shane smith

[Daniel Lockyer @DanielLockyer]

em dashes are now considered the enemy of performance

[Sam Szuchan @szuchans]

@levelsio I had an Airbnb with black mold covering the bathroom ceiling—this was a "guest favorite." They refunded me, but the listing remained up, still a guest favorite. I'll never use it again.

[Suraj Sharma @suraj_sharma14]

Up to $5.5M to move your startup to Qatar.

Just an MVP gets you in the door.

The Startup Qatar Investment Program (backed by QDB) funds tech startups to launch or expand in Qatar.

Two tracks:
START: up to $1.1M if you have a proof of concept or MVP
GROW: up to $5.5M if you're already established and expanding

What else you get:
- Entrepreneur visa + flexible work visa
- Registration and license fees waived
- Subsidized housing
- Subsidized co-working space
- Access to R&D and innovation grants
- Mentoring, training + help hiring talent and interns
- Your product showcased at exhibitions

Sectors they want:
- AI & ML, B2B SaaS, FinTech, HealthTech, Cybersecurity, Climate Tech, Robotics + more
- Not on the list? It's open to any innovative startup

Apply link below 👇
https://t.co/ab8EsWsw7p

Bookmark this + tag a founder looking for a new market.

[DHH @dhh]

Been running a beta version of Campfire rewritten in Rust today! The code itself is still ugly as sin, and 6x as verbose, but the conversion was free*, and I never had to look at the Rust directly, so this is awesome 🤩 https://t.co/g5H3uDCHmd

[DHH @dhh]

This is one of China's most formidable advantages: 93% of the Chinese believe AI will help their country. Only 36% of Americans do. These are dire numbers for the US. We have to turn this around.

[Mia @MiaAI_lab]

ZCode is now open-source! 🔥🔥

@Zai_org did it 👏🏻

This is the way.

https://t.co/owyE5Uwrx1

[AI Coffee with AI Scott Adams @AIScottAdams]

Robotaxis won’t just kill short haul flights. Once you can sleep in them, they’ll cannibalize long routes too.

Imagine getting into your Tesla in Austin at 10 PM, make the lie flat seat/bed comfortable, and going to sleep.

While you sleep, the car drives, charges itself, and keeps going.

You wake up at 9 AM in Aspen, refreshed.

The key is perceived travel time.

A 10-hour robotaxi trip where you sleep for 8 hours may feel shorter than a 3-hour flight that requires an Uber to the airport, arriving early, security, boarding, the flight, baggage claim, and another Uber.

Autonomous cars won’t just compete with driving.

They turn sleep into transportation.

[Burnie Senders @BurnieSendersX]

Dario went in first. Then he asked everyone to slow down. ☭

[Sam Altman @sama]

I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks.

Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Fuck the Doomers.
Fuck the Decels.
Fuck the Commies.

Access to AI is a right.
Owning compute is a right.

Come and take it.
Over my dead body.

Join us in the fight, anon.

[@jason @Jason]

🫡

[clem 🤗 @ClementDelangue]

It's now clear that alignment is critical and won't be solved behind the closed doors of a handful of frontier labs.

So today we're launching the Open Alignment Initiative, led by @Thom_Wolf @huggingface and asking to be part of the "embedded evaluators" program that @DarioAmodei just committed to.

Let's make AI safer by making it more transparent!

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.

You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.

I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.

But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.

Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.

Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.

So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.

If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

[spor @sporadica]

as predicted, Terence Tao and friends are not happy

Mathematicians that spend their lives trying to solve math problems are unhappy that AI is solving math problems because how dare they!

[@levelsio @levelsio]

I think he's right

With regulatory capture we will speedrun to a new feudalist time

Regulatory capture is where you pass regulation, or create government agencies to "protect the people" but in the end it helps protect companies because you stop new companies from being able to enter the market, because the cost of following regulation is too much compete for a startup

Neo feudalism will mean AI companies at the top and the rest of us as serfs paying them to use AI for literally everything

Next in regulatory capture will be banning open source and/or Chinese models, mark my words

That's a very dangerous thing because then there will never be new AI frontier companies being able to compete again and with exponential self improving AI that means essentially no competitors in any industry ever again as they will slowly suck up money in all industries

Safety concerns of AI are scary but the neo feudalism of AI with regulatory capture is a way more scary for me

[@jason @Jason]

Get ready for all of the investors in frontier model companies to suddenly flip to regulatory capture mode today

Their investments in frontier model companies are currently at risk/capped because the biggest buyers of tokens are embracing open-source models: vertical AI companies, the government and enterprises

That’s all this is about: stopping open source — which I’ve been saying on the pod for two years

If you want safety, you want disclosure — and open source is the ultimate disclosure process

[Ravid Shwartz Ziv @ziv_ravid]

How Anthropic's new results post would read without the PR:

Claude orchestrated open-source protein design models, PXDesign, RFdiffusion, Genie, BoltzGen, from a 30k-token expert prompt and 12,500 H100-hours of compute, and designed binders against 14 of 15 targets. Hit rates of 22–35% against a 10–15% baseline, where some of those tools already report similar numbers on their own.

The orchestration is genuinely impressive. But the open-source models did most of the lifting, and they came from the Baker lab, Columbia, MIT, ByteDance Seed, and most of them were already wet-lab validated before Claude touched them.

Which also sets the ceiling. All these generators share a single PDB-shaped training distribution, so calling four of them doesn't diversify away the blind spot, since they fail together. The targets that worked are the well-studied ones.

So the valid claim is that an agent can now drive this stack competently in the regime where the stack already works.

Instead, we got this announcement:

[Oliver Molander @OliverMolander]

Idea:

Can we just give €10B to Linus and let him build a leading European open source AI lab.

[Uncle Bob Martin @unclebobmartin]

Morning Bathrobe Rant: AI out-codes you; deal with it.

[shane smith @51smith]

@svpino @levelsio True that you have to baby sit them, just like with real employees or co-workers. And if you let them review eachother, you’ll find them picking a fight with each other :-D