Christopher Nolan's best film is the lesser known The Prestige. Two magicians compete to be the greatest showman in 19th century London. The main character, Alfred Borden, develops The Transported Man trick in which he seemingly teleports himself in front of a live audience. His rival Robert Angier, dumbfounded by the trick but desperate to keep up, attempts to hack it with a cloning machine built by Nikola Tesla.

Without giving too much away, Angier's machine becomes the ultimate faustian bargain while Borden's trick was born out of ingenuity, industriousness, and sacrifice. This reveals to us that put together, these intangibles form a craft that appears to the naked eye, as magic.

"The secret impresses no one. The trick you use it for is everything." – Alfred Borden

The New Machine in Software

There's a new machine out there, it clones human thought. Have you heard of it? Ask it a question semantically and you'll receive a human-like response. Game changer. Is it magic? It sure seemed that way, until we learned the trick.

The trick, of course, consists of training LLMs. A tall order to be sure, not one that is easily replicated without resources. If you want to do magic you'll have to find your own Telsa to buy a machine from. It may just be an api call, opposed to a full blown physical monstrosity, but once you've got it you're able to wow. Plug in your model and boom! You're a magician. Or so you say....

If everyone is doing the same trick, is it magic? In a world without secrets, the trick becomes getting any audience at all. In order to gain an audience, the magician must do something new that no one else is doing, or grow slowly but surely — heads down, putting on show after show, until one day he wakes up as an overnight success.

Of course, the second magician must incorporate the new tricks of the day. In fact the second magician often started as the first — but the audience never sees it. They only see the first or the second, without realizing it's the same man. And that's the trick.

Culture is Magic

Done properly, magic and technology should elicit the same reaction — "holy cow, how'd you do that!?". The difference is that the audience for a new piece of technology (customers) aren't looking to be fooled, they're looking to be delighted.

What AirGraph does is simple, we take the information you work with and put it in one place so your job becomes infinitely easier. Instead of the friction that comes with finding, organizing, and using information, we offer delight.

But what looks simple on the outside can only be achieved by ingenuity, industriousness, and sacrifice on the inside. The inputs precede the outputs. Such is the culture of AirGraph. Is that our secret?

If we told you that's the secret, you'd be unimpressed. We'd rather show you the trick and keep you guessing. Isn't that what you want too?

No one understands this better than Apple. Is the iPhone magic? In the summer of 2007, it sure seemed like it. They'll never tell you their secret, it is perhaps the most secretive company in the world. Was the design the trick? Or was it organizing a global supply chain to put that little piece of glass and aluminum in your hands right when they said they would?

Sounds boring. Sounds hard. What is this wizardry? Magic, properly defined.

Secrets

So, is there such thing as magic? Alfred Borden was London's finest magician, but we learned his secret and suddenly the trick became clear. Plug in your Tesla-made api and summarize this text. Or perform, night after night, building computers and selling them door to door — until the secret doesn't matter. Because even if you tell them, they won't care. They only see the trick, and they're delighted to do so.

If you do want to know our secret, you'll have to come help us perform the trick, we have no secret machine. Otherwise, you'll have to try AirGraph and decipher which magician you came to see. Though soon enough, you won't notice. All you'll see is magic.