Tokens & Tactics #5: Building Viral AI Projects and Reading the Whole Web
Greg Hochmuth's approach to AI experimentation, from his viral Methaphone project to his vision for AI-powered Google Alerts that monitor everything.
Welcome back to Tokens & Tactics, our Tuesday series about how people are actually using AI at work.
Each week, we feature one person and their real-world workflow—what tools they use, what they’re building, and what’s working right now. No hype. No vague predictions. Just practical details from the front lines. This week: Greg Hochmuth, also known as grex, an artist and engineer.
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Tell us about yourself.
My name is Greg Hochmuth. I’m an engineer and artist, depending on the time of day. I was a very early engineer at Instagram. Most recently, I worked at Midjourney for about two years and just joined OpenAI in June.
When I’m not exchanging tokens for income, I work on many personal projects — the most recent one, Methaphone, went very viral in May. You’ll find all my projects on my website.
ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude?
ChatGPT. It has the best mobile app and I love o3 for all queries that aren’t just “why are carrots called zanahoria in Spanish?”
What was your last SFW AI conversation?
At the very top of my chat list right now:
make a list of major US movies released in theaters from 2000 and onwards. include all notable indie films too.
The NYT put out a very strange list of best movies released since 2000, followed up by an even stranger list of “reader favorites.” I wanted to make my own list and needed a starting point for review.
First "aha!" moment with AI?
It was “aha & oh shit” at the same time: making an image with the earliest version of Midjourney.
Your AI subscriptions and rough monthly spend?
ChatGPT: $20/mo
Cursor: $20/mo
Google AI Studio: free
Fal.ai (pay as you go) to play with a bunch of new model releases
Services i subscribe & cancel as needed:
Elevenlabs (mostly to test how good their latest releases are)
Who do you read/listen to to stay current on AI?
Just my twitter feed.
Your most-used GPT/Project/Gem?
I love uploading an eBook to ChatGPT and going to town — but other than that, I don’t know any specific GPTs/gems that are actually good? Someone point me to a great one they use often.
The AI task that would've seemed like magic two years ago but now feels routine?
Making images from text, or modifying an image using text. the GPT image launch was a particularly striking leap, but now it just feels normal … but still magical. Just everyday, normal magic.
Magic wand feature request?
Just read my mind already.
Short of that: I want Google Alerts meets LLMs. I want background queries over the entire web (including closed places like TikTok/Twitter/Instagram) and get updates when relevant stuff pops up. Why do *I* have to read the whole web from top to bottom still?
If you could only invest in one company to ride the AI wave, who would it be?
Of course it’d “be nice” to own shares in Cursor… but overall, I actually think it’s too early — this is not the wave yet.
The real wave (tsunami) will be the company that offers AI-powered employees for businesses, whether that’s programmers, lawyers, marketers or sales people. What we’ve seen until now is child’s play compared to this. Some companies are already vying for this with coding but I don’t think any single one has an unbeatable lead here … and the switching costs are also near zero.
Have you tried full self-driving yet?
Waymo. I never want to drive or be driven any other way ever again. Great job, Google.
Latest AI rabbit hole?
I spend most of my time playing with tools and understanding what’s (currently) possible. My most recent rabbit hole was understanding the current state of real-time voice chat over telephony. On the research front, my latest rabbit hole was diffusion text models — a speedy token future awaits!
One piece of advice for folks wanting to get deeper into AI?
Find a small project or a question that’s personally meaningful to you and just play with the tools in that field. It’s honestly not fun and very overwhelming to stand on the sidelines with your jaw on the floor — try to make something that you can send to a friend afterwards, it’ll be so much more real and meaningful than “trying to keep up.” Also prepare to be disappointed more than once by the clash between hype and reality — the magic is not evenly distributed.
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Thanks for reading,
Noah and Claire