Philip Agenmonmen

Independent AI Consultant, AI Engineer & Angel Investor.

Founder @ Pinnacle Prompts

[Philip Agenmonmen @AgenP_]

Grow the pie. Grow the pie. Grow the pie. Grow the pie.

Today's affirmation.

[Philip Agenmonmen @AgenP_]

@liamottley_ Bars.

[Philip Agenmonmen @AgenP_]

@theallinpod. Day 1!

[Philip Agenmonmen @AgenP_]

@RLanceMartin @Jason @_sholtodouglas I’m at All-In Summit. Just asked Friedberg to get @_sholtodouglas on. Hope it happens, would be a great convo for the field 🔥

[Gavin Baker @GavinSBaker]

Wild 24 hours for AI and lots of different proposals have been made.

TLDR; the only *tangible* new fact is that OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have embedded 3rd party evaluators from unknown organizations with Dario floating METR as a possibility. Having 3rd party evaluators is smart as there is no Section 230 style liability shield for model outputs and showing a “duty of care” will be important in future litigation. Several internet companies might have gone bankrupt without Section 230 so limiting liability really matters.

There are minimal investment implications from this single new fact, but I do think that for anyone who wants a “smoother for longer” cycle then most constraints are good: wafers, watts, real rates and spreads. Excessive regulation is a different matter but I don’t think we are anywhere close to this even if the vector changed over the last 24 hours.

To summarize the events:

Dario made the most maximalist proposal of the weekend: embedded 3rd party evaluators, a national regulatory regime for models beyond a certain capability/ingredient threshold, a broad international regulatory pact between democracies, stricter limits on compute/distillation for China and then a different international regulatory regime that encompasses China. Before there is a national regulatory regime, he wants a Sherman act waiver so that Anthropic can safely coordinate with OpenAI and other frontier labs without antitrust fears. TBF, this latest proposal is much less maximalist than some of his prior proposals like “Policy on the AI Exponential,” where he advocated for an FAA for AI. I believe he is sincere in his beliefs. And despite all the protestations, all of this would also probably be good for his business over the long-term.

Sam agreed that embedded 3rd party evaluators were a good idea and stated they would implement them. Again, this is smart as should help limit future liability.

Elon said “Dario is right” and later specified that “Dario is right that there should be some oversight. Peer review of AI by competitors is the right way to start this off.” This would be a MPAA like self-regulatory structure for AI with regular calls between the labs plus a process where each new model is evaluated for safety by competitors for a 1-2 week period before being released. That is *wildly* different from Dario’s proposal and in-line with what David Sacks has been proposing. Elon also stated that nothing was going to slow down open-weight models.

Demis said that Dario’s essay was a “step in the right direction.” Dario also said that he was also open to Demis’ idea of a FINRA like self-regulatory structure as part of his proposal.

David Sacks had a thoughtful post where he said that Dario and Sam should pace unilaterally, called the antitrust waiver a cartel request and denied that METR was truly independent given their ties to Anthropic.

Sriram Krishnan, former White House AI advisor, noted that it would be important to have the 3rd party evaluators come from independent organizations that are not affiliated with any lab, which is basically an indirect statement about the relationship between METR and Anthropic which Sacks was explicit about.

Clem from Hugging Face said they were open to being a neutral 3rd party evaluator, which is interesting especially if Jensen was consulted before that post.

Alexander Wang from Meta noted that alignment would be an increasing focus going forward.

An executive order seems likely after all this and the language in this EO is going to be really important. It is possible to democratize and distribute AI broadly and safely without centralizing it in the hands of a few corporations who might each become more powerful than any single government.

I do not want a few humans in control of intelligence.

I want us all to have our own intelligences that reflect our own values and human variation in all of its richness.

Intelligence distribution over intelligence centralization FTW.

[Thariq @trq212]

it's basically impossible to interpret evals by looking at just at the pass/fail scores these days

many of the failures I see in benchmarks are due to overly strict hidden tests, in some cases the model's answer makes more sense than the expected eval result

[David Senra @davidsenra]

Doug Leone. Sequoia.

Tomorrow. August 30, 2026.

Available everywhere you get podcasts.

@dougleone @sequoia

[David Senra @davidsenra]

Doug Leone has three questions he asks himself before investing in any company:

1.  Would I put my kids' money into this?

2. If I only make 20 investments in my life, is this one of the 20?

3. Can I return the whole fund with this investment?

“If I don't pass those three, I'm not going to make the investment.”

“There's probably 200 investments that you can make in your lifetime, and a lot of them are going to return 2x your money, 3x your money. I only want the ones where you can return 100x your money. That's all I'm interested in. I want the outliers.”

[Philip Agenmonmen @AgenP_]

@DottChen @aleshu_ber @davidsenra @sama @OpenAI Btw y'all, If you look at every thumbnail of Founders Podcast and David Senra Podcast, they're all in black and white.

Dates years back, if you include Founders Podcast.

Imo, much much more likely an intentional brand choice than clickbait.

[Philip Agenmonmen @AgenP_]

@davidsenra @sama @OpenAI LETS GO.

[Philip Agenmonmen @AgenP_]

@davidsenra @travisk Absurdly good, thank you.

[Unnati @Unnati_builds24]

Elon Musk in a living room in 2008, 12 days from bankruptcy, pitching a $109,000 car to people...

[Philip Agenmonmen @AgenP_]

@swyx @rronak_ What a phenomenal talk. Thanks for shouting it out. On-Policy Self-Distillation has become my North Star.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

I resisted AI for too long

Living in denial

Now it is game on

@xAI @Tesla @SpaceX

[Philip Agenmonmen @AgenP_]

Man, this Ed Catmull quote hits the spot while building out eval and observability infrastructure:

“There are so many parts you have to get right, and it’s so easy to get lost in this swirling mass. Your first conclusions are always wrong, and so are your second and your third. So you have to create mechanisms where teams of people can keep working together to see what’s really happening and then work together to solve the problems.”

[Philip Agenmonmen @AgenP_]

Peter Thiel. Mood:

“Above all, don’t overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company.”

[Philip Agenmonmen @AgenP_]

High velocity decisions under uncertainty. That's the name of the game.

[Philip Agenmonmen @AgenP_]

@swyx Lg - more O-1 visa fuel.

[Philip Agenmonmen @AgenP_]

@JPoehnelt @aiDotEngineer Thanks a ton for setting these up. I came to the first one and had really great convos!

Went into “blister management” mode afterwards, but would’ve loved to go to the other 3.