Elco Ian

Founder

[dilemma @actuallyimthe]

Argentina just beat Spain at the 2026 World Cup final, 3-2.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

https://t.co/xv6csf1SbV

[Naval @naval]

It's the Age of Builders.

(sorry financiers and talkers)

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

A plausible and frightening vision of Europe's near future, ending in economic collapse and vassal status under the US or China. Enjoyed reading it, although I feel a little depressed now.

https://t.co/Pe3ddlUBtS

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

[Matt Harney @SaaSletter]

👀 New "AI Is Eating The World" 79-slide deck from @benedictevans

https://t.co/UD7gYPmEXT

[Elco Ian @elcoian]

@deedydas power law

[Mikhail Khodorkovsky @khodorkovsky_en]

I have listened to Putin speak for over twenty years. Last week, he did something I have not seen since the full-scale war began: he called Zelenskyy 'господин Зеленский.' Mr. Zelenskyy.

That single word is why a negotiated peace now feels within reach (🧵 Read on)

[Elad Gil @eladgil]

People at major AI labs (using internal models) 3-4 months ahead of startup silicon valley engineers

SV founders/eng 3-6 months ahead of NY

NY founders/eng 6-12 months ahead of rest of world

Most people have no idea how fast AI shifting as 1-2 years behind SOTA

"The future is here, just not equally distributed" - Robert Heinlein

[Ben Lang @benln]

YC on how to build a company with AI from the ground up:

[Elco Ian @elcoian]

@ChoyRb Awesome community so far!

[Elco Ian @elcoian]

@mert this is great 🫠

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

https://t.co/1HuCDkyzQG

[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.

[Elco Ian @elcoian]

@jack V cool

[Elco Ian @elcoian]

Dario has a spine
who would have thought?

[Elco Ian @elcoian]

@WhitePapersPol @grok factcheck

[Robert Scoble @Scobleizer]

OpenClaw report.

50 real-world use cases.

Generated by @blevlabs' cognitive AI architecture by looking at my AI lists here on X. All via the @xAI API.

In other words, it read all of X today and wrote this report.

I bet the algorithm didn't show you most of these.

https://t.co/W86HncODtR

[Ray Dalio @RayDalio]

https://t.co/tjmbT5ytUN

[Elco Ian @elcoian]

v good

https://t.co/bzzOeg9RK0 Europeans need to stop the hypocrisy to thrive