Dave Silk

COO/CTO The Media Trust, Security, Cloud, Adtech, DevOps, Leadership, Coaching, Startups, stealth Entrepreneur.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Harvey is a great example of how American companies are building world-class specialized models: they took an open-source base (Kimi K3), post-trained it on legal data, and delivered state-of-the-art performance on legal benchmarks at a fraction of the cost of frontier models. Restrictions that kneecap open models would do nothing to stop Chinese labs from shipping the next Kimi. They would, however, cripple the ability of startups like Harvey to create high-performance, low-cost vertical models. Of course some of the closed labs would love this — it eliminates their competition.

[Dave Silk @DaveSilkinTech]

@WilliamShatner Just feels like the only appropriate response here is, “live long and prosper”, but you’re already doing that!

[Allie K. Miller @alliekmiller]

A positive Claude watermark doesn’t prove it’s entirely AI-generated and the lack of a watermark doesn’t prove it’s entirely human-generated.

The two best ways to tell if something is AI-generated:

1) Use AI so much that you notice the telltale signs (“quiet”, “here’s the truth:”)

2) Compare against hundreds of others responses to the same question (ex: when we have a job application out, we can tell that half of the responses are nearly identical in structure and content)

And unlike Pokémon, you’ll never catch ‘em all. And yes I wrote that myself.

[Dave Silk @DaveSilkinTech]

Crawlers are always trying to index content, and while there is value in announcing that "I am a bot, I mean no harm" when that action is happening, it does not play well with ads. Ads are delivered via a hyper specific targeting tech that can be misused. And so, security concerns dictate a review of all variations of the ad content being delivered to understand and ensure trust and safety goals are met. If a bad actor knows which ones are the bots checking for safety vs the humans they are hoping to reach (and potentially compromise) they know what to deliver to the human and what to deliver to the bot. Hence, the techniques the trust and safety tech uses to look like real browsers.

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

I’m convinced 90% of a founder's job is to just do 3 things:

- be delusional in your optimism
- push everyone to move faster
- make it crystal clear what to work on

[Dave Silk @DaveSilkinTech]

The panic on doing something, anything labeled “AI” or “agentic” is real. While the productivity and the capabilities are true accelerators, it’s imperative that a company takes a couple beats to think through the right model (pun intended) on how to transform into an AI first organization.

[Lazy IT Guy @lazy_IT_guy]

The absolute worst thing to happen to corporate IT in the last decade is the sudden, inescapable obsession with integrating AI into every single mundane business process.

Our CEO just returned from a 3-day executive retreat in Silicon Valley, completely intoxicated by buzzwords and demanding that my department implement a localized generative AI model by the end of the week.

Mind you, we are the IT department, not a frontier lab.

He called an emergency all-hands meeting to announce that we were transitioning to a bleeding-edge, machine-learning paradigm that'd "take us into the future"

He looked directly at me during the presentation, confidently stating that the IT department was already hard at work building an internal neural network to predict customer purchasing habits.

I had absolutely no intention of doing 40 hours of highly complex machine learning engineering just so the executive board could feel like they were innovating.

Instead, I spent exactly 20 minutes writing a basic landing page with a sleek, futuristic dark mode interface and a massive, glowing blue orb in the center of the screen.

I connected the search bar to an outdated Bash script from 2008 that essentially just functions as a random number generator attached to a database of pre-approved corporate buzzwords.

When the CEO came to my office for a private demonstration this morning, I handed him the keyboard and told him he was interfacing directly with our new quantum-heuristic prediction matrix.

He typed in a query asking the AI how we should optimize our Q3 marketing strategy in the midwestern demographic sector.

The script processed the input, spun the glowing blue orb for exactly 22 seconds to simulate heavy processing load, and spat out 1 heavily randomized sentence.

The screen declared that the company must leverage holistic paradigm shifts to maximize asynchronous bandwidth alignment.

The CEO literally gasped, pulled out his iPhone to take a picture of the monitor, and whispered that it was brilliant.

He sent an email to the entire company, branding it as our proprietary digital visionary and strictly forbidding anyone from questioning its output.

I'm currently being praised as a master architect of machine learning, and my department budget was just increased by $75k to accommodate server maintenance for the new system.

I plan to use that entire budget increase to install a commercial-grade espresso machine in the server room and hire a local contractor to soundproof the walls.

Corporate executives don't actually want advanced technological solutions.

They just want a shiny, glowing box that validates the meaningless business-slop they read on Twitter.

[Mars 🌿 @MarsHomestead]

I thought the best part of Trump Accounts was the $1,000 for newborns. It wasn’t.

I started out asking one simple question in an X post yesterday.

“Does it even make sense to open one for my 12-year-old?”

Now I’ve actually opened one for Pearl.

Because I finally realized this isn’t really about opening another account.

It’s about giving a child years to learn how money grows.

As I read through hundreds of comments, people kept pointing me toward the Invest America Act,
the S&P 500 index fund,
the SpaceX stock donation from Gwynne Shotwell,
Michael Dell’s pledge,
the QR code that lets family and friends contribute,
the possibility of a future Roth IRA conversion,
and even the conversations around Bitcoin and financial education.

Then it hit me.

Nobody ever taught me how to invest when I was Pearl’s age.

When I was growing up, investing meant reading the newspaper and calling a broker.

Today a 12-year-old can learn about an S&P 500 index fund, Bitcoin, compound growth, and long-term investing from a phone.

That feels like a much bigger opportunity than just opening another account.

If successful people want to help ordinary kids build a future by contributing money to their accounts,

I’m not going to tell them no. 😅

My goal isn’t to raise a millionaire.

My goal is much simpler.

I don’t want Pearl sitting where I am at 50, wondering if she started too late.

[Dave Silk @DaveSilkinTech]

Fly me to the moon!

[Palantir @PalantirTech]

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska

https://t.co/8igjazz1On

[Dave Silk @DaveSilkinTech]

@aakashgupta His persona is ever large and will live on well beyond his mortal time here with us, especially in the generations who have enjoyed his talent our whole lives. Dude is a legend. Keep smokin' 'em @WilliamShatner!

[Dave Silk @DaveSilkinTech]

@andrewchen @silksterweb has something interesting @andrewchen

[Silkster @silksterweb]

https://t.co/udxUYxZmOK

[Dave Silk @DaveSilkinTech]

This is close to home today. We lost out family pup, Roxie, this past Saturday. She absolutely raised her head to see me right before she passed. If you have a pup, throw her an extra treat today for Roxie!

[Michelle Labs @MolecularLab_]

A deeply emotional psychological breakdown of what dogs experience and feel in their final moments with their owner.

[Dave Silk @DaveSilkinTech]

The Virginia special election is important. The redistricting maps that will be used if this passes are beyond anything logical or fair. Virginia is one of the original thirteen states of the Union, and several of the founders who designed our free republic were good Virginians. I know people are spun up with concerns on both sides of the aisle, but we need to keep Virginia with a fair and just system to determine maps, and not allow any one party to decide how to draw. That only leads to disenfranchising a large segment of the Commonwealth. Let's not be Texas nor California. Let's keep Virginia as a model for all states.

[No Gerrymandering Virginia @nogerryva]

On April 21st, Virginians will face a simple choice: let politicians rig the maps and take away the power of your vote, or keep our elections honest. Vote NO on the Gerrymandering Amendment, and help spread the word before early voting begins March 6th.

[Dave Silk @DaveSilkinTech]

The continuations and responses to the @mattshumer_ piece are also good. Thank you Matt for starting the conversation and @joelcomm for this additional color and the level set on where we are going. I remain optimistic that these tools will give knowledge workers super powers and break down the “tech barrier” that kept non technical people from entering.

[Joel Comm @joelcomm]

https://t.co/1Cgztv7JZu

[Dave Silk @DaveSilkinTech]

I remain optimistic that AI will give humans “super powers” that will accelerate our progress. Fear is a human response to radical changes or perceived threats and it’s there to protect us. Seek to use AI and that change that natural fear to put good things into the world. My thesis remains that good things have a way of finding their way back to you.

[Connor Boyack 📚 @cboyack]

https://t.co/4SMw7birVU

[Dave Silk @DaveSilkinTech]

Amazing to see the leaps and bounds happening now in the models. AI will begin to advance civilization as we know it at rates that will challenge society’s ability to cope. Buckle up!

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

https://t.co/ivXRKXJvQg

[Carly @carlymersky]

Top 5 Super Bowl commercial

[Dan Go @CoachDanGo]

One of the greatest cheat codes in life is to never get offended. Train yourself to have a thick skin. Don't take things personally. Let others disagree with you. Being easily offended means you're easily manipulated. Want more peace? Avoid getting offended.

[Dan Go @CoachDanGo]

Squats help you get up from a chair.

Deadlifts help you lift heavy objects off the ground.

Cardio helps you run circles around your grandchildren.

Exercise is not for looking good naked. It's for living independently and avoiding the nursing home.