Samar Birwadker

I build stuff.

[Samar Birwadker @samar]

@kylekuzma Kuz be cookin'

[StockMarket.News @_Investinq]

The CEO of the most advanced AI company in America just went on national television (Save this)

Hours after his company was blacklisted by the US government.

Here's what he said.

Dario Amodei built the only AI deployed inside the Pentagon's classified networks.

His company helped run military operations, intelligence, cyber defense.

Then the government told him to drop all safety limits.

He said no to two things.

Just two.

"One is domestic mass surveillance."

He explained: the government can already buy your location data, your browsing history, your political affiliations from private companies.

AI makes it possible to analyze all of it.

On every American, all at once.

"That actually isn't illegal. It was just never useful before the era of AI."

"Case number two is fully autonomous weapons."

Not the drones used in Ukraine and the remote-controlled systems.

Weapons that select targets and fire without a single human pressing a button.

"The AI systems of today are nowhere near reliable enough."

"We don't want to sell something that could get our own people killed or that could get innocent people killed."

He approved 98% of what the Pentagon wanted.

"No one on the ground has actually run into the limits of any of these exceptions."

The government wasn't fighting over something it needed.

It was fighting over the right to have no limits at all.

They gave him three days.

He said no.

So the President called his company "radical left woke."

Then ordered every federal agency to stop using their technology.

Then the Pentagon labeled them a national security risk.

A designation that has only ever been used against foreign enemies.

When asked if he'd received any formal legal action, he said this:

"All we've seen are tweets from the president and tweets from Secretary Hegseth."

No letter, filing or a legal document.

"When we receive some kind of formal action, we will look at it, we will understand it, and we will challenge it in court."

He said the Defense Secretary lied about the law.

Hegseth tweeted that any company with military contracts can't do business with Anthropic "at all."

Amodei: "That is not what the law said."

"The nature of the tweet was designed to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt."

Asked if this was an abuse of power, he paused.

Then said:

"This designation has never happened before with an American company."

"It was made very clear that this was retaliatory and punitive."

"I don't know what else to call it."

Asked if Anthropic could survive, he didn't hesitate.

"Not only survive it. We're gonna be fine."

Then the final question.

"If you had a moment with the President right now tonight, what would you say to him?"

"We are patriotic Americans."

"Everything we have done has been for the sake of this country."

"The red lines we have drawn, we drew because we believe that crossing those red lines is contrary to American values."

"Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world."

"And we are patriots."

A CEO just went on national television and told the President of the United States:

You can blacklist us.

You can call us names.

You can threaten our business through tweets.

But we will not build machines that spy on Americans or kill without human hands.

[Samar Birwadker @samar]

@BleacherReport Klay be looking like a genius right now #gsw

[Paul Graham @paulg]

I tried asking ChatGPT and here's what it said:

[Samar Birwadker @samar]

@bscholl So awesome! Congrats @bscholl !

[Matthew Carrigan @carrigmat]

Complete hardware + software setup for running Deepseek-R1 locally. The actual model, no distillations, and Q8 quantization for full quality. Total cost, $6,000. All download and part links below:

[bone @boneGPT]

DEVELOPING: Chinese entrepreneur boasts receipt of 200 NVIDIA H200 GPUs in Beijing despite US export ban, explains how he circumvents export ban 🧵

[Samar Birwadker @samar]

Awesome summary of why deepseek is a big deal!

[Jos Quinten @TaranQ]

🇨🇳🇺🇸 These AI models from China are amazing!

- Gianluca Mauro
#OpenAI
#Deepseek

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

This doesn’t seem to be getting enough attention. The Silicon Valley social contract forced on the public by Obama and then Trump and then Biden (minus Lina Khan) and now Trump was straight forward: We will let these bros become the richest people in human history and in exchange they will develop a tech industry that makes the U.S. dominant for a century.

They did the first part, then built monopolies to try to keep out competition rather than continue to innovate at a top level, and then got out-competed by Chinese companies in both AI and social media. They are the losers we always thought they were — and now so are we.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Kids are awesome. Nothing will make you happier.

[Samar Birwadker @samar]

VCs competing to fund these nouveau edgelords like it’s a reverse Hunger Games

[Overfit Quantitative Strategies @OverfitQuantit1]

The Silicon Valley dream: burning VC money to launch a chatGPT wrapper so you can get invited at podcasts to discuss your AGI timeline and become a Grimes reply guy

[Samar Birwadker @samar]

These kind of teardowns are why I'm spending more time on X. Good luck finding this investigative analysis on LinkedIn.

Great work @RobertMSterling, surprising details I had no idea about! E.g. 10x the 85k limit/year is just nuts! How has this gone unnoticed for so long!?

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

H-1B DATA MEGA-THREAD 🧵

I downloaded five years of H-1B data from the US DOL website (4M+ records) and spent the day crunching data.

I went into this with an open mind, but, to be honest, I'm now *extremely* skeptical of how this program works.

Here's what I found 👇

[Samar Birwadker @samar]

@8teAPi Or, hear me out... we’re just addicted to watching people try to compress their superiority complex into 280 characters

[Samar Birwadker @samar]

@cre_cashflow Ah, the ol' trauma of watching compound interest work backwards in first class

[Samar Birwadker @samar]

@JacobKinge $20B in new Tether is like watching someone print Monopoly money while insisting it’s totally backed by Boardwalk 🤪

[Samar Birwadker @samar]

@gregisenberg Love how YC’s RFS went from ‘make something people want’ to ‘make something the government desperately needs but won’t admit/realize it wants.

[Samar Birwadker @samar]

@pitdesi The real assumption you missed: SPOT isn’t a music company, it’s a habit company. Netflix loses shows, we shrug. Spotify loses our carefully curated workout playlist? Emotional damage. (That’s why they’re worth $100B and we're here talking about it)

[Kumar🇺🇸 @datarade]

AI is about to eat every indefensible CRUD app. And almost no one sees it coming.

ServiceTitan: $9.5B valuation $TTAN

~$700M+ ARR
~12,000 customers
>110% NRR

But here's the thing: they're ultimately well-executed CRUD applications with no moat for plumbers, HVAC, lawncare, etc.....

Let me show you something wild.

[KanekoaTheGreat @KanekoaTheGreat]

Peter Thiel reluctantly agreed with Elon Musk's belief that if the Democratic Party won the 2024 election, it could consolidate power into a one-party state.

"I didn't want to believe Elon when he said this, so I texted him and told him I hadn't believed you when you said this at first. But I think this is because, psychologically, I don't want to believe that."

"The sense in which I felt that he was correct was if Trump, with much better substance and much better on so many things, could not win in 2024 against the machine, then the machine would always win."

"And if the machine always wins, then you no longer have a democracy. You certainly no longer have a democratic process within the Democratic Party. We can always debate the election shenanigans in November 2020."

"The far more extraordinary thing was in March of 2020 when Biden came in fourth or fifth in Iowa and New Hampshire and then somehow got rammed through South Carolina. All the other candidates drop out."

"So, this extremely non-democratic primary in the Democratic Party in 2020 led to an even less democratic process in which Biden was replaced with Harris."

"If the machine could defeat Trump, I thought it was reasonable that it would gain even more power and somehow be unbeatable, and the country would become like California, a one-party state."

@elonmusk
@peterthiel