A March Madness of Basketball Books in Latent Space

I am 64 today, and last night I pushed one dream over the finish line. For several years I have been envisaging an “agentic” future for books where there is an endless loop of AIs coming up with book ideas, evaluating them, evolving them, expanding them, and collaborating with human authors to finish and publish very high quality original works. I have prototyped many of the key tools but have held back on scaling up. Today, I am scaled up.

There are three main reasons why I haven’t finished this before now. First, I tend to get distracted! Too many ideas, too many projects. Second, model runs are expensive, for me, anyway. Third, perfectionism: I’ve been telling myself “it’s a waste of money to scale up before you’re ready.”

Last week I finally got around to implementing a simple and free way to overcome the second and third self-imposed obstacles. I installed the model-running app Ollama on my shiny new M4 Mac with 48 GB unified RAM and got a quantized version of DeepSeek running. Now I have more than enough free and reasonably high-quality output tokens to generate thousands of new ideas a day and feed through my evaluation & expansion pipeline. Free makes a big difference.

The John Feinstein Memorial Tournament

As an illustration, I am running a basketball book idea tournament to coincide with the NCAA’s Men’s Collegiate Basketball championship tournament: March Madness, which also starts today. It is named in honor of the late John Feinstein, who died last week, one of the best basketball writers of his generation. xAI’s Grok wrote:

John Feinstein was known for a spirit that was passionate, fearless, and uncompromising, traits that shone through in both his work and personal interactions. Described by those who knew him as a tireless storyteller, he approached sports journalism with an unrelenting drive, producing over 40 books—many of them bestsellers like A Season on the Brink—and countless columns with a tenacity that never waned. His spirit was one of intensity; he loved sports deeply, watched them obsessively, and held strong opinions he wasn’t afraid to voice, whether about college basketball, the Olympics, or the state of the game.

There will be 64 competitors (68 is lame) and six rounds. Here are the ideas in the tournament. These came from Grok. I haven’t edited them at all yet. In each round of the tournament, the grading model will be asked to evaluate the ideas more and more closely. The champion will have been preferred to an alternative six times in a row.

Brackets and seeds will be out soon, and the first round of 32 idea v. idea face-offs will start on Thursday. The Python class I wrote to manage the ideas and tournaments is behind the paywall.

There will be lots of other competitions. If you are interested in sponsoring one, let me know!

Cordially,

Fred Z.