Avinash

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Ford rehires more than 300 veteran human engineers after it says AI failed to deliver the same level of expertise.

[Gabbar @GabbbarSingh]

Pls laugh

[Iceland Cricket @icelandcricket]

We can confirm that we don't wish to add Gautam Gambhir to our coaching staff. He clearly has talent, though. To take those Indian players and deliver those results in Ireland takes truly remarkable gifts.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Sam Altman just crashed two stock markets in 4 hours and exposed the AI bubble.

OpenAI is delaying its public listing until 2027 because Altman REFUSES to accept a single dollar under a $1 trillion valuation.

Asia opened to the news and the panic was instant:

SoftBank fell 13% in Tokyo, its worst day in months. The Nikkei dropped 4.5%. South Korea's KOSPI crashed 8% and the Korea Exchange triggered circuit breakers on the futures market, then halted trading entirely for 20 minutes when the bleeding refused to stop.

Hong Kong and Shanghai followed. US futures slid before market open.

One report triggered all of it in roughly four hours, erasing trillions in market cap across three continents.

The world's most valuable private company just admitted it doesn't believe public markets will pay its asking price so Altman's own bankers presented him with two options:

He could list this year at a lower valuation or he could wait until 2027 and try for the full trillion.

He picked the wait, and the New York Times quoted a source saying he called any haircut a "non-starter."

So basically: The man building "the most important technology in human history" doesn't think investors who actually have to mark their positions to market every day will hand him a trillion dollars right now.

The reason he's right to be scared is sitting on the SpaceX ticker.

Elon Musk's company IPO'd three weeks ago at a record $1.77 trillion valuation. The stock has since collapsed from $225 to $153, a 32% drop in seven trading days.

Musk lost his trillionaire status in the process and every other AI-adjacent name has been dragged down with it.

Altman watched that happen in real time and decided he'd rather burn another 18 months of compute cash than risk the same humiliation.

Meanwhile the financials underneath the trillion-dollar number look like this:

OpenAI did $13 billion in revenue last year on a $21 billion net loss. The company has committed roughly $600 billion in compute and hardware spending through 2030.

Revenue is climbing to $2 billion a month, but the spending climbs faster. They are losing money at a scale that would have ended any other company in tech history, and the only thing keeping the lights on is the next funding round at the next higher number.

The system Altman built depends on one thing: Each round has to price higher than the last, because that's what convinces the next round of investors to keep writing checks.

The moment public markets refuse to pay the markup, the whole structure starts pricing itself the other direction. Anthropic already overtook OpenAI's last private valuation at $965 billion in May. SpaceX is showing what happens when reality finally hits.

And SoftBank, the company that has bet $60 billion of borrowed money on OpenAI hitting that trillion-dollar mark, just had its worst session in weeks because the timer on Masayoshi Son's exit got pushed out another full year.

Son spent yesterday at the shareholder meeting calling SoftBank "the goose that lays golden eggs."

But the takeaway here is the TIMING:

Altman's advisors told him retail enthusiasm "may be limited given current market jitters." That is banker code for "the bubble is showing cracks and you'll get embarrassed if you try this right now."

The man who has been telling Congress, the press, and the public that AI will reshape civilization just looked at the order book and decided he doesn't want to find out what it's actually worth.

The real story here goes beyond the delay itself.

The most aggressive, hype-trained, valuation-obsessed CEO in modern technology just chose to wait rather than face a market that might say no.

When the loudest believer flinches, the rest of us should probably pay attention.

[Nate Friedman @NateFriedman97]

My documentary on the Islamification of Birmingham has been demonetized on YouTube after reaching 600,000 views. So here is the entire video on X.

In the video, I'm told that it's okay to strike your wife if she's disobeying you. I'm told that I would have to leave the grocery store and go to the city center in order to be able to find a white person. I'm told that all women in the UK who cheat should be executed.

Thank you to @elonmusk for commenting on this video and allowing this content to be on X. If it weren't for X I genuinely think the west would have reached the point of no return already.

[Morningstar, Inc. @MorningstarInc]

$CRM and $ICE are now seen as significantly undervalued. https://t.co/PGQ5euKgyh

[Syrian Girl @Partisangirl]

The face of Pakistan's prime minister after Trump threatened to murder Iran's negotiators.

[THE SKIN DOCTOR @theskindoctor13]

Imagine flying all the way in from the US expecting a 1915 Gandhi-style homecoming, convinced that 250 million followers would rally to overthrow the regime... only to find yourself stranded on a street corner, with nothing standing by you except your erect nipple and a handful of the usual professional protesters, while GenZ is more interested in following the FIFA World Cup.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

David Sacks was one of the first people to get a full readout from the White House after the Fable ban. He went on the All-In podcast this week and told the story from the inside. It is not the story anyone is telling.

Here is what actually happened.

Dario went to Washington in April and told national security officials he had built a cyber weapon. He spiked cortisol levels across the entire administration. Got everyone focused.

Then Anthropic quietly expanded the Mythos preview to over 50 companies without telling the White House. According to the Washington Post, at least one of those companies was flagged as a national security concern.

That was the predicate.

Then Fable launched. Mythos with guardrails. Anthropic's own largest partner started testing those guardrails and found a jailbreak. They escalated to the White House. The administration called Dario directly. A cabinet secretary picked up the phone personally.

It should have been a five minute call.

Instead, Dario argued. He said the jailbreak was not serious. Then he published a blog post trying to distinguish minor jailbreaks from major ones. This is the man who had just told Washington he built a cyber weapon.

Sacks said it plainly. The trust is gone. And once you are in one of these situations it is always harder to get out than it was to avoid getting in.

Anthropic spent years building credibility as the AI safety company.

They burned it in a single week by refusing a phone call.

WATCH THE FULL PODCAST ON @theallinpod

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

The $10-$15 trillion total addressable market for AI, if it is successful, is actually "terrifying".

- The famous "Dean of Valuation", Professor Aswath Damodaran, of NYU Stern School of Business.

The reason: AI as a tool is a much smaller market; AI as a replacement for human-jobs is where the giant market story comes from.

"The best-case scenario for AI, that $10 to $15 trillion market, will happen if ONLY it replaces people.

If AI is a tool, it’s going to be a much smaller market than if AI replaces people. So, the stories we’re telling about $10, $20 or $25 trillion markets are actually terrifying stories for the rest of the world.

Why? Because if that story comes true, half of all white-collar people are going to lose their jobs. And what are they going to do instead? Who’s going to come up with the income to buy the products and services?

If AI works as well as it’s supposed to and replaces people, how do we deal with that as a society? Because people lose their jobs. Not only do you lose your income, you lose your life’s meaning.."

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Video from "Excess Returns" podcast (full video in quoted tweet, also link to their YT in comment)

[Kabiran @Kabiran_]

The billioniares' vision of the world is a vision without humanity.

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

Some of the best saves in football history

[Kalshi @Kalshi]

JUST IN: Jeff Bezos says concerns over AI making humans obsolete are overblown

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

This is an excellent essay in the NYT that highlights the unresolved question of why the makers of AI constantly whine and cry that the world will come to an end because of AI.

Hint: it won’t.

[Avinash @avinkum2]

@GaryMarcus Claude is good only if someone can clearly define the task and work with Claude till the final outcome. Without the human loop, the output may be functional code but far from production grade.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true:

— As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable.

— Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.)

— A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused.

— In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.”

— In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety.

— In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community.

— The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority.

— Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.

[sphinx @protosphinx]

Sir, they have blocked access to the very AI models you said we should share instead of build

[Ron DeSantis @RonDeSantis]

Businesses are increasingly concluding that the value of the AI model is not worth the extravagant costs.

[Avinash @avinkum2]

@chamath Even for engineering work the newer models are not so good as they make so many mistakes. 4.6 was much better

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

About 8 months ago, I warned that “Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.” This take was controversial at the time; now look how many people are saying it.