Myrko Thum

Digital Marketing Account. Visit for my digital marketing agency and sales funnel coaching.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.

I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.

My takeaways:

1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.

2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.

3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)

4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.

5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million

6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.

7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.

8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.

9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.

10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.

11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.

12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.

13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.

14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....

15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.

16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.

17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.

It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.

But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.

We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.

What an incredible time to be building.

[Myrko Thum @Myrko]

@neatprompts This is one of these infographics that sound clever, but actually almost nobody talks about himself anymore. Everybody basically talks about that after world. Still people are extremely oversold on this.

What actually is true that a great product is very important nowadays.

[Julia McCoy @JuliaEMcCoy]

Let's be crystal clear:

• Most knowledge work will end in 36 months
• Mine and yours
• No exceptions

This isn't about IF AI replaces human work.
It's about WHEN.
And that when is now.

But here's what everyone misses:

This isn't a threat.
This is *liberation.*

Billions of people finally freed from the hamster wheel of jobs they hate.

While others fight to protect jobs that are already gone, I'm preparing for:
• Universal abundance
• Creative freedom
• Human sovereignty

Stop defending your chains.
Start embracing your liberation.

The age of trading life force for survival is ending.
The age of human potential is beginning. 🚀

[Julia McCoy @JuliaEMcCoy]

Made something in Claude today.

Q1 2025 isn't just another quarter. It's when everything changes.

Agent swarms turn on. 'Operator' from OpenAI. O3 rolled out. The automation cliff begins to drop, severely. Work as we know it transforms.

This isn't speculation. The systems are being deployed now.

I'm seeing it firsthand in the work we do at @FirstMoversAI. 🤯

[vitrupo @vitrupo]

Barack Obama says AI isn't just disrupting coders -- it’s disrupting meaning

“Already, AI can code better than 60–70% of programmers. A lot of that work is going to go away.”

When high-skill work is automated, it's not just the experts who need to adapt. Where does purpose come from in a world where machines can do what we do?

[Taelin @VictorTaelin]

My take from GPT-4.5 is that humanity has designed an AGI architecture - it is just prohibitively expensive. This model is not great, because training a $1 billion transformer only gives us a 12.5% improvement over a $100 million one, in a paradigm where, apparently, utility scales logarithmically with training cost...

That also means that a dense GPT-5 would be only ~11% better than GPT-4.5, for the cost of $10 billion. Similarly, to get a jump as big as the one we've seen from GPT-2 to GPT-4, we'd need to train a GPT-7 (*not* a GPT-6), and that would cost about $100 trillion, i.e., the world's entire GDP. So, that's the wall: we saturated humanity's capacity to scale. Or, to be more specific, we'd need 1,000,000x more compute than GPT-4, to see that sort of jump again.

Some argue that reasoning breaks this wall, but I feel like it only weakens it. If test-time compute laws hold, then, we'd need a GPT-4 scale model to "think for 100 million tokens per output token" to emulate a GPT-7. Except it would take days to produce each token. That's not viable. So, unless we make 1,000,000 clones of planet Earth, we could be stuck at roughly this capacity for several decades, and never see a jump as big as the one from GPT-2 to GPT-4 again.

Unless, of course, new ways to improve the efficiency of these systems are discovered. AGI has become an optimization problem. I, for one, suspect that GPTs are embarrassingly sub-optimal, and that these big matrix multiplications are merely emulating an underlying "learning algorithm" with a massive overhead.

Now, it isn't hard to see that, at this scale, a single attention (i.e., "neural dict") pass takes easily more than 1,000,000x the compute than a dict lookup. If that is true, it wouldn't be surprising if the first team to break the "matmul wall" would be able to train a model equivalent to GPT-4 for as little as $100. Of course, attention is doing much more than a dict lookup; but we don't know what it is doing that leads to reasoning capacities. And, once we figure that out, we may be able to have GPT-7 for the cost of GPT-4, and not for the world's entire GDP.

That said, this would require a complete redesign. Gradient descent and matmuls have to be replaced by something entirely different - and nobody knows what that would be. It took us decades to go from neural nets to transformers, so, it could take us a decade to figure this out. Or someone could be stuck with a rush of inspiration and it would happen overnight...

Anyway sorry if I got some napkin math wrong, and all the respect for OpenAI for this release. Publishing a result that isn't a complete success is great science. Now I just want to understand what transformers are emulating, and how we can do the same, for less. I have many ideas, and I have many experiments to run... I'll try not to disappear completely but excuse me if I do

[Sam Altman @sama]

GPT-4.5 is ready!

good news: it is the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person to me. i have had several moments where i've sat back in my chair and been astonished at getting actually good advice from an AI.

bad news: it is a giant, expensive model. we really wanted to launch it to plus and pro at the same time, but we've been growing a lot and are out of GPUs. we will add tens of thousands of GPUs next week and roll it out to the plus tier then. (hundreds of thousands coming soon, and i'm pretty sure y'all will use every one we can rack up.)

this isn't how we want to operate, but it's hard to perfectly predict growth surges that lead to GPU shortages.

a heads up: this isn’t a reasoning model and won’t crush benchmarks. it’s a different kind of intelligence and there’s a magic to it i haven’t felt before. really excited for people to try it!

[Myrko Thum @Myrko]

@Plinz How would you ever want to validate consciousness and make sure computers don’t deceive you with just a clever (but 100% unconscious) simulation of consciousness?

[Ed Krassenstein @EdKrassen]

Today Elon Musk held a Twitter Space to discuss xAI.

Here is a recap of what was discussed for those who missed it:

- The founding team was on hand to introduce themselves, and I must say it is an impressive team with an impressive background. They had very strong backgrounds with Deep Mind, OpenAI, Google, Tesla, etc.
- Elon Musk said the goal with xAI is to build a good AGI (artificial general intelligence) with the purpose of understanding the universe.
- Musk said that the safest way is to build an AGI that is ‘maximum curious’ and ‘truth curious,’ and to try and minimize the error between what you think is true and what is actually true.
- For truth-seeking super intelligence humanity is much more interesting than not humanity, so that’s the safest way to create one. Musk gave the example of how space and Mars is super interesting but it pales in comparison to how interesting humanity is.
- Musk said there is so much that we think we understand but we don’t in reality. There are a lot of unresolved questions. For example, there are many questions that remain about the nature of gravity, and why there is not massive evidence of aliens. He said he has seen no evidence of aliens whatsoever so far. He went further into the Fermi Paradox and how it's possible that other consciousness may not exist in our galaxy.
- If you ask today’s advanced AIs technical questions, you just get nonsense, so Musk believes we are really missing the mark by many orders of magnitude and that needs to get better.
- xAI will use heavy computing, but the amount of ‘brute force’ will become less as they become to understand the problem better.
- Co-Founder Greg Yang said that the mathematics they find at xAi could open up new perspectives to existing questions like the 'Theory of Everything.'
- Elon stated that you can't call anything AGI until the computer solves at least one fundamental question.
- He said that from his experience at Tesla, they have over complicated problems. “We are too dumb to realize how simple the answers really are," he said. "We will probably find this out with AGI as well. Once AGI is solved, we will look back and think, why did we think it would be so hard.”
- They are going to release more information on the first release of xAI in a couple more weeks.
- Elon Musk said that xAI is being built as competition to OpenAI, when asked by @krassenstein.
- The goal is to make xAI a useful tool for consumers and businesses and there is value in having multiple entities and competition. Elon said that competition makes companies honest, and he’s in favor of competition.
- Musk said every organization doing AI has illegally used Twitter’s data for training. Limits had to be put on Twitter because they were being scraped like crazy. Multiple entities were trying to scrape every tweet ever made in a span of days. xAI will use tweets as well for training.
- At some point you run out of human-created data. So eventually AI will have to generate its own content and self-access that content.
- Answering a question from @alx, Musk said there is a significant danger in training AI to be politically correct or training it not to say what it thinks is true, so at xAI they will let the AI say what it believes to be true, and Musk believes it will result in some criticism.
- Musk said it’s very dangerous to grow an AI and teach it to lie.
- Musk said he would accept a meeting with Kamala Harris if invited. He said he’s not sure if Harris is the best person to be the AI czar, but agrees we need regulatory oversight.
- Musk believes that China too will have AI regulation. He said the CCP doesn’t want to find themselves subservient to a digital super intelligence.
- Musk believes we will have a voltage transformer shortage in a year and electricity shortage in 2 years.
- xAI will work with Tesla in multiple ways and it will be of mutual benefit. Tesla’s self-driving capabilities will be enhanced because of xAI.
- According to Musk, the proper way to go about AI regulations is to start with insight. If a proposed rule is agreed upon by all or most parties then that rule should be adopted. It should not slow things down for a great amount of time. A little bit of slowing down is OK if it's for safety.
- Musk thinks that Ray Kurzweil's prediction of AGI by 2029 is pretty accurate, give or take a year.

I've love to hear everyone's thoughts on where you think xAI will go.

[Laver Cup @LaverCup]

All the Fedal feelings.

#LaverCup

[Jon Brosio @jonbrosio]

Master psychology and you can basically print money at will.

However, 99% of creators have no clue how or where to start.

After reading 9 books and studying 47 websites, I finally figured it out.

13 psychology truths to *ethically* market products that sell like crazy: 🧵👇

[Yishan @yishan]

I've now been asked multiple times for my take on Elon's offer for Twitter.

So fine, this is what I think about that. I will assume the takeover succeeds, and he takes Twitter private. (I have little knowledge/insight into how actual takeover battles work or play out)

(long 🧵)

[Kamala Harris @KamalaHarris]

While I may be the first, I won’t be the last.

[Joe Biden @JoeBiden]

Tonight, the whole world is watching America. I believe at our best America is a beacon for the globe.

And we lead not by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.

[Bill Clinton @BillClinton]

America has spoken and democracy has won. Now we have a President-Elect and Vice President-Elect who will serve all of us and bring us all together. Congratulations to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on your momentous victory!

[Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton]

The voters have spoken, and they have chosen @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris to be our next president and vice president.

It's a history-making ticket, a repudiation of Trump, and a new page for America.

Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen. Onward, together.

[Michael Moore @MMFlint]

A day of walking on clouds 9, 10 & 11. Regardless our differences on the liberal/left, take a day or two to celebrate, feel the wondrous sense of relief, experience a bit of joy that has been missing for too long. Absorb this one truth: When the moment came, the majority rose up.

[Michael Moore @MMFlint]

In Trump’s hometown.

[Arnold Schwarzenegger @Schwarzenegger]

Congratulations to President-elect @JoeBiden and Vice-President-elect @KamalaHarris. I say this after every election, and I’ll repeat it now because some people need to hear it more than ever: I’m rooting for you, because your success is the country’s success.

[Michelle Obama @MichelleObama]

Van, thank you for expressing the sorrow and relief that we all feel. My hope is that those who hoped for a different outcome will take a moment to empathize with the pain so many of us have felt over the past four years.