David Iach

Founder @Superseed • e/acc with mods • ASI by 2035

[David Iach @davidiach]

Cynics are rarely happy.

Believe in something.

[Superseed @superseed]

https://t.co/Jxt1QlEGiQ

[David Iach @davidiach]

@agupta Wait, people pay $15k per month to rent a generic 2br apartment in SF?

[David Iach @davidiach]

@TheStalwart It's the models.

[David Iach @davidiach]

@alexwg @imaginationxyz @WHOOP @thejackobrien @mariagorskikh @nireshagarwal Okey, that sounds a lot more plausible to me from a timelines perspective. If one upload is possible, running multiple instances will most certainly be easy.

[David Iach @davidiach]

Every time a smarter model comes out this becomes more true.

The quality of the output increases very fast and we’re getting really close to the point where outputmaxxing is what you need to do.

[roon @tszzl]

lines of code is a better metric than people think it is. token use is a better metric than people think it is

[David Iach @davidiach]

The world has changed. A lot of people in crypto are sleeping on the fact that AI is making it trivially easy to find software vulnerabilities.

We need to somehow band together as an industry and ask @AnthropicAI and @OpenAI give us access to their best cyber defense tools before potential attackers get access to the latest models.

[wip @workinpro]

I was able to replicate finding the Zcash Orchard vulnerability using GPT 5.5 without a harness and little to no steering (except for passing the files).

GPT 5.5 is consistently able to find this vulnerability.

Opus 4.8 released on May 25th, and the vulnerability was found one day later, on May 26th. GPT 5.5 released on April 23rd, meaning someone could’ve found the vulnerability using GPT 5.5 for an entire month.

(Link to chat in next post)

[David Iach @davidiach]

@dwarkesh_sp Very good episode, should have been 3 hours long.

[David Iach @davidiach]

@thsottiaux It is very acceptable to have small incidents if that means you reset the limits.

[David Iach @davidiach]

@TheStalwart @47fucb4r8c69323 Maybe this works as a heuristic when you’re investing, but looking back, clearly Google, Facebook, Instagram etc. did not peak the moment when normies started using these platforms.

[David Iach @davidiach]

Eventually most economic activity will come from agents too.

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history. https://t.co/2zX5bHdhsa

[David Iach @davidiach]

GPT 5.6 is getting a cinematic video. Sounds like a special model.

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

It's time to fly.

[David Iach @davidiach]

@emollick It’s so strange that society somehow converged to not placing any costs on those that are too conservative with their predictions.

[MTS @MTSlive]

SITUATION DETECTED: ChatGPT has crossed 1 billion monthly active users, the fastest any app has ever reached the milestone.

[David Iach @davidiach]

Looks like quantum computing research is accelerating. Partly due to optimization discovered by AI.

Few understand that this is scary news and that this means that timelines for qday are much shorter than current projections.

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.

On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.

But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!

As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.

Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.

Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.

Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!

The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)

Part 2: neutral atoms and qday

The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.

Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.

Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.

My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".

Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.

So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.

Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.

Part 3: post-quantum cryptography

There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.

These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.

The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.

Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

[David Iach @davidiach]

I used to hold this view, but I'm not so sure anymore.

The problem is that public markets add a layer of "rewards and punishments" to companies that force them to take paths that are much more short term focused than they should be.

I fully expect that once a substantial amount of capital allocation is done by AI, flagship IPOs will happen at $10tn or more.

[DCinvestor @DCinvestor]

trillion dollar IPOs are a failure of the modern capitalist system

[David Iach @davidiach]

Not saying this should be done, but there’s a third way that’s better than either confiscation or being exit liquidity.

All affected companies have to issue a new type of share (call them Class XYZ shares or whatever) every year based on some predefined rule and these go newly issued shares go to a fund owned by the public. Capped at 50% of the company.

These shares maybe have some limitations, aren’t meant for control over the company but rather they’re for capturing upside for the general population idk.

[David Iach @davidiach]

IPO season coming.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

Anthropic has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Pending completion of SEC review, this gives us the option to pursue an initial public offering.

Read more: https://t.co/onGZAhRLvD

[David Iach @davidiach]

What?

[gian @giansegato]

spent my 11-hour flight back from europe working on a very long report. started as a slack message but morphed into a several pages long doc. wifi was as shitty as it gets. after finally making it home i realized that the computer had forcefully restarted. opened slack: draft was gone :(

hail mary: claude pls save me, no clue how but pls try

it checked APFS snapshots, time machine, slack indexeddb, write-ahead logs, service worker / http caches, local storage, app logs, hibernation image... nothing. all gone

but then... it realized i have alfred installed. so it checked the clipboard snapshots alfred keeps in sqlite. sad news: alfred clipboard memory gets deleted after 24h. aggressive retention policy. however! when sqlite runs DELETE, nothing gets actually deleted. it only marks pages as reusable, but it doesn't override the physical bytes. so claude decided to do a raw-scan of the db, reverse eng alfred data format, figure out the portion containing the timestamp, stitched everything back together across overflow pages... and handed me the exact final version of my report, the last one i cmd+C'd

all this, in a single shot

... day 200 of "what if you had an elite hacker you can ask anything to"

[David Iach @davidiach]

@drgurner @IAmSteveHarvey Is this genuinely what you believe? If I read your take correctly you seem to say that navigating a devastating personal tragedy is a bit like hitting a developmental milestone.

That’s very different from saying that one can bounce back from going through a devastating tragedy.