Jesse Proudman

Boats, Bikes, Music. CTO @AskVenice.

Lifelong Seattle Entrepreneur. Prev Co-Founder of Makara (sold to Betterment), Strix Leviathan, Bluebox (sold to IBM).

[Jesse Proudman @jesseproudman]

Jamie Pedersen and Bob Ferguson passed a 9.9% income tax. No vote. No say. Just take.

Jamie's made it clear he's coming for your wallet and we have until July 2 to get 400,000 signatures to put it on the ballot where YOU get to decide.

Order your signature sheets now: https://t.co/FxmxLmjJg8

Every sheet counts.

[Jesse Proudman @jesseproudman]

Pretty good use for what otherwise is a completely dead mall.

[SEATTLESUBMISSIONS @SEATTLESUBMISS]

Seattle Soccer House just brought
Pacific Place back to life (Video Credit @fwc26seattle)

[Jesse Proudman @jesseproudman]

They literally killed the messenger.

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Ferrari replaces its marketing chief following backlash to the Luce EV debut.

[Venice @AskVenice]

Seedance 2.0 4K is now live on Venice.

Generate high quality video at native 4K resolution, anonymously.

[Venice @AskVenice]

Frontier-level agentic capabilities and long-horizon coding, open source and fully private.

That's GLM 5.2, now on Venice.

Here's a full walkthrough to build a retro video game with GLM 5.2 and OpenCode, starting from a single prompt:

[Venice @AskVenice]

GLM 5.2 now also available in privacy mode TEE/E2EE

[Jesse Proudman @jesseproudman]

Give GLM 5.2 today a try today: https://t.co/LNLFcowpFL

[Jesse Proudman @jesseproudman]

GLM-5.2 from @Zai_org: #1 open-source on coding, 1M context and within 1% of Claude Opus 4.8.

Frontier intelligence without shipping your code or thoughts to be logged and stored forever.

This is what we built @AskVenice for. Privacy isn't bolted on, it's the architecture. Open weights make it real.

[Z.ai @Zai_org]

Introducing GLM-5.2: Frontier Intelligence, Open Weights

- Significant improvements in coding and agentic tasks
- Strong long-horizon capabilities with a 1M context window
- Two levels of reasoning effort: GLM-5.2 (max) pushes the limits, while GLM-5.2 (high) strikes a strong balance between performance and token efficiency
- MIT-licensed open weights
- Same API pricing as GLM-5.1

Tech Blog: https://t.co/LAsxUdN0JZ
Weights: https://t.co/g0A1C4UWx4
API: https://t.co/Kc3E22cbN7
Coding Plan: https://t.co/Nk8Y98HNhU
Chat: https://t.co/WCqWT0qCQb

[Venice @AskVenice]

GLM 5.2 is now live on Venice.

@Zai_org's frontier open-source model built to power agents and long-horizon agentic coding, with High and Max reasoning modes for the hardest problems.

Available fully private to Pro users.

[Jesse Proudman @jesseproudman]

Venice doesn't store your data. Full stop. There's nothing to share, nothing to train on. That's the architecture, not a policy.

On training our own models: open source has this covered. We run inference on GPUs we control, which is a better economic and privacy bet than burning capital to replicate what Zai, Minimax, Kimi, and DeepSeek already do well.

[Erik Voorhees @ErikVoorhees]

Venice LLM throughput (web+api) now over 85 billion tokens daily

[Jesse Proudman @jesseproudman]

The table-flip moment is real. Not just who builds the models. It's who controls the experience.

Centralized AI rents you intelligence and optimizes for lock-in. The rebel alliance builds for the user: private, portable, aligned.

The next era won't be rented. It'll be owned.

[Michael Mignano @mignano]

For the first time in ~3 years, it feels like the AI table has been flipped over. Yes, the labs and hyperscalers will have the highest chance of resetting it before everyone else, given their vast capital, frontier model, and compute advantages.

But there is now a window for a new ecosystem to emerge. A "rebel alliance," which is what we're calling it at @USV.

We are excited by open weight models, distributed compute, human-aligned agents, routing, open source harnesses, the orchestration layer, and a lot more.

Basically, anything that gives people and enterprises powerful intelligence while maintaining tight incentive alignment, we're into it.

[voided intern @voidedintern]

Elon Musk reveals that SpaceX was forced to strap a seal to a board and put headphones on it to test sonic boom sounds

"We were forced to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on the seal, and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed. This is an actual thing that happened. This is actually real. I have pictures."

Lex Fridman: "I would love to see this."

Elon Musk: "Yeah. I mean, sorry, there's a seal with headphones. Yes, it's a seal with headphones strapped to a board. And the amazing part is how calm the seal was."

Lex Fridman: "Because if I was a seal, I'd be like, this is the end. They're definitely going to eat me. How will the seal, when the seal goes back to other seal friends, how are they going to explain that?"

Elon Musk: "They're never going to believe them. It's sort of like getting kidnapped by aliens and getting an anal probe. You come back and say I swear to god I got kidnapped by aliens and your seal buddies are never going to believe him. And by the way we had to do it twice."

Lex Fridman: "They let him go twice? You had to catch the same seal?"

Elon Musk: "Well no, different seal."

[Jesse Proudman @jesseproudman]

If you tax jobs, you get fewer jobs.

Seattle's JumpStart tax was sold as a way to fund the city by hitting "big business." Five years later, downtown is hollowed out.

This isn't a bug. It's the design. When you penalize payroll, companies shrink footprints, hire remotely, or leave entirely. The tax base erodes, and the workers the city claimed to help are the first ones gone.

Econ 101: tax what you want less of. Seattle wanted less of... itself?

[GeekWire @geekwire]

Five years in, new analysis ties Seattle’s ‘JumpStart’ tax to downtown decline https://t.co/21KMUuK8Pq

[Jesse Proudman @jesseproudman]

Happy to clarify a few misconceptions here since you’ve got open questions.

Venice runs its own private inference infrastructure. We’ve got millions of dollars of GPUs either in flight or on balance sheet.

We verify on-chain but don't "rely" on NEAR for compute. And using open-weight models is standard practice across the industry.

Our architecture is open for review if you're ever curious.

I’m here for the debate since I’ve staked my entire professional career on doing this one the right way.

We’re here to build for the long term.

[Jesse Proudman @jesseproudman]

And all of this playing out at the same time open source models are rapidly converging on capability and quality.

It’s going to be a fascinating summer of Open Source AI.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Game theory from here is super interesting:

Original Mags (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta) now have a serious non-zero opportunity to tank the frontier labs.

Go to the government, kneecap the labs’ motion of putting the latest models out in the wild, become the trusted gatekeeper between the labs and the public at large (including internationally) by having the labs go through their clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) and implement strict KYC to seal the deal.

The frontier labs should have seen this coming years ago and implemented a robust KYC for just this moment. The fact they didn’t is kind of concerning.

Why did they not do it?

Best guess is because it would have changed the run-rate revenues (downward) which would have then changed funding dynamics - lower valuations, more dilution, less secondary.

A valuation reset may happen now anyways, except the labs may end up with less control and more restrictions at the end of it. At the same time, everyone is already clamoring about token prices of the old models from the labs anyways…

This couldn’t be a better setup for open source and neoclouds. Big question is can they meet the moment?

There are too few of them and their progress seems sporadic at best.

[Jesse Proudman @jesseproudman]

Quality slop.

[Rémi in 🌁 for AIEF @remilouf]

France can still win

[Andy @PositivFuturist]

Elon could literally solve homelessness tomorrow.

All he needs to do is sell his stake in the companies he created from the ground up, crashing the price and evaporating his wealth as well as the savings and pensions of workers globally.. handing the control of these companies over to short term profit interests and preventing any long term vision from being enacted..

THEN take whatever money that remains which will be nowhere near 1tn and give it to homeless charities who have never solved homelessness anywhere on earth because they’re financially incentivised to do the opposite.

Bam - homelessness solved.

The reason he doesn’t do any of this is because he’s evil.

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

If you just give us a few percent more of your money, we could finally fix the worsening education, homelessness and crime caused by our own terrible policies…

Please bro… just a few percent more.
One last tax. I swear bro. Then I’m done.

[Kane 謝凱堯 @kane]

Fun fact: @GavinNewsom has budgeted >300% more tax dollars for a nonexistent California rail system than SpaceX raised in private capital in its entire history as a private company.