Avinash

Software Developer/Entrepreneur/Investor. Blockchain enthusiast. Dad + Husband. Student of business, finance and tech. Building

[Gavin Baker @GavinSBaker]

Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday.

What I should have said:

There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this.

On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way.

On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project.

On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns.

On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians.

On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers.

On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries.

On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land.

Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged.

When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America.

I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw.

Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.

[Avinash @akondagunta]

@Megatron_ron WTF...

[Xiaoyin Qu @quxiaoyin]

If U.S bans Kimi, it will actually benefit Kimi:
1. They aren't making much money in the U.S and banning it has no impact on its business.
2. U.S sanctions prove Kimi is a frontier AI leader worldwide, which makes China proud and will help boost their upcoming IPO in China.
3. They will continue to distill Anthropic, use B300s, and launch better models.
Instead, it's a sanction against every American consumer and enterprise.
- It increases their AI OpEx spend,
- slow down their agentic adoptions, and
- fails to protect their data and AI sovereignty.

This is the least MAGA policy ever.

[calle @callebtc]

I have a report full of security issues of a software I'm working on.

Codex won't fix them because of Cyber guardrails
Fable won't fix them because of Cyber guardrails

Kimi K3 fixed them all. No restrictions, just gets the job done.

This will end badly for OpenAI & Anthropic.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

https://t.co/xv6csf1SbV

[Avinash @akondagunta]

@quxiaoyin Who's building safety and security guardrails for open source / self-hosted models?

[Sarah Tavel @sarahtavel]

For the past 25 years, application software startups have had a singular focus: increasing company and employee productivity. AI enables a paradigm shift: Rather than sell software to improve an end-user's productivity, consider what it would look like to sell *the work itself*.

When you sell the work, instead of selling a 15% productivity improvement, you sell a 95% improvement. Incumbents are not only advantaged in selling software, they are stuck there. You don't need to play their game. Post: https://t.co/29BkdGIMC3

[Avinash @akondagunta]

@seandsweeney Looks really inviting and nice!

[Avinash @akondagunta]

@markpinc @markpinc I am a dad building https://t.co/o9LRvO22Ee to help parents navigate their kids learning journey through play! Would love to get your thoughts/feedback (DMs open)

[Ben Nowack ☀️🌎🪞 @bennbuilds]

Built a space mirror, launching soon

[David Zagaynov @DavidZagaynov]

We built the world's largest cargo drone @poseidonaero

[Avinash @akondagunta]

@paraschopra Hmm...great question, quantum computing based approach instead of incremental progress building on von neumann architecture? Or maybe the solution is in the combination of breakthroughs in algorithms, material science and other areas

[Fareed Zakaria @FareedZakaria]

California is one of the most dynamic places on the planet.

But it is a case study in how a rich society can spend more and more while producing less and less of what its ordinary citizens need.

My take:

[Avinash @akondagunta]

@Sneketoshi @objktcom What an amazing story!!!

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

This is biblical.

A woman in her eighties. Ten years into Alzheimer's. Hadn't spoken a full sentence in five years.

Takes one, 5 gram dose of psilocybin.

She slept 19 hours and woke up and spoke for hours about her life, recognized family and held real conversations. She regained bladder control after five years, walked on her own. and dressed herself. Gains held for weeks.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

this is just the most ridiculous AI application i've ever seen lol

a Peter Thiel-backed startup that makes AI collars for cows is now worth $2 billion

and the more I read about it the cooler it gets. here's how it works:

every cow wears a solar-powered collar that talks to a network of radio towers and an app on the farmer's phone

instead of building physical fences, the farmer draws the fence on a map in the app, and the collar keeps each cow inside that invisible line using GPS

when a cow drifts toward the edge, the collar plays a sound to steer her, and a gentle vibration tells her which way to go.

it's like how a car beeps as you back up toward a wall

the cows learn the cues in a few days

so now a rancher can move an entire herd to fresh grass by sliding the fence on a map, without driving out to open a single gate

and that same collar is reading each cow's body the whole time.

it takes five readings per second on every animal, so the AI can catch a cow that's sick, injured, ready to breed, or about to give birth before a person would ever notice walking the field

so it's basically like WHOOP for cows too lol

and they gave the AI behind it the perfect name: the Cowgorithm

it's been trained on more than 7 billion hours of real cow behavior, which is why Halter calls the data its real asset and moat.

they know what a normal cow looks like better than anyone, so they can flag the odd one out instantly

it's already on more than 1M cattle across New Zealand, Australia, and a bunch of US states.

California even used it on public land to graze cattle in patterns that clear dry brush and slow down wildfires

costs about $5 to $8 per cow per month

a job that used to mean barbed wire, gates, and driving the fields all day is now mostly 1 person on their phone

[Dami-Defi @DamiDefi]

Realising Apple went public at under $2 billion and 15 times revenue in 1980.

SpaceX wants you to buy at $2 trillion and 100 times revenue in 2026.

That is not getting in early. That is being the exit for venture capitalists who have held this equity for years at a fraction of what you are being asked to pay.

Almost none of the retail investors buying this IPO will read the 300 pages before the book closes on June 11.

That is your entire competitive advantage right there.

[Richard Hanania @RichardHanania]

India has sent 96 people to America who started billion dollar companies. No one else is even close.

There's only about 5 million Indians in America. Almost one in 50,000 of them is a unicorn founder!

What a holy, special, beautiful people.

I will always fight for them.

[a16z @a16z]

World Labs CEO Dr. Fei-Fei Li: "The world is not made of words."

"Language models have given machines an extraordinary command of concepts, vocabulary, and reasoning, but the physical world, virtual or real, runs on a different substrate."

"Where language models learn the statistical structure of text, world models learn the statistical structure of space and time: how light falls on a surface, how a garden looks from an angle no camera has captured, how objects respond to force and follow the laws of physics."

"Language gave machines a way to talk about that world. World models are how machines will finally come to understand, imagine, reason and interact with it."

Full piece: https://t.co/C9qOJg5wuc

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

1/5
I'm a cardiologist. I have spent twenty years watching cholesterol destroy arteries, trigger heart attacks, and kill people I care about.
Today, Eli Lilly presented data that may begin to end that era.
VERVE-102. A single infusion. One dose. It uses base editing to permanently turn off the PCSK9 gene in your liver.
Presented today at the European Atherosclerosis Society Congress:
88% reduction in PCSK9.
62% reduction in LDL cholesterol.
Sustained up to 18 months.
No treatment-related serious adverse events.
One infusion. Not daily pills you forget to take. Not monthly injections. One dose — and your cholesterol may stay low for the rest of your life.