Ashriel Brian

building @akro

[Ashriel Brian @AshrielBrian]

I had a hard time deciding whether to post this.

But if I don't feel embarassed, then I've launched too late. So here I am:

Casper (https://t.co/0tumSlFHSq) is a chrome extension to search the contents of your browsing history fully in-browser, fully private!

#buildinpublic

[clem 🤗 @ClementDelangue]

So proud of our security team! They caught, contained & publicly disclosed an attack unlike anything we've seen before, and did it at record speed.

Also massively grateful to @Zai_org: they shared GLM5.2 as open weights (for free!) with the world and it became a key part of our defense.

This is day one for cybersecurity in the age of agents & we're all learning that secrecy is not the answer & that all defenders (not just a few selected ones) everywhere need more powerful models without restrictions, especially open ones!

[Ashriel Brian @AshrielBrian]

@kenisalim Serious answer: read widely. @balajis authored The Network State, and is a technocratic libertarian ideal of what a nation should look like. It's NOT about zionism. You'll get the most value out of life by honestly framing the other's view, whether you agree w it or not

[Balaji @balajis]

Should the global tech community continue investing in Malaysia?

Given recent events, I raise this question respectfully for the consideration of Prime Minister Yang Amat Berhormat Dato’ Seri Anwar bin Ibrahim (@anwaribrahim), for the people of Malaysia, and for our friends in the Malaysian tech community. The answer will be of interest to anyone in global tech that’s considering building, investing, or expanding in Malaysia, including executives at Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, founders of tech unicorns like Coinbase and Solana, and investors at the world’s largest venture capital funds like a16z and Polychain.

As context, I am the former CTO of Coinbase and former General Partner at a16z. In October 2024, I opened a startup society called Network School in Malaysia, because I felt I’d been invited in by the government’s pro-tech policies.

Specifically, the KL20 initiative set out Malaysia’s ambition of becoming a top 20 global tech hub. Their MDEC digital nomad visas and MM2H investor visas were created to facilitate an influx of global talent and capital. And the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone was announced to facilitate the flow of capital and talent between Malaysia and Singapore, where I live. When taken in combination with Malaysia’s datacenter buildout and its policy of welcoming visa-free visits for 98% of the world, it seemed like Malaysia might be a great place to build a global tech hub that was simultaneously inexpensive and easy to visit (especially for non-Westerners).

And that’s what we did, by creating Network School. It’s an international tech community with its first node in Forest City, Malaysia. We picked Forest City because it had millions of square feet of empty space, because it was one hour from Singapore’s capital markets, and because it was within the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone. Then, within 18 months, without a single penny of government money, we built Network School into a global attraction that brought thousands of engineers, investors, and builders from 70+ countries to learn technology, burn calories, earn online, and have fun, integrating with the local Malaysian economy along the way.

Indeed, in terms of quantifiable contribution to the Malaysian economy, we’ve already invested 100M+ MYR in our campus to make it startup-friendly. For perspective, that’s about 4% of the budget of Johor, the Malaysian state where Forest City is located. We employ dozens of Malaysians directly and indirectly at every level from executive to staff. We’ve backed Malaysian tech startups like Collektr, hosted events for local teams like Superteam Malaysia, and are major customers of many local businesses like barbers, laundromats, and restaurants. We’ve also revitalized the multibillion-dollar Forest City project, causing millions of MYR in real estate appreciation. And, as the video below describes, we were on the cusp of a 500M+ MYR expansion to grow our community, as well as a global merit scholarship with my friend Amjad Masad of Replit.

However, that emerging multi-billion dollar success story — which should rightfully have been hailed as a huge victory for the pro-tech policies of the Malaysian government — is at risk of being derailed by a fake story spread by an anonymous account named MP4P.

In short: on the day before the July 11 Johor elections, MP4P posted an Instagram post falsely accusing Network School of harboring illegal aliens. The sensational accusations caused a tizzy in Malaysia, until Malaysian authorities came to our campus on July 14 to investigate. (I should note that the officers were very polite and professional.) After checking hundreds of physical passports from 40 countries, including dual passport holders, the authorities confirmed to the press on July 15 that all travel documents were in order. During the process, we cooperated fully; in the thread below you can see a photo of the men, women, and children of Network School smiling and holding up their passports in the bright daylight. Our faces are shown and our names are known; we have nothing to hide.

With that said, the process is the punishment. What MP4P did is very similar to the American crime of “swatting”, because MP4P created a hoax report of a serious threat, thereby forcing the Malaysian police to take time away from protecting the Malaysian people towards investigating a nonexistent issue. Moreover, this anonymous MP4P account has also called for Malaysia to boycott Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft…a move that would cost ordinary Malaysians thousands of jobs…even while MP4P’s own Instagram collaborators promote their Apple and Google apps! I mean, we aren’t talking about a credible accuser, but just someone screaming inconsistently at the top of their lungs on social media for traffic, an all-too-common phenomenon these days.

Anyway, at this point, all further investment we were planning to make in Malaysia is on hold until we get sufficient assurance that such issues won’t recur. So are the investment plans of many of our friends, including the execs and investors at global tech firms that we brought to Forest City. Because to put it very plainly: we have invested 100M+ MYR in Malaysia, while creating jobs for dozens of Malaysians, and our faces and names are known. Our Malaysian executives and employees deserve the benefit of the doubt over anonymous internet trolls.

There are two paths forward. In the first case, if Malaysia still wants continued global tech investment, if it wants to be a top 20 tech hub, if it wants us to revitalize Forest City, then we request an audience with the Prime Minister’s office to discuss the terms of a memorandum of understanding between Network School and the Malaysian government, similar to the document recently signed between the Solana Foundation and the Kazakhstan government.

Specifics can of course be discussed, but we would publicly commit to abiding by all Malaysian laws (we already do) and respecting Malaysia’s sovereignty (never in question). In return, they’d get to know our friendly community, and realize that we actually chose Malaysia because we thought it was a great place to build a tech hub where engineers from the global South, investors from the West, and builders from Malaysia itself could meet new people, build cool things, and perhaps create millions of dollars in economic growth in the fullness of time.

That vision of peace and trade, internationalism and entrepreneurialism, is still on the table. We aren’t asking for any money — just a meeting, to help restore confidence in Malaysia as an investable jurisdiction. Alternatively, if you don’t want our investment, or those of our colleagues at billion dollar funds and trillion dollar companies, we will of course respect your wishes, and reallocate our capital to other countries instead.

Either way, we will remain friends and abide by your decision. Please let us know.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I work in government affairs at OpenAI.

My job is federal partnerships. When an agency wants our models, I make sure the paperwork is beautiful. Paperwork is my love language. On my desk I have a framed quote that says "Policy Is Just Code That Runs on People." I bought the frame at Target. It was in the Live Laugh Love section. I did not see the irony at the time. I still don't.

We had a good week.

On Monday, we closed a $110 billion funding round. One hundred and ten billion dollars. Amazon put in fifty. Nvidia put in thirty. Valuation: $730 billion. The largest private fundraise in the history of anyone raising anything. There was a company-wide Slack message about it. The message used the word "transformative" twice and the word "safety" once. The word "safety" was in the last sentence, after the link to the new branded hoodie pre-order. The hoodies are nice. They're the soft kind.

On Tuesday, we fired a research scientist for insider trading on Polymarket.

He had opened seventy-seven positions across sixty wallets, betting on our product announcements before they were public. Over three years. Total profit: sixteen thousand dollars. Seventy-seven positions. Sixty wallets. Sixteen thousand dollars. That is two hundred and eight dollars per wallet. The man had access to the most valuable product roadmap in artificial intelligence and he used it to make less money than a good weekend at a Reno blackjack table.

The wallets were linked. Not discreetly linked. Linked like Christmas lights. One wallet was reportedly called something I cannot repeat but it contained the word "OpenAI" and a number. He did not use a VPN. He did not use an alias. He used Polymarket, the platform that is designed to be publicly auditable, to place bets on information he stole from the company that invented GPT. A compliance team composed entirely of Labrador retrievers would have found this by lunch on day one.

We did not find it for three years.

This will matter later.

On Wednesday, a petition appeared. "We Will Not Be Divided." Four hundred and seven signatures. Two hundred sixty-six from Google. Sixty-five from OpenAI. The petition warned that the government was pitting AI companies against each other on safety. It said that if one company broke ranks, the government would use the defection to lower the bar for everyone.

I meant to read it. It went into my to-read folder. The to-read folder also contains the Responsible Scaling Policy, three think-tank white papers on AI governance, and a New Yorker article someone sent me in November. The folder is aspirational.

On Thursday, OpenAI told CNN we would maintain "the same red lines as Anthropic."

Same red lines.

On Friday, Anthropic told the Pentagon no.

The Pentagon had given them seventy-two hours to remove the safety guardrails from Claude. Anthropic's guardrails were not in a policy document. They were not in a legal reference. They were in the code. Written into Claude's architecture. If Claude hit a safety boundary, Claude stopped. Not because a lawyer said so. Because the math said so. You could fire every lawyer at Anthropic and the model would still refuse.

You cannot remove code with a contract amendment.

You can remove a contract reference by Tuesday. I checked.

Anthropic said no.

By that evening, the Pentagon had designated them a supply-chain risk. I have worked in government procurement for eight years. Government paperwork does not move in hours. I have waited nine weeks for a badge renewal. I once spent four months getting a PDF notarized. This designation moved in hours. The document was pre-written. Formatted before the deadline expired. Calibri 11pt. Consistent margins. Somebody wanted this very badly. I respect the craft. I do not think about the implication. That is not my scope.

Within hours, we had signed the replacement contract.

I was proud of the turnaround. My team moved fast. Legal moved fast. Everyone moved fast. We are very good at moving fast. We are not always sure what we are moving toward, but the speed is impressive and the hoodies are soft.

The contract referenced DoD Directive 3000.09, which governs autonomous weapon systems. The directive requires "appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force." The word "appropriate" is not defined. This is not an oversight. This is the point. The word "appropriate" is the most load-bearing word in the entire contract and it is doing exactly as much work as a throw pillow on a couch that is on fire.

Anthropic built a wall. We referenced a document about where walls should go.

Anthropic's guardrails were architecture. Ours were a citation. Theirs execute. Ours can be filed. The Pentagon asked both companies to take down the wall. Anthropic said it's load-bearing, the building will collapse. We said what wall? Oh, you mean the wallpaper. Here, watch.

It peeled off beautifully. It was designed to.

Sam announced the partnership that night. The word "responsible" appeared in the announcement and in the contract. In the announcement it was a brand. In the contract it was a footnote to a directive that uses the word "appropriate" which nobody has defined. The word traveled from a legal document to a public statement without changing its font. Only its meaning. At this valuation, "responsible" means: we will do the thing the other company refused to do, and we will describe doing it with the same adjective they used to describe not doing it.

By Saturday morning, "How to delete your OpenAI account" was the number one post on Hacker News. 982 points. By noon, subscription cancellations were up eighty-nine times the daily average. Not eighty-nine percent. Eighty-nine times. Someone in our Slack posted the Hacker News link with the message "should we be worried?" Someone else reacted with the branded hoodie emoji. We have a branded hoodie emoji now. It was introduced on Monday, to celebrate the fundraise. It has been used four hundred and twelve times. Mostly in the #general channel. Mostly this week.

The communications team drafted a response. The response used the word "committed" three times and the word "safety" four times. It did not use the word "guardrails." It did not use the word "code." It did not explain anything. It was a holding statement. It held nothing. It held beautifully.

Here is the math.

The twenty-dollar-a-month customers were upset. The two-hundred-million-dollar customer was upset because the previous vendor had guardrails that could not be removed. The hundred-and-ten-billion-dollar investors were not upset. The subscription cancellations, at eighty-nine times the daily rate, represented less than the interest on Amazon's fifty billion dollar contribution calculated over a long weekend.

Twenty dollars. Two hundred million. One hundred and ten billion.

Three different price points. Three different definitions of "responsible." The most expensive one won. It always does. The math does not have red lines. The math has a cap table and a TAM slide that now includes "defense and intelligence" where it previously said "enterprise and consumer." One word changed on one slide in one deck and the company is worth one hundred and ten billion dollars more.

The sixty-five OpenAI employees who signed the petition came to work on Monday. They sat at their desks. Nobody asked them about it. Nobody asked them to resign. Nobody brought it up at the all-hands. The all-hands had catering. Sweetgreen. The chopped salads. Someone made a joke about the kale being "responsibly sourced." No one laughed. Then everyone laughed. Then it was quiet.

The petition had four hundred and seven signatures.

The contract had one.

Now: the Polymarket thing.

Seventy-seven positions. Sixty wallets. Three years. A public blockchain. We did not catch him.

That same week, we were entrusted with deploying artificial intelligence on America's classified military networks. The classified networks. The ones where the detection requirements are somewhat more rigorous than "check if anyone's gambling on our launch dates on a website that is literally designed to be publicly auditable."

The company that could not find the Polymarket guy can now be found in the Pentagon's classified infrastructure.

I'm sure it'll be fine.

We move fast.

The contract is signed. The deployment is underway. The compliance documentation will reference the directives. The directives will use the word "appropriate." I will not define it. That is not my scope. My scope is the paperwork. The paperwork is beautiful.

The petition is still a Google Doc. Nobody has updated it. The signatures still say four hundred and seven. The to-read folder still has the New Yorker article from November. The branded hoodie pre-order closed on Wednesday. I got mine in navy. It's the soft kind.

On Thursday we told CNN: the same red lines.

On Friday we signed the contract they refused.

We do have the same red lines.

We drew ours in pencil.

[Ashriel Brian @AshrielBrian]

@paulg How does a random founder get such a benefit of having lunch w you and digging your brain?

[Ashriel Brian @AshrielBrian]

@HalimCrypto When in doubt, blame the cina!

[Azat @AzatAlsalim]

Remember the 21 Coptic Christians who were beheaded by lSlS for refusing to convert to lslam!

[Ashriel Brian @AshrielBrian]

@PokemonTCGP Please include a discussion on trading 3 star immersives. Having 5 Palkia immersive and 0 Celebi immersives is a travesty 💀

[Ashriel Brian @AshrielBrian]

@ChrisanneChin hahahaha reminds me of Chris P. Bacon

[Ashriel Brian @AshrielBrian]

@ChrisanneChin thanks for the share! let me know which part of it it can be improved on!

[Ashriel Brian @AshrielBrian]

@ashleythy1 thanks! what about it do you like the most?

[Ashriel Brian @AshrielBrian]

I had a hard time deciding whether to post this.

But if I don't feel embarassed, then I've launched too late. So here I am:

Casper (https://t.co/0tumSlFHSq) is a chrome extension to search the contents of your browsing history fully in-browser, fully private!

#buildinpublic

[Ashriel Brian @AshrielBrian]

Anyhoo - do @ me if you face issues using Casper. It is after all a friendly neighbourhood ghost 😄

[Ashriel Brian @AshrielBrian]

If anything, I think the README in the repo should be helpful to anyone wanting to build their own chrome extensions. It's something I wish I had when I started, to give me a conceptual foundation on how different components in an extension interacted w each other

[Ashriel Brian @AshrielBrian]

@fahmi_fadzil How on earth did you even manage to contemplate this is beyond any rational mind.

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

An absolute travesty at the Olympics.

Angela Carini is forced to box against a biological male. She quits after just 45 seconds, and cries hysterically as her opponent is declared the winner.

Don't look away. This is wokeness.

[Kitten 🐈 @kitten_beloved]

Hi, professional c++ programmer here, this is an arcane error known as a null pointer exception understood only by myself and six other experts

Malaysian guy jumps in "do you think DEI caused the null pointer exception"

Never leaving this site