Austen Allred

CEO @GauntletAI: Free AI training + high-paying jobs for the smartest engineers. Will tweet as I wish and suffer the consequences. Accelerando: @kellyclaudeai

[Austen Allred @Austen]

For the number of times I’ve seen the claim on X about, “Then these companies sign a bunch of bogus deals with their batchmates so they can all rotate money around and show fake revenue” I’ve literally never seen it happen

[Jessy Huang @goodhartproof]

so i have been in the sf tech scene for a couple of months now, and i learned the games that ppl play

1. land a $3M lab order in 2 weeks, *26 = ~$80m as the annual revenue
2. schedule all orders to be signed in the same month, and multiply the best month by 12
3. sign $5M LOIs with friend's companies and batchmates. they sign one back (also happens at scale with large labs/compute)
4. buy github stars at 6 cents each

the last company that swapped invoices with a partner reported $220M - and it's bankrupt now

sad that it's a whole gresham's law game right now and if you dont play you just get downvoted

[Austen Allred @Austen]

My new favorite Grok @bot template:

It sweeps my email, texts, meeting notes, and Slack looking for commitments I’ve made and missed or other asks that are waiting on me.

It ranks them according to how much damage is happening and offers to help fix.

https://t.co/9WGNjsPcYn

[Austen Allred @Austen]

Hmmmm

[Austen Allred @Austen]

I just had an interaction with what I’m 75% sure was an AI voice agent.

The timing of her phrasing was just a little funny, but what really tipped me off were things I _think_ were put in there to make it seem more human.

Like an awkward semi-throat clear and “excuse me.”

[Austen Allred @Austen]

@kylekane I mean I’ve been using Grokbot and x money but I didn’t think I’d get paid for doing that

[Austen Allred @Austen]

See, I _did_ need to buy the $10,000 MacBook

[Chubby♨️ @kimmonismus]

Holy shit: Kimi k3.1 pro is on par or even outperforms Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 astra on key benchmarks!!

They just announced K3.1 Pro, a 2.8T-parameter multimodal model with a 1M-token context window that it claims rivals leading proprietary models in coding and agent tasks, with open weights promised by November 4.

China is back!!

[Austen Allred @Austen]

@leononrails I vaguely remember

[Austen Allred @Austen]

Codex browser usage is getting really good really fast

[Austen Allred @Austen]

Well if you had never built or shipped anything or tried to do anything consequential ever at all we wouldn’t be having these security problems, now would we?

[Austen Allred @Austen]

Read a book

[Dr. Abdul El-Sayed @AbdulElSayed]

GM just announced the biggest stock buyback in automotive industry history.

Instead of investing in their workers or new product lines, GM executives are robbing from the future to pay themselves and their shareholders today.

Stock buybacks should be illegal.

[Alexander Whedon @alex_whedon]

Today we're introducing the smartest, most capable version of our enterprise-ready decision model: SubQ Snap 1.1.

Snap is tied for #1 on the Artificial Analysis Decision Index and has made big gains on agentic tasks, outperforming Jev by +7.2 points across 16 leading enterprise benchmarks.

All while maintaining 384k tokens of context, in a single pass, as the only model with constant compute per token.

- Powered by Subquadratic Sparse Attention.

- Tied for #1 on the @ArtificialAnlys Decision Index.

- 96.2 on When2Call, up from 75.2, and up 6 points on @huggingface 5 Tools & Automation benchmarks. It knows when to call a tool, when to ask, and when to decline.

- 81% fewer confident errors on questions it can't answer.

- $0.04 per 1M input tokens. No charge for output.

Go to https://t.co/v454Mk1Lxd for access, and 100M free tokens.

[Eric Rea @ericwilliamrea]

We built a $150M ARR business twice.

The first time took 8 years. The second took 2.5.

Today, Podium crossed $150M in AI annual recurring revenue.

Three years ago, we already had a great software business. Well over $100M in revenue, tens of thousands of customers, and a product we'd spent nearly a decade building.

And we decided to start over.

The business was performing well. But we believed AI was going to fundamentally change the software industry and make much of traditional software obsolete.

As a founder, you pour your life into what you're building. An insane amount of time, sacrifice, and effort. The hard part is not getting too attached to it.

When we started building our first AI agents, we had to confront the possibility that much of what we'd built might not be that valuable in the future. That's a tough pill to swallow.

But we also realized those same 10 years had put us in a unique position to take advantage of what AI could do for our customers.

Instead of protecting what we'd spent a decade building, we decided to bet the future of the company on AI employees that actually do the work for our customers.

We massively underestimated what we'd signed up for.

We ended up building entirely new operating systems for the industries we serve, from the AI agents all the way down to the systems of record. Now customers run their entire businesses on Podium.

Reinventing our product wasn't even the hardest part. We had to reinvent how the entire company operated.

When you've been running a company for over a decade, the operational inertia is incredibly powerful. We had to rethink how we build products, how we sell, how we serve customers, and how we run the business.

We effectively started a second startup inside an already successful company. And we're still at the very beginning.

Today, we have 20,000 AI agents working for our customers. They've helped generate more than $13 billion in revenue for those businesses. And we're barely scratching the surface of what AI will be able to do for them.

And we've done all of this while becoming profitable and generating free cash flow. We're building Podium to be around for decades.

Huge credit to our team for having the guts to make this bet and the ability to actually pull it off. We still have a long way to go and tons of problems to solve, but it's so damn fun to be winning when the opportunity ahead is this big.

In the age of AI, you can either disrupt your own company or wait for somebody else to do it.

I'd rather do it ourselves.

[Austen Allred @Austen]

Guys come on bro it’s just one US customer ecosystem who cares

[eMudhra @eMudhra]

Global TLS Intermediate CA incident: We’ve updated our incident page with how it happened, who is affected (one US customer ecosystem), what’s not affected, and what we’re putting in place. We will publish the root cause once our investigation is complete.

👉https://t.co/Ykzuwh34j0

[Austen Allred @Austen]

Oh my goodness this has to be right.

Instead of generating a random 256-bit number they generated a random number between 0 and 256.

That’s how they got 4, 66, 155, 156, 230 and 237.

[flow in 🏴‍☠️ @flowirin]

@itsnebulalol They misread 256 bit as 0-256,
I bet

[Austen Allred @Austen]

What changed in the last 24 hours of AI for builders:

• Patch PHP now: AI found decade-old pre-auth RCEs
• LiteLLM 1.107.0 = malware. Rotate your keys
• Open tools to catch agent-patch regressions
• Claude Duet: proactive agent preview

👇 https://t.co/QltkKymBBp

[Austen Allred @Austen]

@HuevaToi It’s a joke

[Austen Allred @Austen]

Earlier today I detected a cybersecurity incident affecting my systems.

The incident has been contained and there is no evidence of misuse at this time.

That may because I was the cause of the incident and I tried to hack myself just to fit in.

[Austen Allred @Austen]

Next time make it 5

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

‼️ BREAKING: The private keys of 8 certificates from Indian certificate authority eMudhra were compromised, Mozilla says. Firefox blocked them within 3 hours.

Each key should be a 116-digit number, but one was just 4.

Anyone can guess them and forge HTTPS certs for any website.

[Austen Allred @Austen]

If you got hacked recently and haven’t told anyone yet now is the time to notify

[Austen Allred @Austen]

@jake51317 My car drives me to work every day

[Austen Allred @Austen]

I like that the discourse has moved to the point where we don’t even have to discuss *why* someone would be in jail if there were a different president.

We just assert confidently that they would be.

[Western Lensman @WesternLensman]

On the Bulwak podcast, Kara Swisher says Elon might already be in jail under Kamala Harris, and "he knows what's coming for him."

Another one to put in the "what Democrats plan to do if they take power" file:

"If Donald Trump loses the House and the Senate, I would worry. I'd be worried if I were him."

"So they're going to start investigating again. You think he's not on the list? He's at the top of that list."

"He has a very big sense of fate. And I think it's coming for him. And real hard."

They're all just saying this stuff out loud now. There are no secrets about what they want to do.

[Austen Allred @Austen]

@frozenmusic One guy is holding a microphone, they're both speaking into microphones.

The guy speaking Spanish is LDS.

[Austen Allred @Austen]

I like how as soon as I saw this video I knew with 100% certainty the guy holding the microphone is LDS (Mormon)

[Collin Rugg @CollinRugg]

College professor left completely stumped after @KaiSchwemmer started talking in Spanish after the professor said he welcomed mass migration.

Schwemmer: Would it be an issue if every city spoke a different language?

Professor: No.

Schwemmer: "Entonces sería bastante difícil si estuviéramos hablando, entendernos, porque nosotros no podemos entender lo que estamos diciendo y no podemos alcanzar tener respeto mutuo."

Brilliant.