Brij Singh

abstraction miner. ex-visa, few startups here and there. now applied research in ai and finance @socialprotolabs

[Brij Singh @brij]

“He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it”

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

This is a bigger trend. Cracks forming fast. Lots of schools are going to fail.

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

The problems that are worth solving are the ones society collectively agrees are impossible.

[Brij Singh @brij]

Read this post but change “frontier labs” to “social media networks”

Imagine using KYC to post on insta and youtube?

Why is it different this time, from legal POV?

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Game theory from here is super interesting:

Original Mags (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta) now have a serious non-zero opportunity to tank the frontier labs.

Go to the government, kneecap the labs’ motion of putting the latest models out in the wild, become the trusted gatekeeper between the labs and the public at large (including internationally) by having the labs go through their clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) and implement strict KYC to seal the deal.

The frontier labs should have seen this coming years ago and implemented a robust KYC for just this moment. The fact they didn’t is kind of concerning.

Why did they not do it?

Best guess is because it would have changed the run-rate revenues (downward) which would have then changed funding dynamics - lower valuations, more dilution, less secondary.

A valuation reset may happen now anyways, except the labs may end up with less control and more restrictions at the end of it. At the same time, everyone is already clamoring about token prices of the old models from the labs anyways…

This couldn’t be a better setup for open source and neoclouds. Big question is can they meet the moment?

There are too few of them and their progress seems sporadic at best.

[Brij Singh @brij]

Shot fired. Satya is almost asking CTOs: have you war gamed a backup plan to ensure you retain control if your model APIs become unavailable?

“company should be able to switch out a “generalist” model without losing the “company veteran” expertise built into their learning system. This is the key “test” of your control and sovereignty in the era ahead.”

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

https://t.co/vLmiBKTtX3

[Brij Singh @brij]

enterprise deployments dont work like this. once model apis are in place, they will stick around.

[dax @thdxr]

LLMs are hard to create a moat around

it's stateless compute that you can switch overnight when a better/cheaper option shows up

all the commotion you see is downstream of this fact as companies flail around trying to fight this

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

Ro, you just gave a nice little stump speech. Congrats.

I'm talking about how AI can be used to make government more efficient, less expensive and provide an option, where it makes sense , to private enterprise.

Enabling more of the revenue you collect from taxpayers to go directly to the people who need it.

Ask your GenZ and neediest constituents, if AI could reduce spending in your state and improve the quality of services offered, with some percent of those savings being deposited in their bank accounts annually, would they approve of the government using AI ?

You know the answer.

By focusing on technology that can allow government to provide better services at a lower cost, which AI will be in a position to enable, only then can you help provide for people who need help and support.

AI is new, and not easy to implement. Which is why your state and the federal government should be creating programs to give new grads, who know or can learn AI, jobs to work with existing staff to find ways to decrease costs and improve efficiency. It's an investment that will pay off.

And as far as all the things you want to subsidize, from homes to childcare to healthcare , you could take every dollar from every billionaire and trillionaire in your state and probably every state and territory, leave them broke and then eat them, and it wouldn't cover for a year, the cost of what you want to do

But

Since I know healthcare, let's start there and see how serious you are about Medicare for All ?

Who runs it and how do you choose that person?

Right now the proposed legislation from jayapal and sanders says ," at the discretion of the Sec of HHS"

What do you think would be happening right now if that had been passed ?

I'll tell you the same thing I tell Republicans who think removing government and regulation from any market will make that market bigger and more efficient ...

Ideology is not a strategy

[hallerite @hallerite]

it's not lack of compute that's the issze. it's that in Europe, it's unthinkable to pay a guy in his mid 20s $600k salary and give him resources and freedom to train models without having oversight by a committee of gerontocratic professorswho don't keep up with the research

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Five dimensional chess doesn’t exist. Everyone is furiously improvising all the time. The future is utterly uncertain.

[Brij Singh @brij]

Rooting for Sarvam, as I strongly believe every country should have a strong AI ecosystem. But this kind of sycophantic attitude is exactly why India struggles to scale to global standards. I’d love to be proven wrong 👇

“government that understands the imperative for technology innovation”

[Pratyush Kumar @pratykumar]

Bottomline, irrespective of hit jobs by foreign media or naysayers of various shades, India has the talent, the scale of the economy, the ambition amongst people for a better life, and a government that understands the imperative for technology innovation.

The Fable ban is a good instigation for more people to engage in recognising the need for sovereignty. But while many opine, Sarvam is at work making the Fable of India's first consequential AI company a reality.

We are hiring!

[FOX Sports @FOXSports]

America showed up for the @USMNT 🇺🇸

[Brij Singh @brij]

Don’t remember the last time a soccer team captured the imagination of an entire country. @USMNT 🇺🇸🚀

[. @sergino_dest]

Amazing start of the tournament! We keep going 🇺🇸

[Brij Singh @brij]

Biggest irony is that the best coding model failed to establish ironclad guardrails.

[Brij Singh @brij]

This is a good explanation 👇

Remarkable how Anthropic has backed itself into a no-win situation - entirely self-inflicted. There will always be vulnerabilities and jailbreaks in the future and Anthropic has effectively put itself in the position of having to “certify” that its models are safe to release.

This also means enterprises need to have a backup plan at all times.

[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.

[Brij Singh @brij]

Andy Jassy?

[Techmeme @Techmeme]

Sources: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is among tech leaders who raised concerns with Trump officials about Mythos 5, setting in motion new export restrictions (The Information)

(Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

[Brij Singh @brij]

Maybe this was the plan all along?

“It would be darkly ironic if Anthropic ended up being the first Sovereign AI all along, and we had no idea”

[hari raghavan @haridigresses]

https://t.co/FHoayAaU50

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

The reason anyone gets insanely rich is almost always because of the stock market. It certainly how @elonmusk did.

And the reason they get rich from the stock market, is because 150m Americans decided they wanted to own shares of stocks directly, or through their retirement plans, or through other approaches as a way of building their net worth and trying to create a better life for themselves.

One Hundred Fifty Million Americans. About 60% of adults.

Effectively believing that @elonmusk and many billionaires could make them wealthier and help them achieve a better life.

If you want @elonmusk , and most billionaires to no longer be that rich, convince those 150m to sell their stocks, funds, ETFs whatever.

Of course you would wipe out the net-worth of most of those people, and everyone else’s savings, as the markets crashed and brought down the economy and created the worst depression we have ever seen.

Alternatively

There are ways to improve healthcare access and eventually make it available to all.

To start -
If you want @elonmusk and all billionaires to improve healthcare for everyone , ask them to stop doing business with the enormous healthcare conglomerates and to work directly with transparently priced care providers.

It’s the behemoth HC conglomerates that make HC so bad for so many. (Check my timeline for more detail)

Removing them would push the cost of healthcare down for everyone. Their corporate decisions impact our healthcare cost and availability.

Of course if they do that, not only would our HC costs go down , and the quality of care for their employees and the entire country go up

But

They would see their corporate cash flow increase dramatically and we would have more millionaires, billionaires and maybe even another trillionaire when that cash flow moved from the big health care conglomerates to their bottom line, so would the net worth of the 150 million American adults that own public stocks

Capitalism is better than socialism because 150m Americans can influence exactly what happens in this country.

[Brij Singh @brij]

Regulators and bureaucrats hold more cards than most people realize.

One reason the US leads and will likely continue to lead in AI is its ability to align capital, talent, infra and policy at scale and letting market do what it does best.

only other country that comes close when it comes to executing long term innovation bets is China.

[Nando de Freitas @NandoDF]

No one should be surprised by this. The USA is doing what any self-interested nation state would do.

The real question is why are Europe, Canada, Australia, Korea, Japan and UK not able to compete seriously. That is the question everyone in government needs to answer.

And no, having a couple of startups that have raised $1B or $2B is FAR from enough to compete with $100B American companies. The scale matters. Imagine your sword’s length is 1cm and your rival’s 1m — no match.

Here is the harsh math (thanks to a poor version of Claude):

•10,000 GB200 superchips ≈ ~278 NVL72 racks.
•Each NVL72 rack costs roughly $3M–$3.5M.
•That puts the full-system total around $830M–$970M, before networking, power, cooling, and datacenter buildout.

That would enable you to train a model that was Sota 2 years ago. You need about 5 to 7 times this to compete today.
So the starting bill is $5B, but even if you have this, here is the reality: there’s no available chips. So when you hear someone raised $1B, remember this is going back to American compute, and is simply not enough.

The other two ingredients for AI are data and people.

American startups pay better than European ones, so the people vote with their feet so they can pay their mortgage and send kids to school. An experienced AI engineer makes double the salary in Europe by working for an American startup (like Anthropic) than a European one, and about ten times more if they work for a USA corporation. There are however amazing European startups, but the money and ambition is lacking.

The USA is far more relaxed with data and fair use - Canada is good too and @cohere is doing fine thanks to this. So American companies have a strong advantage over European ones. Brussels and the UK think they can hold the world to their questionable “ethical” views on data but they are just destroying the local AI industry, and in the process falling into a very precarious situation. They are partly responsible. Only the French minister has stood by their local LLM @MistralAI … and I guess more recently Germany has started to wake up.

The hope is of course LLM startups like @MistralAI and @cohere which are a year or so behind but can provide personalised services, and amazing startups like @cusp_ai @IneffableLabs @nscale @Orbital_Ind @bfl_ai and a few others. But for all these, it’s incredibly hard to compete.

[Brij Singh @brij]

@anandraman Yes, incorrect analogy to nuclear tech is part of the problem

[Brij Singh @brij]

Completely unnecessary by the US government. This sets a disturbing precedence

[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

[Brij Singh @brij]

@anandraman Hypocrisy runs deep

[Brij Singh @brij]

these people are shaping democratic politics.

Instead of removing regulatory barriers and expanding opportunity they are obsessed with extraction politics

[Casey Handmer @CJHandmer]

The lesson I take from the SpaceX IPO is that the only thing stopping us from solving arbitrarily difficult problems is extreme creativity in business models.

No amount of tax and spend programs got us reusable rockets and great electric cars. Customer delight is a necessary precondition for success.

There seems to be some discussion around whether successful entrepreneurs should give up control of their companies so they can subsidize some philanthropic venture that otherwise has no value prop sufficient to run it as a business where customers voluntarily exchange money for goods and services at a competitive and reasonable price.

This misses the point. Transformational products deliver tangible value at 1000x the rate of charities whose value cannot be tested in the market place. Think about the undeniable value of the smart phone, satellite Internet, electric consumer devices, etc etc.

I think the transformational moment for SpaceX was when Elon stepped away from the philanthropic Mars greenhouse concept and fixed his resolve on unlocking radically better rockets for humanity. The greenhouse would have been, at best, a neat trick. Falcon and Starship give humanity a durable economic engine to maintain and improve access to space, forever.