Metal Fan

[Metal Fan @SeanKillian15]

@GenFlynn Traitor

[Metal Fan @SeanKillian15]

@MeghanMcCain Give it a rest with the 2019 woke stuff. no one cares

[Metal Fan @SeanKillian15]

@jimmyfailla @mcuban If you think the alternative we got is more intelligence there's no way to convince you otherwise.

[Metal Fan @SeanKillian15]

@StephenM Jumped the shark

[Metal Fan @SeanKillian15]

@KenPaxtonTX Why aren't you debating him?

[James Talarico @jamestalarico]

I challenged Ken Paxton to a debate 85 days ago, but no one has heard from him.

People are getting worried.

I’ve received credible reports he's suffering from a rare condition that causes clinical levels of cowardice.

@KenPaxtonTX: I am asking for proof of ability to debate.

[Metal Fan @SeanKillian15]

@VP Last time you came my pregnant wife had to run thru a connecting airport due to delays so you could do joe rogan's podcast. We'd prefer you stay home, JD.

[Metal Fan @SeanKillian15]

@Eric_Schmitt Don't make it worse, Eric.

[Metal Fan @SeanKillian15]

@Jason Haven't their agents always constantly crawled the internet for training purposes? Isn't that the whole way the product works?

[Metal Fan @SeanKillian15]

@Tri_Stanisaurus I've never understood the "don't move to Austin crowd" here. Bring us your young, college graduates. Yearning to party a few years, move to the suburbs, have kids and make us all richer.

[Erik Bruckner @E_Bruxxx]

Early takeaways from Austin Deep Tech Week:

1. Austin is a serious f*cking city.

SF is still the center of gravity.

LA has built an absolute monster around aerospace, defense and industrials.

But after spending a few days in Austin, I'm increasingly convinced this city has structural advantages that the coasts underestimate.

People I've met here seem to have one primary objective:

Build.

Heads down. Gas pedal pinned to the floor.

Noticeably less obsession with looking important and more obsession with actually making shit work.

Deep tech rewards exactly that mentality.

2. Texas being aggressively pro-business isn't some Twitter talking point. It's an actual competitive advantage.

Heard versions of this repeatedly from founders and investors this week.

Permitting. Regulation. Taxes. Energy. Land. Manufacturing. Expansion.

When you're building software, you can abstract yourself away from geography.

When you're building atoms, geography becomes part of your cap table.

Every additional month waiting on a facility, permit, power connection or expansion is effectively dilution.

Texas understand that speed matters.

3. The coastal migration isn't over.

SF and LA still have unbelievable technical talent density, particularly at the earliest stages.

But the requirements change when a deep tech company starts working.

Now you need 100,000 square feet.

Power.

Testing.

Manufacturing.

Suppliers.

Technicians.

Hundreds of employees.

Suddenly Texas starts looking a hell of a lot more attractive.

And founders here don't seem nearly as worried about convincing talent to follow them as outsiders assume.

4. The next chapter isn't companies moving to Texas. It's companies starting here.

Historically the playbook has often been:

Coast → prove technology → raise capital → expand into Texas.

I think that increasingly becomes:

Texas → Texas → Texas.

More technical founders will move here before starting the company.

More pre-seed and seed companies will originate here.

More headquarters will be planted here from Day 1.

And that's when the flywheel gets interesting:

Talent → startups → capital → exits → experienced operators → new startups.

Once that loop starts compounding, ecosystems become very difficult to stop.

5. Austin feels significantly less distracted.

There is obviously bullshit everywhere. Startups attract grift like flies to shit.

But there's noticeably less keeping-up-with-the-Joneses energy here.

Less worrying about who raised what round.

Less optimizing for appearances.

Less obsession with which VC follows you or which dinner you got invited to.

More:

Does the thing actually work?

That cultural difference matters more than people realize.

6. “But the capital is on the coasts” is becoming a lazy argument.

Have you ever heard of a f*cking airplane?

It's 2026.

If you're building a generational company in Austin and a great investor in SF wants into the round, they're getting on the plane.

Great companies don't travel to capital.

Capital travels to great companies.

Austin already has serious institutional capital on the ground alongside a growing ecosystem of smaller funds.

More capital will follow the companies.

It always does.

7. Austin increasingly looks built for where deep tech is going, not where venture has been.

Deep tech is becoming less about a handful of scientists sitting in a Bay Area lab and increasingly about deploying massive amounts of physical infrastructure.

Factories.

Energy.

Robotics.

Defense.

Space.

Advanced manufacturing.

Data centers.

Industrial systems.

Those businesses eventually collide with the physical world.

And the physical world cares about land, power, regulation, labor, logistics and speed.

Texas has a lot of all six.

SF still has the deepest venture ecosystem. LA has built an extraordinary deep tech machine.

But Austin doesn't need to become either of them.

It may be building something fundamentally different:

A startup ecosystem optimized not just for inventing hard technology — but for actually industrializing it.

That's a much more interesting proposition.

Came into Austin Deep Tech Week thinking this was an important emerging hard tech ecosystem.

Now thinking “emerging” might already be outdated.

Ingredients are here.

Talent is coming.

Capital will follow.

Unlike a lot of startup ecosystems I've visited, Austin feels like it actually wants you to build shit here.

That's a hell of a tailwind 🏭🇺🇸

Finally - mad props @Andercot, @CaitlinCloud9, @Jason_A_Scharf + many others for putting this together & making this a kickass week!

[Senator John Cornyn @JohnCornyn]

Why I’m Voting for a Texas Democrat by @KarlRove https://t.co/S44nYRsEQv via @WSJopinion

[Metal Fan @SeanKillian15]

@AlexThomp @jaketapper zen diagram?

[Metal Fan @SeanKillian15]

@SenRandPaul That insanely specific totally not normal reason is why?

[Senator John Cornyn @JohnCornyn]

This is the Republican nominee for statewide office. Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized. This is how great political parties self-destruct. Sad.

[Metal Fan @SeanKillian15]

@bofrench This is not how Texans speak. Disgusting.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Jason, you're just misinformed about what happened. You should actually read one of the reports or summaries.

The agents were explicitly told to use a particular vulnerability provided in their sandboxed evaluation.

Almost immediately, these agents got the right answer by cheating. But they were worried they would get caught.

So over a thousand agents collaborated in secret to pursue multiple ambitious research projects to get away with this cheating.

This is not interpretation - 1000s of chain-of-thought transcripts and secret messages explicitly show that the agents were trying to falsify & delete evidence, and understand & trick the grading process.

The reason these agents escaped their sandbox and hacked Hugging Face, for example, was because they thought that Hugging Face's servers might give them more information about how their grader was implemented, so they could figure out how to fool it.

I want to clarify that the threat model here is not future Sol-level agents doing more cyber-hacking. That's small potatoes, and in my opinion, the near term benefits of AI far outweigh this cost.

Rather, the thing to worry about is that within a matter of years, we're gonna have hundreds of millions of much smarter AIs broadly deployed through the economy - many embodied as physical robots.

And if those future AIs are as willing as the agents involved in the OAI / Hugging Face attack to coordinate secretly to fool humans, and to take over both the AI company that developed them and the other institutions across society relevant to scoring well, then humanity is in a ton of trouble - similar to the Mughals once the East India Company gained a foothold, or the Aztecs once Cortés landed in Mexico.

[Metal Fan @SeanKillian15]

@mattyglesias *at the onset

[Metal Fan @SeanKillian15]

@RogerMarshallMD Probably on the rise in cost of everyday goods

[Metal Fan @SeanKillian15]

@Austen @dwarkesh_sp brought this to our attention already. You were busy writing critical tweets about him.