---
title: 2023 recap
date: 01.30.24
tags:
  - notes
author: Courtland Leer
description: A retrospective of Plastic Labs' transition from EdTech to AI infrastructure research in 2023.
---
# 2023 Recap
Last year was wild. We started as an EdTech company and ended as anything but. There's a deep dive on some of the conceptual lore in last week's "[[ARCHIVED; Honcho; User Context Management for LLM Apps#^09f185|Honcho: User Context Management for LLM Apps]]:"

>[Plastic Labs](https://plasticlabs.ai) was conceived as a research group exploring the intersection of education and emerging technology...with the advent of ChatGPT...we shifted our focus to large language models...we set out to build a non-skeuomorphic, AI-native tutor that put users first...our [[ARCHIVED; Open Sourcing Tutor-GPT|experimental tutor]], Bloom, [[ARCHIVED; Theory of Mind Is All You Need|was remarkably effective]]--for thousands of users during the 9 months we hosted it for free...

Building a production-grade, user-centric AI application, then giving it nascent [theory of mind](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.11490.pdf) and [[LLM Metacognition is inference about inference|metacognition]], made it glaringly obvious to us that social cognition in LLMs was both under-explored and under-leveraged.

We pivoted to address this hole in the stack and build the user context management solution agent developers need to truly give their users superpowers. Plastic applied and was accepted to [Betaworks'](https://www.betaworks.com/) [*AI Camp: Augment*](https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/30/betaworks-goes-all-in-on-augmentative-ai-in-latest-camp-cohort-were-rabidly-interested/?guccounter=1):

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/868985592?h=deff771ffe&color=F6F5F2&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

We spent camp in a research cycle, then [published a pre-print](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06983) showing it's possible to enhance LLM theory of mind ability with [predictive coding-inspired](https://js.langchain.com/docs/use_cases/agent_simulations/violation_of_expectations_chain) [metaprompting](https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.07350).

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PbuzqCdY0hg?si=OSujtqg44AK3y_W-" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Then it was back to building.
# Keep in Touch
Thanks for reading.

You can find us on [X/Twitter](https://twitter.com/plastic_labs), but we'd really like to see you in our [Discord](https://discord.gg/plasticlabs) 🫡.