INSIGHTS: 🔎 AlphaEvolve evolves, New Brand Collabs, and Feeding The Bots.

From human to AI and the threads between, glimpse into brand strategy, tech, and the marketing scene. This is your window seat from 30,000 feet.

Author

culture pilot
May 20, 2025

Is AI About To Go Beyond Imitation?

What have we done.

BRAND SIGNAL

Can AI models go farther than rehashing what they’ve learned to create something genuinely new?

This past week Google DeepMind’s latest project, AlphaEvolve, may have just crossed that line. It designed math algorithms that outperform some of the best human-designed solutions from the last 50 years, including one that stood unchallenged since 1969.

Not based on mimicry. Not borrowed from training data.

This is as close to “built from scratch” as it gets, and evolved by code.

We’re no longer just teaching machines how to replicate what we do. We’re starting to ask: What can they do that we haven’t thought of yet?

FROM THE FIELD

At Culture Pilot, we’ve been working on potential brand partnership initiatives, and our strategic eyes are peeled to several recent collaborations hitting the media.

Brand collaborations aren’t just about expanding an audience. The strongest outcomes are a perfect Venn diagram of shared demographics and cultural context.

A few that recently nailed the overlap:

  • Matty Matheson Ă— Gozney – Our favorite fiery chef teams up with the fire-forward cooking brand with their take on the infomercial.

  • Dr. Squatch Ă— Liquid Death – Irreverent humor and an anti-generic edge. A perfect tonal match for your new favorite soap.

  • LVMH Ă— Formula 1 – Prestige, performance, and spectacle in one high-fashion fast lane. These two signed a 10-year deal.

  • Mountain Dew x Dickies – Two brands with an active audience and tons of room to play while driving up more TikTok sales.

The results don’t feel like a stunt. They should feel inevitable.

The real win? More reach, and even more relevance.

GO TIME

Treat Your AI Like Partners, Not Tools.

Like great leaders providing clear direction, we need to give our teams the power to produce better results. And your bots need nourishment too. 

When you give AI direction, try including:
→ Context
→ Constraints
→ Links
→ Screenshots
→ Spreadsheets
→ Reports

Or any example material that fuels the fire you’re trying to build.

Good output requires good input.

Just don’t feed it a napkin sketch and expect a masterplan.

YOUR TAKEAWAY

AI can get us there faster.

Let’s be sure it’s somewhere worth arriving.

Reply

or to participate.