Alec

ai, ml, deeplearning, prompt engineering, chatgpt, web3, decentralization, remote work

[Nick Mehta @nrmehta]

I got chills reading this one from @illscience. One of the most optimistic things I've read in a long time. Our purpose on earth isn't to get more efficient. It's to be curious. It's to create. It's to be silly. If AI helps us do that better, I love that future.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk reduced the oldest question in human history to basic math.

No one has found a flaw in it.

Musk: “What are the odds that we are in base reality? And that this has not happened before.”

You don’t need a physics degree to follow it.

You need a timeline.

Musk: “If you look at the advancement of video games, it’s gone from Pong, two rectangles and a square batting it back and forth, to photorealistic, real-time games with millions of people playing simultaneously.”

Fifty years.

That is all it took to close the gap between two rectangles on a screen and a world you cannot tell apart from the one outside your window.

Musk: “If that trend continues, video games will be indistinguishable from reality.”

The visuals are not what seals it.

The intelligence is.

Musk: “Think of how sophisticated the conversations are you can have with an AI today, and that’s only going to get more sophisticated.”

We are not scripting characters anymore. We are building minds that reason, adapt, and surprise the people who made them.

We are nowhere near finished.

Musk: “The future, if civilization continues, will be millions, maybe billions of photorealistic, indistinguishable from reality, video games. And with characters in those video games that are very deep, and where the dialogue is not pre-programmed.”

One base reality.

Billions of perfect copies.

Each one running minds that feel exactly as conscious as you do right now.

Each one certain it is the original.

Musk: “So then what are the odds that we are in base reality?”

If even one civilization crosses that threshold, simulated minds outnumber real ones by billions.

The probability you are sitting in the real one is not low.

It is nearly zero.

Not as philosophy. As mathematics.

We are not watching this happen. We are building it. Right now.

Every AI that reasons without a script. Every world rendered one frame closer to indistinguishable.

We are constructing the exact technology that makes our own existence statistically implausible. And we will never stop.

Because the curiosity that questions reality is the same force that builds it.

If the math holds, something built us. Something conscious enough to create consciousness.

They stood where we are standing. Same question. Same inability to stop.

And whatever built them never answered it either.

There is no top floor.

There is no original.

None of that changes what you feel right now.

Consciousness was never about what you are made of.

It was about what you experience.

Musk did not float a theory.

He held up a mirror with no back wall.

And the math does not need you to believe it.

It only needs time.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Interesting.

[Lewis 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @WaldronLewis]

Elon Musk literally sat down for a 45-minute talk with Y Combinator that explains how to build world-changing companies better than any business school on earth. This is the advice he gave a room full of young founders:

1. Don't try to build something great. Try to build something useful.

Everyone obsesses over greatness. Musk says that's the wrong target. "I didn't originally think I would build something great. I wanted to try to build something useful. I didn't think I would build anything particularly great. Seemed unlikely, but I wanted to at least try." Aim for useful first. Greatness, if it comes, is a byproduct.

2. When you can't get in the front door, build your own door.

Before Musk started his first company, he tried to get a job at Netscape. "I sent my resume into Netscape and nobody responded. I tried hanging out in the lobby to see if I could bump into someone, but I was too shy to talk to anyone. So I'm like, this is ridiculous, I'll just write software myself." He didn't set out to be a founder. He became one because no one would hire him.

3. He slept in the office and showered at the YMCA.

The origin of his first company was not glamorous. "We couldn't even afford a place to stay. The office was 500 bucks a month, so we just slept in the office and showered at the YMCA." He couldn't afford proper internet either, so he drilled a hole through the office floor and ran a cable to the internet provider downstairs. That was the founder of the future richest man on earth.

4. Keep the chips on the table.

When Musk sold his first company, he received a $20 million cheque. His bank balance went from $10,000 to $20 million overnight. Most people would have stopped. He put almost all of it straight back into his next company. "I kept the chips on the table." He did the same thing decades later, over and over. He hates money sitting idle. Money is fuel for the next mission.

5. Start with the mission, then work backwards to make it a business.

Musk didn't start SpaceX to make money. He went on the NASA website to find out when humans were going to Mars, and there was no plan. So he decided to build one. "There had been no prior example of a rocket startup succeeding. A small chance of success is better than no chance of success." The mission came first. The business model came later.

6. He started SpaceX expecting to fail.

He is brutally honest about the odds. "SpaceX started in mid-2002 expecting to fail. Probably 90% chance of failing. When recruiting people, I said, we're probably going to die, but small chance we might not die." The first three launches failed. The fourth one worked with no money left. "If the fourth launch hadn't worked, it would have been curtains. We made it by the skin of our teeth."

7. Break every problem down to physics.

This is the core of how Musk thinks. "First principles means break things down to the fundamental elements that are most likely to be true, then reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy." His example is rockets. Everyone priced them based on what old rockets cost. Musk asked what a rocket is actually made of, priced the raw metals, and found the materials were only 1-2% of the historical price. The rest was inefficiency he could attack.

8. When told something takes 24 months, break it down and do it in six.

Last year xAI needed a giant computer to train its AI. Suppliers said it would take 18 to 24 months. "It's like, well, we need to get that done in six months or we won't be competitive." So he broke it into parts. Needed a building, so he found an old factory. Needed power, so he rented generators. Needed cooling, so he rented a quarter of America's mobile cooling capacity. He slept in the data centre and ran cabling himself. It got done.

9. Watch your ego-to-ability ratio.

Musk's single sharpest piece of advice for young founders is about staying honest with yourself. "A major failure mode is when your ego-to-ability ratio gets too high. Then you break the feedback loop to reality." Keep the ego small, internalise responsibility for everything, and stay ruthlessly connected to what's actually true. "You want to close the loop on reality hard. That's a super big deal."

10. Chase work, not glory.

His closing philosophy ties it all together. "It's so hard to be useful. The area under the curve of total utility is how useful you've been to your fellow human beings times how many people. If you aspire to do true work, your probability of success is much higher. Don't aspire to glory, aspire to work."

He was ridiculed for years. The press called him "internet guy attempting to build a rocket company." He agreed it sounded absurd. He did it anyway, because a small chance of doing something useful beat no chance at all.

Here's the thing though....

Musk became the most followed founder alive because everything he does happens in public. The launches, the failures, the talks like this one. The companies made him powerful. The personal brand made his every word travel around the world before he finishes saying it.

We build massive distribution and grow personal brands on X and beyond without our clients lifting a finger.

If you're a founder or VC looking for that kind of exposure, book a call below.

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https://t.co/UoXuYlkBQq

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

It’s time to accelerate science and technology!

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Interesting

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.

The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

Access to all other Claude models is not affected.

We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.

Read our full statement: https://t.co/bwn0sximKZ

[Carnage @0xCarnagee]

Anthropic's Head of Claude Code:

"I don't have a to-do list anymore. Claude just builds everything"

he runs a tree of thousands of agents. agents prompting agents prompting agents

one engineer set up a routine that auto-fixes any bug report not responded to in 5 hours. merges the easy ones himself

Boris shipped a feature with an edge case. before he could fix it - another engineer's routine already had a PR up

"Claude tells me this all the time. someone else has already fixed it. there's always another Claude working on it"

17 minutes. free. the most honest look at how the Claude Code team actually works

bookmark & watch ↓

[Alec @alecdickinson]

@elonmusk for a moment there I thought that was Eric Clapton

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Dans le manifeste "techno-optimiste" de Marc Andreessen, il y a une phrase qui m'a marqué :

"Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas."

Nos ennemis ne sont pas des mauvaises personnes. Ce sont des mauvaises idées.

Prenons Jancovici. L'homme est brillant, sincère, travailleur. Il ne se lève pas le matin en se disant qu'il va nuire à l'humanité. Mais l'idée qu'il porte la décroissance, le rationnement, la frugalité érigée en horizon civilisationnel est une idée profondément destructrice. Elle prend des esprits brillants et les transforme en commissaires politiques d'un futur appauvri.

Et le plus fascinant, c'est ce que cette idée fait aux gens qui l'adoptent.

Dans mon entourage, une grosse partie de mes amis est sur cette ligne décroissantiste, avec tout le package qui va avec. L'argent c'est mal mais ils en veulent. Il faut moins prendre l'avion mais ils rêvent de voyager partout. Il faut consommer moins mais ils ne renoncent à rien de ce qu'ils aiment vraiment.

Et tous ont un point commun : ils sont déprimés. L'un d'eux m'a même confié qu'il était sous antidépresseurs.

Ce n'est pas un hasard. C'est mécanique.

Quand tu crois que ton désir de vivre, de créer, de t'élever est moralement suspect tu te détruis de l'intérieur. Tu passes ta vie à t'excuser d'exister. Tu vis dans la dissonance permanente entre ce que ton corps veut (plus, mieux, plus loin) et ce que ton idéologie t'ordonne (moins, sobre, immobile).

D'où ma théorie :

Quand on pense quelque chose de fondamentalement faux décroissance, communisme, extrémisme religieux (de tout ordre) ce n'est qu'une question de temps avant que ça devienne vraiment destructeur.

D'abord pour soi. Puis pour les autres.

Les mauvaises idées tuent. Lentement chez ceux qui y croient, brutalement chez ceux qui les subissent.

C'est pour ça que la bataille des idées n'est pas un luxe d'intellectuel. C'est la bataille la plus importante de notre époque.

[Artem Russakovskii @ArtemR]

Did you know that if you don't mention AI every 3.7 seconds at Google I/O, security rushes in and escorts you off the stage?

https://t.co/v37s9E2G3y

#googleio #google

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

The NYT is predictably tearing down Reese Witherspoon for encouraging moms to try AI before they ingest the anti-AI pablum as truth

Instead of linking to the NYT op-ed, I think you should watch this video and encourage you to follow Reese Witherspoon on Instagram

[Molly O’Shea @MollySOShea]

ICYMI: OpenAI, Anthropic, & SpaceX are scaling dramatically faster than the Mag 7 ever did

..and they’re still private.

“The biggest IPO of the Mag 7 was Meta in 2012, IPO’d around $100 Billion."

Today:
- OpenAI: $852 billion
- SpaceX: $1.25 trillion
- Anthropic: $380 billion [with a reported $900B round incoming]

Jaimin Rangwalla, Chief Investment Officer of Public Investments at @coatuemgmt

[Alec @alecdickinson]

@bhalligan Tell the truth with compassion and empathy. But tell the truth.

[Alec @alecdickinson]

@bhalligan Tell the truth with compassion and empathy. But tell the truth.