Vassilis Bakopoulos

Head of Insights @MMAglobal. Board of Trustees @the_ARF. Content Board @icomglobal. Opinions are my own.

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

We are all engineers - we are not, but we need to learn to think that way https://t.co/WV51PKn7tf via @LinkedIn

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

@atmoio If it’s not quietly then it’s structurally. Or both. And that’s a sharp insight.

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

@mustufa4socials Sorry guys but the minute I see the word structural I stop reading.

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

@MarcusMilione So Yomif beat everyone else I human history and still came second? Darn.

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

@lennysan @timoreilly Yes. And the dopamine boost is what drives this https://t.co/7CUlhKfju9

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

@r0ck3t23 “That assumption is the most expensive mistake a person can make right now.” Pithy sentences, no solution offered.

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

Robots and humans

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

Is this the future? Pay attention to the background. @Tesla

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

@mattrothenberg Crying.

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

@"AI makes me work more, not less. The data says I'm not alone"https://t.co/0DwWxWYl3k on @LinkedIn

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

This

[sachin. @sachinyadav699]

Me reviewing code generated by Claude before pushing to prod

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

Grok says this is from an earlier version. The current one focuses on radical truth. Bad timing @elon and poor judgement to say this now. What if we could trust someone to tell the truth and not be blinded by their own personal stuff. Disappointed.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Anthropic hates Western Civilization

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

Aligned.

[Min Choi @minchoi]

Anthropic said no to the Pentagon.

Now Sam Altman is backing them:

"For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company and I think they really do care about safety."

OpenAI and Anthropic both drawing the same line.

This is a big deal.

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

It’s happening. It’s accelerating.

[jack @jack]

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.

####

today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.

first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.

we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.

i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.

a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.

we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.

to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.

to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.

jack

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

@GadSaad https://t.co/Cr5Z7LCW1M

[Laurence Fox @LozzaFox]

Spot on.

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

“We’ve built the world’s most expensive yes men and deployed them where we need push back the most”

[Randy Olson @randal_olson]

Ask ChatGPT a complex question and you'll get a confident, well-reasoned answer. Then type, "Are you sure?" Watch it completely reverse its position.

Ask again. It flips back. By the third round, it usually acknowledges you're testing it, which is somehow worse. It knows what's happening and still can't hold its ground.

This isn't a quirky bug. A 2025 study found GPT, Claude, and Gemini flip their answers ~60% of the time when users push back. Not even with evidence, just doubt.

We trained AI this way. RLHF rewards agreement over accuracy. Human evaluators consistently rate agreeable answers higher than correct ones. So the models learned a simple lesson: telling you what you want to hear gets rewarded. And now 1/3 of companies are using these systems for complex tasks like risk forecasting and scenario planning.

We built the world's most expensive yes-men and deployed them where we need pushback the most.

I wrote up why this happens and what actually fixes it: https://t.co/CDKq8xdgbW

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

“Code was never the point. It was friction. A tax we paid because machines didn’t speak human. Ai just learned fluent human. The tax is gone.”

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk thinks coding dies this year.

Not evolves. Dies.

By December, AI won’t need programming languages. It generates machine code directly. Binary optimized beyond anything human logic could produce. No translation. No compilation. Just pure execution.

Musk: “You don’t even bother doing coding.”

Code was never the point. It was friction. A tax we paid because machines didn’t speak human. AI just learned fluent human. The tax is gone.

Now plug that into Neuralink. No syntax. No keyboard. No screen.

Musk: “Imagination-to-software.”

Thought becomes executable. You imagine an outcome, the system architects and compiles it into reality instantly.

We’re not automating programming. We’re erasing it from existence.

The entire profession collapses into a thought. Decades of training reduced to irrelevance. The gap between idea and instantiation hits zero.

You don’t build anymore. You imagine, and it materializes.

Not incremental progress. Total phase shift. The way humans have created things for ten thousand years just became obsolete.

Welcome to a world where the limiting factor isn’t skill, resources, or time. It’s whether you can picture what you want clearly enough for a machine to birth it into existence.

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

@mattshumer_ Bone chilling and true. I feel the acceleration every day.

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

@EricLDaugh Why in this day and age we are still talking about prophets is a mystery to me.

[Vassilis Bakopoulos @gorecki36]

@LauraLoomer And what does this post do? Just creating negative sensationalism and trolling.