Craig Connors

Army veteran. CTO for Infrastructure & Security @ Cisco. Opinions are my own.

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

The new White House policy requiring green card applicants to apply from outside the US is a capricious attack on legal immigration. It will hurt families, leave us with fewer doctors, teachers and scientists, and hurt American competitiveness in AI.

[Craig Connors @egregious]

@steipete I love to see the things I built in my agent harness appear in codex itself

[Magee Clegg @mageeclegg]

One of the strangest things about America 🇺🇸…

You meet people making $300k/year who are anxious, exhausted, medicated, and can barely sleep at night.

Then you go to Mexico 🇲🇽…

and see some guy running a small restaurant, barely breaking even…

but he’s laughing with friends, drinking mezcal at lunch, hugging customers, and sleeps perfectly fine at night.

[Craig Connors @egregious]

@krishnanrohit Not everyone is good at using AI.

[Craig Connors @egregious]

@SenWarren What?! I regret my past donations to you immensely.

[Craig Connors @egregious]

@emil_priver Rebase requests please

[Craig Connors @egregious]

If you aren’t doing this as a leader of software engineers, I think it’s hard for you to grasp the scope of the transformation our industry is undergoing.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

I came back to code because AI made it possible for me to build at a level I couldn't before.

I'm not coding despite being CEO of YC. I'm coding because this is the most important technological shift since the internet and I'd be an idiot to experience it from the bleachers.

I'm 45, running the most important startup institution in the world, and I can ship production software at 2am. That's not a distraction from the job.

That is the job understood correctly.

[Craig Connors @egregious]

AI will massively disrupt the legal industry. Administrative staff are often on the front lines of this change. So, she gets experience in AI-assisted law and lets Georgetown learn how to adapt to the future of legal work? Seems like a smart move.

[kicole nidman @ferald_gord]

just saw a tiktok a from a girl who said she was deferring her acceptance from georgetown law because she got a job as a paralegal at a biglaw firm. i’ve never seen a comments section so unanimously against an idea. genuinely what the fuck is she thinking

[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.

[Craig Connors @egregious]

@SimonPihler @HeidyKhlaaf We are actively using it in real life, though.

[Craig Connors @egregious]

@HankYeomans @ZackKorman Ouch Hank!

[Craig Connors @egregious]

Honored that Cisco was able to be a part of this. This is not marketing hype nor exaggeration.

My take: We have to re-think how we design software, how we patch software, how we test software, how we deploy software.

The ideas we pioneered with Cisco Hypershield over the past couple of years were just the start - more to come.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

Introducing Project Glasswing: an urgent initiative to help secure the world’s most critical software.

It’s powered by our newest frontier model, Claude Mythos Preview, which can find software vulnerabilities better than all but the most skilled humans.
https://t.co/NQ7IfEtYk7

[Siméon @Simeon_Cps]

Carlini, one of the world best AI security researchers: "I've found more bugs in the last few weeks with Mythos than in the rest of my entire life combined"

[Craig Connors @egregious]

@HeidyKhlaaf I didn’t (and would never) call you naive. I said the take was. Anthropic is not exaggerating here - your red flags aren’t invalid in the face of limited information, but they are leading people to underestimate this (and future) models.

[Craig Connors @egregious]

Cisco was early in many AI initiatives and we are all learning what “failure” and “learning” look like on a 2 month software cycle riding a 3-5 year hardware cycle.

But that doesn’t stop us from experimenting and that’s why I’m here.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

I think that if companies are not failing at all with their AI efforts it is a sign that they are not being ambitious enough. This is a fundamentally new technology that we do not know how to use well. Achieving breakthroughs will require experimentation, which require failure.

[Craig Connors @egregious]

@vtahowe Products need to be re-architected to support active defenses and rapid response

[pedram.md @pdrmnvd]

men in their 40s used to have cool midlife crisis but now they just have agentic workflows

[Samantha Ruddy @samlymatters]

I love that people from Massachusetts created the most generous, socialist health care system in all 50 states while also being the most aggressive drivers. They’re like “I want my neighbors to have the best care. They’re gonna need it if they don’t get out of the left lane.”