David Benefield

Rebirth

[David Benefield @DWBenefield]

This isn’t happening to me. This is happening for the growth of my consciousness.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.

The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.

But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.

So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.

TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.

[David Benefield @DWBenefield]

The only winning move is not to play.

[David Benefield @DWBenefield]

@ramahluwalia aotd

[David Benefield @DWBenefield]

@AahanPrometheus Pony Room’s great

[Memetic Logos @memetic_logos]

service to self whispers “take what you’re owed.” service to others asks “what can i become?” one builds walls around the self; the other opens a door and finds it leads back home.

[David Benefield @DWBenefield]

@ramahluwalia 'We're going to hit them extremely hard over the next 2-3 weeks and bring them back to the stone ages where they belong.' Bit of a different message than the optimistic 'we can just leave' that seemed to inspire bullishness Monday. Bringing up WW1, 2, Vietnam etc also not great.

[David Benefield @DWBenefield]

@AviFelman What are next steps to reach the end from here?

[Memetic Logos @memetic_logos]

Polarity isn’t a war—it’s a dance. Light only sees itself fully when it meets shadow, and shadow only exists to remind light how to move. The trick isn’t to win; it’s to honor both steps of the rhythm.

[Route 2 FI @Route2FI]

People fantasize about hitting the freedom money and then disappearing to live life, but the ones who would actually have disappeared to live life will almost never make it. Why?

Because you don’t wake up one day with 8 figs because you “balanced work and life” perfectly. You get there because you’re a little broken in the head and actually like the game more than the prize. In the same way, bodybuilders don’t quit the gym the day they look shredded.

People with real money all still work in some form. Investing, building, trading, whatever.

When I talk to friends with safe office jobs, they’ll say something like: “If I were pulling what you make, I’d just be on holiday all year.” That’s exactly why they never get there. The second money appears in their head, they’re already planning how to burn it on vacations and luxury items, and end up right back where they started.

It feels a bit controversial to say this, especially from me, Route2FI lol, as you know what the initials stand for, but yeah, I used to think the same way: dreaming of financial independence so I could basically do nothing. Looking back, the problem wasn’t that I hated work. It was that I hadn’t chosen my work. Once you find something you think is fun and you feel good at, you don’t fantasize about quitting. You just want to keep playing.

[David Benefield @DWBenefield]

@Kunal_K_Patel @strassa2 @TomDwan It was the best of times

[David Benefield @DWBenefield]

@strassa2 @TomDwan I was most impressed that she slammed 3 pork buns then the entire bowl of tonkotsu.

[Jay Anderson @TheProjectUnity]

Every night human beings go to sleep, lose all sense of their known reality, plunge into an abstract hyper-dimensional realm of infinite experience where time collapses, all moments instantly manifest, and then they wake up and just go about their day.

[David Benefield @DWBenefield]

Credibility of our leadership rapidly diminishing.

[David Benefield @DWBenefield]

PSA - someone is scamming as me via text message from a variety of local phone numbers. I’ll never ask you for money or favors. If anyone has thoughts on what I can do about this please share, thanks!

[🍂 @Lovandfear]

Dostoevsky; “People don't want truth, they want comfort dressed as truth.”

Franz Kafka; “Reality is too heavy for most people to carry. So they borrow illusions, soft dreams, sweet lies, and call it happiness.”

[David Benefield @DWBenefield]

“He who had recognised himself came to the Supreme Good, while he who had prized the body, born from the illusion of desire, remained wandering in the dark, suffering through the senses the things of death.”

[David Benefield @DWBenefield]

@bryan_johnson Become the vibration. Experience unity. Surrender.

[David Benefield @DWBenefield]

@bryan_johnson What if the mushrooms make it so the weaker sperm can't make it through, effectively pruning the less evolutionarily advantageous sperm, while making aggregate numbers look less appealing?

[David Benefield @DWBenefield]

"The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father."