#121: The Future is Agentic Commerce, 'AI Animation Done Right', Mastering Perplexity Computer

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week we will take a look at how Perplexity Computer compares to OpenClaw, a socially accepted example of AI use in animation, how agentic commerce will establish a new type of economy, and more.

Let's dive in:

Perplexity Computer, Scaling $25k/mo App, Quant Desk Sim

A few of my favorite X articles from the previous week:

Mastering Perplexity Computer: The Ultimate Guide - A deep-dive comparison of Perplexity Computer vs. OpenClaw. Looks at which is better overall, why you might still need both, and the exact prompts and workflows to get the most out of either.

This is how I scaled my mobile app to $25k+/month (The Complete Guide) - A founder's step-by-step playbook for: picking the right app, cracking distribution, onboarding, and paid ads.

How to Simulate Like a Quant Desk. Every model, Every formula, Runnable Code - A rigorous, code-first walkthrough of how to model prediction markets like a professional trader. Covers Monte Carlo basics, importance sampling, particle filters, copula-based correlation, and agent-based simulations, ending with a full institutional-grade production stack.

The Future is Agentic Commerce

Agentic commerce is an emerging concept with the potential to become one of the foundations of Economy 2.0. For those unfamiliar, it refers to software that handles the buying process on your behalf, searching products, comparing prices, reading reviews, and completing transactions without human intervention. It learns your preferences, anticipates your needs, and acts autonomously in your interest.

The number of agents operating on behalf of humans will vastly outnumber our population, producing massive downstream effects on how humans exchange expertise and services.

Stripe President John Collison, on the future of commerce:

"I would distinguish between how things work today and how things will work in the future.

In terms of how things work today agents absolutely can - a lot of people build with Stripe.

You can have a one time use credit card that your agent can go out and spend, but if you look at what's happening there's lots of agents having to solve captchas to be able to do stuff on the wider web.

Clearly the web is not built for agents and as a result they have to get creative to do any real world tasks and that's true in the kind of economic activity as well.

Where we think things will go is just there will be a huge amount of agent commerce and again we're seeing a little bit of it today. We think there will be a torrent of us and that is what unites stablecoins and AI because we think you're going to need blockchains and better blockchains honestly...

I mean this was our thinking behind incubating Tempo because you're going to need a really high throughput blockchains for the agents.

Entrepreneur Greg Eisenberg also shared his thesis for what the future of the agent economy looks like:

build startups for agents over the next 10 years, you'll have a market of billions of customers (agents)

with millions of wallets that want to use your services

go look at every saas tool you use. notion, slack, stripe etc

now ask: "what's the version of this that's built purely for agents?"

agent-native payments, agent-native communication, agent-native memory etc

every single category gets rebuilt (for agents)

we're entering the machine-to-machine economy and almost nobody is building for it yet.

Litany of Humility

This article from @growing_daniel was a beautiful reminder of detachment from ego and remaining grounded. He shared a prayer written by Cardinal Rafael Merry de Val in 1905, titled the Litany of Humility. It's a prayer constructed as two separate series, with each having a refrain that is said after statements in the series.

What intrigued me about Daniel sharing the article and prayer, is how he described his time as a youth exploring stoicism and Buddhism. What he gathered from studying these for five full years during his undergraduate time, is how both philosophies were aimed to release its practitioner of earthly desires. He found them to be imperfect.

Through the Litany of Humility and his exploration of Christianity, Daniel found a truth in the fact that:

"Every day, your existence is perceived and warped by what people see, hear, and think about you. You will always be imperfectly understood, cast unfairly, judged quietly. It is within this tortured context that we all must exist. We feel as though we live and die by these assessments from others, realizing from a very young age that it is better to stand taller and be favored.

A radical idea implicit to the Christian faith is that you, like Christ, can let go of this earthly attachment."

By confronting our pride, our desire for status, approval, and recognition, and our fear of their absence, we release ourselves from the ego.

In its place, we gain peace, love, and a stable sense of worth grounded in a relationship with God instead of other people's opinions.

AI Animation Done Right

I always find it interesting when there is a socially accepted use case for AI in the creation of art. There was a recently viral tweet stating, "This is an example of AI done right for the industry."

In it, animator Marvin Te used Rive AI's agent to build a physics system and applied it to his character rig, effectively blending hand-keyframed animation with AI-generated physics.

The replies ranged from tongue-in-cheek thanks to "the arbiters of AI" to comments stating this was nothing new for the industry. The top-liked reply came from a commenter saying, "This is exactly the kind of stuff I love to see. AI can enhance artists' workflows. It doesn't need to replace them."

This is nearly the same exact stance that Japanese filmmaker and VFX supervisor Takashi Yamazaki holds. At the Visual Effects Society Awards in February 2025, he described AI as "a very capable assistant or tool, as it stands right now, but it is not at the point where it can kind of take center stage and generate what humans can".

Yamazaki's view started out skeptical, but he recognizes AI's trajectory. He stated that "due to the extraordinary speed of evolution, one day we may realize that it has become one of our important tools".

He and fellow filmmaker Hideaki Anno also expressed that human judgment remains essential. Anno gave a preview of where most films may start to head, stating:

I believe that when AI evolves to the point where it can create all kinds of videos, the only people left will be the producers and directors. The people who fund the project and the people who can ultimately say, 'This is good enough.' Only these two will remain.

Mastery Learning with Justin Skycak

Justin Skycak is one of my favorite follows in the education space. He regularly shares gems of insight, such as his "summary of (The Math Academy Way) that explains in forensic detail, with hundreds of academic citations, how Math Academy students master math at breakneck speed by leveraging the science of learning."

The summary can be found here.

For those interested in the learning techniques most leveraged by Math Academy, look no further than what Skycak directly mentions: active (but guided) learning, deliberate practice, mastery learning, minimizing cognitive load, developing automaticity, layering, non-interference, spaced repetition (distributed practice), interleaving (mixed practice), the testing effect (retrieval practice), and gamification.

And last but not least, lots and lots (and lots) of retrieval practice.

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Becket U

Undiscovered #121: The Future is Agentic Commerce, 'AI Animation Done Right', Mastering Perplexity Computer

#121: The Future is Agentic Commerce, 'AI Animation Done Right', Mastering Perplexity Computer

Perplexity Computer, Scaling $25k/mo App, Quant Desk Sim

The Future is Agentic Commerce

Litany of Humility

AI Animation Done Right

Mastery Learning with Justin Skycak

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