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AJ Angela Jiang On Latent Space

“I think I read something like 200 or so books in like a year. … These were like tweets for myself. And I was practicing a little bit of: how would I try to compress the idea that I have in as few words as possible? It was kind of like the personal test I had for myself. And then I guess people just started liking it.”

Latent Space · AI Builders · October 2026

“I think I read something like 200 or so books in like a year. … These were like tweets for myself. And I was practicing a little bit of: how would I try to compress the idea that I have in as few words as possible? It was kind of like the personal test I had for myself. And then I guess people just started liking it.” — Angela Jiang, Latent Space

Context

Asked about her well-known aphoristic tweets, Angela Jiang explained they came out of a year of heavy reading on a long train commute, when she felt her job had stopped stretching her. The tweets weren't meant to build a following; they were an exercise in compressing an idea into as few words as possible.

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Transcript

Latent Space Around 1:17:00 into the episode
Angela Jiang

you do? What mode of,

Speaker 3

what, like, what framework of mind, frame of mind are you?

Angela Jiang

That's my question. Yeah, no, this was a very long time ago. I went through a period of my life where I was like reading constantly, actually. I found myself like very bored of the stuff that I was doing. And I felt like I was just like not being like intellectually challenged. And so I actually went on this bit of a bender where I think I read something like 200 or so books in like a year. And I was just curious about like everything. I just wanted to like read everything. And I was missing a little bit of like the kind of like intellectual, like, I don't know, like muscle building you get when you're like in school where they like, this is a new topic. You got to learn. It's like tough. It's like not super fun, actually, but you are really like stretching yourself. And I felt…

Speaker 3

got to ask after all the reading, any book, book recommendations, blogs, long articles.

Angela Jiang

My favorite one still is probably The Black Swan by Messi Talib. That was like one of those like, I was like, to me at least, it was like a bit of a life-changing philosophical book where I was like, that's a completely different way to live. Book of the world. And I was thinking of Black

Speaker 3

Swan when the favorite thing happened, right? It's a thing that you didn't know could happen. Now that it happens, it permanently changed your framework of

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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