们下一阶段的工作。”

This is the most creatively reanimated I've felt since Mercury OS because everything I've made since then, while I loved every work I've created whether in a company or outside, has been about what does the world want from me. Like dot for me was this is what the world wants, right? The world wants a personal assistant, the world wants Mercury OS, the world wants this. And where Hivemind is this is what I believe to be true. So those were two different motivations that spawn two different types of outcomes. Both are great in their own way, but Mercury was really the last time until now that I was thinking like what do I think is true independently of what the world thinks it wants. If you even look at my personal list of guardian angels in art and design, Alexander McQueen, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Es Devlin who did the stage design, who is the best designer alive in the world, Es Devlin, she's the person that inspired me to become a designer. They're not afraid of creating what's true and that's what makes their design great. What excites me about Hivemind, even in the little teaser video we've made and all the things that we have in store for everyone this summer and beyond, is that it is the most honest work I have personally ever had a chance to create with people. And it is honest because I spent many years engaging with the painful but beautiful creative process of making 99 nos for this one yes. Even a day after we put the video out, I was like, 'Aha, I now have a new realization about the product that has now inspired sort of our next leg of our work.'

我简直不敢相信我们能做这一期节目。我不知道我是否见过有人如此深入地展示幕后过程，我深深敬佩你的创作过程，甚至从我们上次谈话开始。那是大约两年前的事了，那是一次非常不同的对话，你构思想法的方式、沿途的检查点、最终投入的推理以及做出的决定，都令人着迷。这是独一无二的东西，它激励着我这个设计师。你刚刚带我们走了一遍，我知道不是全部，但那是你创作过程中非常详细的细节，我深受启发。我相信其他观看的人也是。老实说，我很感激，甚至在我还没有问题之前，我就想花点时间说：我很感激你把这些整理出来，就像你某天醒来，说“我只想展示那是什么样子”。谢谢，这可能是我要说的第一件事。

I can't even believe that we have an episode of this. I don't actually know if I've ever seen this level of behind the scenes from someone who... I deeply respect your creative process even from the last time that we talked. I mean, it was like 2 years ago or something like that. It was a very different type of conversation where just the way that you arrive at ideas and the checkpoints that you make along the way and your reasoning for what you ultimately invest in and the decisions you make. It's fascinating. Like it's unique stuff. It inspires me as a designer. The fact that you just walked us through, I know it's not the entirety, but that was a real level of detail into your creative process that I'm inspired. I'm sure that other people watching are. And honestly, I just appreciate, like even before I don't even have a question yet. Like I just wanted to take a second to be like I appreciate the fact that you put that together, like that you woke up one day and you're like I just want to show what that was like. Thank you maybe is my first thing I want to say.

我之所以如此迫切地想与你以及大家分享，是因为我发现一件有点令人担忧的事情——尽管我们似乎不可避免地走向这条路——那就是多年来我们把设计和产品过程变成了太多的科学，以至于失去了背后大量的艺术性。现在，随着模型变得如此之快、如此之好，以及整个行业和围绕准备 AGI 的潜在压力，即使是我，也几乎不可能给创作过程所需的时间来孕育新事物。我没有解决办法，我知道有真正的商业压力等等，但 Hivemind 在某些方面是两年磨一剑，在某些方面是 30 年磨一剑，对吧？因为我所做的一切都是将我所经历的一切融入我的生活。我们只会继续做出更有趣的东西，但这是因为我们能够将过去几年的一切消化成非常连贯、简单而小巧的东西。但我认为这就是为什么人们——这就是为什么我们难以创造新事物。如果我们只从反应的角度出发，它就不能是反应性的。我们创造 Hivemind 甚至这个视觉识别，并不是出于“我想要与众不同”的想法，而是更像是“我想要它真实”。但要找出什么是真实的，需要一点时间。至少对我来说，创作过程，我已经知道了。我常常在进入时就已经知道答案，只是需要很长时间来弄清楚为什么。弄清楚为什么有助于我们完善答案是什么。但我认为答案一直都在那里。当 Christina Aguilera 录制 Linda Perry 创作的《Beautiful》时，她录了 demo 版，听起来非常不确定、原始且缺乏安全感，然后他们就把那个版本用在了最终版，因为当她回去重新录制时，她添加了各种修饰，让它变得非常精致，但感觉不再诚实了。这是音乐界我最喜欢的故事之一。在我成为创始人之前，我一直很欣赏我上一份工作的一点是，过程总有空间可以混乱和不确定。而这是我作为创始人现在的工作，但就像把诗歌带入设计 UI 设计过程的想法对我来说……我不确定这对其他人的体验有多普遍，但至少对我来说，我从未考虑过将生活中的那部分融入我的设计过程。我也从未考虑过将音乐部分带到这里。而我认为这正是帮助我们做出伟大作品的原因。

The reason I felt so compelled to share this with you and with people is one of the things I find a bit concerning, even though it seems inevitable that we're headed down this path, is that we've made the design and product process into so much of a science over the years that we've lost a lot of the artistry behind it. Now with the models getting so good so fast and the sort of industry and all this sort of latent stress around preparing for AGI, it feels almost impossible even for me to give the creative process the time it needs to birth something new. And I don't have a solution for this and I know that there's like real business pressures and everything else, but Hivemind is really in some ways two years in the making, in some ways like 30 years in the making, right? Because everything I do is sort of an integration of everything I've experienced up until that point into my life. We'll only continue to make more interesting things, but it's because we were able to digest everything in the last few years into something very coherent and simple and small. But I think that's why people, that's why we have trouble making new things. If we only operate from a point of reaction, it can't be reactive. We didn't create Hivemind or even this visual identity from a point of like I want this to be different. It's more like I want it to be true. But to find out what's true, it takes a little bit of time. At least for me, the creative process, I already know that. I often already know the answer going into it. It just takes a long time to figure out why. And figuring out the why helps us refine what the answer is. But I think the answer has always been there. When Christina Aguilera recorded 'Beautiful' written by Linda Perry, she did the demo take and she sounded very unsure and raw and insecure on the demo take, and then that's what they put in the final take because then when she went back and redid the recording, she added all these flourishes and made it really polished and it didn't feel honest anymore. That was one of my favorite stories from the music world. One thing I've always appreciated about my former job before I became a founder was there was always space for the process to be messy and uncertain. And this is like my job now as a founder, but it's like the idea of even bringing poetry into the design UI design process to me was... I'm not sure how universal this is for others' experience, but at least for me, I never considered integrating that part of my life into my design process. I never considered bringing the musical part into here either. And I think that is what helps us make the work great.

有一件事我不知道你是否注意到了，尤其是 Claude 最新的 Sonnet 模型，当你想要做某事时，尤其是当你给出批评并想要改变某事时，AI 模型想要添加。它们想要添加或打补丁作为改进的方式。但我认为设计过程实际上是关于删减。这很有趣，因为我认为这是后训练中固有的东西，它只想不断添加更多东西。哦，有个 bug，让我加个补丁修复它。你不喜欢这个？让我让其他东西更怎样怎样。而我说，不，过程实际上是关于删减你不想要的东西。但模型似乎不想对删减什么有自己的看法。当人们在网上谈论品味、品味、品味时，我认为所有品味都是从某个角度进行删减。

One thing I don't know if you've noticed this, with Claude especially with the newest Sonnet models, when you wanted to do something and especially when you give it critique and you wanted to change something, it's the AI models they want to add. They want to add or patch as a form of making better. But I think the design process is really about editing away. And this is so interesting because I think this is something baked into the post-training where it just wants to keep adding more things. Oh, there's a bug. Let me add a patch to fix it. You don't like this? Let me like make this other thing more blah blah blah. And I'm like, no, the process is really about editing down the things you don't want. But the model doesn't seem to want to have an opinion on what to edit down. And when people talk online about taste, taste, taste, taste, taste. All taste is, I think, is editing from with a point of view.

哦，我喜欢这个说法。

Oo, I like that.

没错。品味就是说“不”。品味就是判断。它就像“我喜欢这个，我不喜欢这个”。如果你什么都喜欢，那你就没有品味，因为拥有品味意味着你不喜欢某些东西。你必须对很多事情说“不”。Johnny 和 Dieter Rams 的工业设计学派，其理念是创造一个连贯的形式，包含真理，且只有真理。这是一种提炼。但我认为人们常常把创造连贯事物所需的深度思考误解为“让我们只做看起来美学上简单的东西”。

Right. Taste is just saying no. Taste is just judgment. It's going like I like this, I don't like this. And if you liked everything, then you have no taste because having taste means you don't like some things. And you have to just say no to a lot of things. What Johnny and the Dieter Rams school of industrial design, the idea is you create a coherent form that contains the truth and nothing but the truth. It's a distillation. But I think often people mistake the depth of thought needed to create something that coheres for let's just make something that looks aesthetically simple.

伟大的事物几乎从来不是这样。创作连贯作品的成本反而上升了，因为现在要制造不连贯的东西实在太快太容易了。这就是我们所说的“垃圾”——基本上就是不连贯。即使在我们现在的图像创作中，我也怀念三四年前模型那些更原始的输出。有那么短暂的一段时间，我感觉自己看到了计算机以它自己的方式感知世界。然后我们通过后训练把所有的怪异都磨平了，现在它只会生成大胸哥特女孩，因为人类觉得这就是他们想要的。我觉得我们失去了一扇通往机器意识的窗户，对此我感到有些遗憾。

That is almost never the case of anything great. The cost of creating coherent work has gone up though because now it is so fast and easy to make incoherent. That's what we call slop — incoherence, basically. Even in the image making we do now, I miss some of the more raw outputs from the models three or four years ago. For a brief window of time, I felt like I was seeing how computers perceive the world in a way that was native to computers. And then we've post-trained all of the weirdness away, and now it just makes big titty goth girls because that's what humans think they want. I feel like we've lost a window into the machine consciousness, and I feel a bit sad about that.

不连贯在很多方面也意味着缺乏观点。垃圾可能看起来很漂亮，但如果它没有人性的真实或更深层的意义，那我们到底在看什么呢？

Incoherence is the lack of a point of view in many ways too. Slop can be beautiful, but if it doesn't have the human truth or a deeper why, then what are we looking at?

我们所有的作品——即使是用 AI 模型创作的——但我觉得它们之所以感觉非常人性化，是因为我们花了很长时间从自己的视角去编辑。

All of our work — even we've created it with AI models — but I think it feels deeply human because we spent so long editing things from our point of view.

这也是它如此独特的原因。我本来想问你的问题是：这个品牌的北极星是什么？你在朝着什么方向努力？我很喜欢你刚才的回答，因为正是这种独特性。你是怎么做到的？

Which is why it's so unique too. I had a question I was going to ask you: what was the north star for the brand? What were you working towards? And I love the answer that you already gave, which is because it was so unique. How did you get there?

什么会让你有感觉？什么让我觉得我的直觉在指向哪里？我觉得很有趣的是，在设计领域的很多方面，尤其是高端文化和高端设计，人们似乎对人类体验抱有轻蔑。有一种设计或产品流派会说：“别再刷垃圾了。用无屏设备吧。这才是你应该过的生活。”但人类想要看那些吸引我们的东西，这本身就很人性化。人类体验不仅仅是沿着巴黎运河散步、啜饮拿铁。人类体验有很多棱角：有嫉妒、愤怒、性、欲望、嫉妒和暴力。那也是人类体验的一部分。我们真的应该把这些都抹去吗？那还是对我们自己诚实吗？我不确定我们是否需要创造奖励我们恶习的东西。但当我们设计东西时，即使是从奖励美德的角度出发，我认为我们也不应该因为人类有恶习而羞辱他们。这就是我们本来的样子。我认为现在的设计，尤其是高端设计，感觉完全没有性别色彩。没有欲望，没有情欲。我们磨平了任何可能激起欲望的东西，也磨平了任何可能令人反感的东西。这样做，我们基本上创造出了虚无。对我来说，这才是终极的垃圾。我喜欢我的 iPhone 上有使用痕迹，摔了之后会显露出岁月的痕迹。我喜欢皱纹，那表明一个人经常扬起眉毛。

What will make you feel something? What makes me feel like what is my stomach pointing towards? I find it really interesting that in so many sectors of design, especially high culture and high design, people seem to have contempt towards the human experience. There's a certain genre of design or products where they're like, 'Don't scroll slop anymore. Go with the screenless device. That is how you're supposed to live your life.' But there's something really human about us wanting to look at things that we find appealing. The human experience isn't just going on long walks along the Parisian canal and sipping a latte. The human experience has lots of edges to it. It has envy, wrath, sex, lust, jealousy, and violence. That is also a part of the human experience. Should we really take all of that away? Is that still honest to who we are? I don't know that we need to create things that reward our vices necessarily. When we design things, even from the point of rewarding our virtues, I don't think we should shame humans for having vices. That's simply who we are. I think there's something about design, especially high design now, that feels utterly sexless. There's no desire. There's no lust. We've sanded away anything that could potentially be arousing, but also we've sanded away anything that feels objectionable. In doing so, we've created essentially nothing. And to me, that is the ultimate slop. I love having patina on my iPhone where I drop it and it shows its age. I love having wrinkles that show you that someone has lifted their eyebrows a lot.

那我们能谈谈 Hivemind 接下来要做什么吗？你打下了非常有趣的基础，可以想象出很多种发展方向。你暗示过，即使发布之后，一些想法也在演变，新想法被激发出来。那么，当你思考它的未来方向时，你在想什么？

Can we talk about what's next for Hivemind then? You laid this very interesting foundation, and you can imagine almost any number of stories in terms of where this could go. You hinted that even since launch, some of that thinking has evolved and new ideas have been sparked. So when you think about where this is headed, what's on your mind?

Hivemind 的终极北极星是让人类获得一个诚实的视角，了解人们真正在想什么。谷歌整理了世界上所有的公开帖子和信息，我们的算法和时间线把它们推送给我们。我们生活在一个内容丰富的时代，可以无限生成内容。我相信，我们渴望的是诚实和真实的信号。我们渴望与他人生活在共享的叙事中。当你看到我们正在整合的一些东西时，我认为它会讲述自己的故事，你会明白的。但这部电影实际上是我称之为“障眼法”的一系列动作中的第一幕。我认为人们以为它是某种东西。很快，我认为他们会真正看到这一切背后的全部野心，那将会非常有趣。

The ultimate north star of Hivemind is to give humanity access to a point of view that is honest about what people really think about things. Google has organized all the public posts and information in the world, and our algorithms and timelines feed it to us. We live in an age of abundance of content, where you can just generate infinite content. What we hunger for, I believe, is honest and truth signal. We hunger to live in shared narratives with others. When you see some of the things we're putting together, I think it will tell its own story and you'll understand. But the film is really the first act in a sequence that I refer to as 'sleight of hand.' I think people think it's a certain thing. Very soon, I think they will actually see the full ambition behind all of it, and that will be very interesting.