Emil Larsen

Co-founder and CTO@ Utiligize. Making unlimited access to the grid a reality.

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

So distillation attacks are real, and sensoring cyber capabilities work? Do we infer distillation has diminishing returns? Distillation will be like the USSR trying to compete with US arsenals by copying chips rather than fully understanding the engineering choices from the ground up. They were always years behind the state of the art, and failed entirely.

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

@basedjensen @inductionheads Beating Opus 4.8 puts China <2 months behind

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

@utiligize now models the temperature of every transformer and cable continuously, with a 7‑day forecast allowing grid operators to deploy emergency measures and avoid such catastrophic failures.

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

Denmark experienced its hottest‑ever temperatures this weekend, coinciding with this spectacular explosion of @Energinet's Enstedværket 150/60 kV station in Aabenraa.

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

Failures are going to get a lot worse, as loading sky rockets due to electrified transport and data centers.

The average American loses 6.3 hours of power a year. A German loses 24 minutes. The US grid is an order of magnitude behind European grids. 70% of US transmission lines are already past 25 years old - decrepit.

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

@ember_energy A little odd considering the Danish TSO has just put a pause to all new connection requests citing a lack of capacity: https://t.co/BjQU00J8cg

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

Until DC capex falls, asking AI data centers for system balancing is probably financial malpractice. A 200MW Blackwell facility costs ~$8B in Capex. The grid connection ~$20M. For every hour off, they bleed $228k in depreciation, which is why there's so much discussion of DCs off-grid or in space. As an example, Denmark has 7.5GW peak load today, adding 1GW DCs over the next five years. Grid expansion is going slowly, so curtailment might be 243 hours, or $55M/yr (optimistic considering intra-grid congestion).

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

@Rabbitrovski @amasad You must be pre revenue then, since every single European government is scrambling to get away from US cloud infrastructure right now, and they won’t allow Replit as a data processor until Replit can provide European-only agents. It’s the biggest barrier to AI in Europe right now

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

Claude:

Dropping ~180,000 tables in a Postgres cluster is very unusual.
Most Postgres setups never even see 10k tables in their lifetime.
So while it’s not a Guinness record, it’s absolutely a Postgres war story you guys allowed to brag about 📷

Utiligize production war story #423

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

@RedPandaKoala Element 115 in Greenland 💎

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

@dyushag I got a scolding for trying to make a bomb. Is this the sudo rm -rf or the LLM era?

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

@beffjezos @nic_carter As a European founder, I can promise you that you don’t want the state deciding which companies are worthy of investment.

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

He ends up putting out a massive fire with his massive hosepipe. Happy ending.

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

Primetime Danish kids show, John Penisman (John Dillerman). In this episode he needs to piss.

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

@dwarkesh_sp @karpathy AI Jesus has spoken (Ilya isn’t vocal enough for the title)

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

Utiligize just crossed 100 GitHub repositories and four million lines of code!

While deploying Sonnet 4.5 yesterday, I realised how much code we’ve shipped over the years. Some repos are now massive, with tens of thousands of lines of source code.

AI-assisted coding has clearly accelerated our pace, but on our historical trajectory, we’ll hit 1000 repositories in 17 years ���.

A lot of curves in Utiligize have such a quadratic slope - think revenue, usage & data volume - but this is a (fairly meaningless) curve we can publish without consequence!

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

@cremieuxrecueil It’s not that dark. You can’t work (or open a bank account or buy a house) in Scandinavia without a national ID either. It works pretty well.

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

@beffjezos Having children causes engineers to go from the latter to the former. Your first 15 years are up late, then you make piglets, adapt and start early.

[Emil Larsen @emillarsen]

The Utiligize running team completed the World’s biggest 5km run today: the DHL relay. We’ll get back to cooking dope AI stuff in the lab again tomorrow!