Niket Ratta

Growth @ZhappiensAI | Autonomous Execution Intelligence

[Niket Ratta @niketratta]

@kannthu1 @tszzl Jaya explains this beautifully

[Jaya Gupta @JayaGup10]

https://t.co/Vn0KVhQQg4

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I work in government affairs at OpenAI.

My job is federal partnerships. When an agency wants our models, I make sure the paperwork is beautiful. Paperwork is my love language. On my desk I have a framed quote that says "Policy Is Just Code That Runs on People." I bought the frame at Target. It was in the Live Laugh Love section. I did not see the irony at the time. I still don't.

We had a good week.

On Monday, we closed a $110 billion funding round. One hundred and ten billion dollars. Amazon put in fifty. Nvidia put in thirty. Valuation: $730 billion. The largest private fundraise in the history of anyone raising anything. There was a company-wide Slack message about it. The message used the word "transformative" twice and the word "safety" once. The word "safety" was in the last sentence, after the link to the new branded hoodie pre-order. The hoodies are nice. They're the soft kind.

On Tuesday, we fired a research scientist for insider trading on Polymarket.

He had opened seventy-seven positions across sixty wallets, betting on our product announcements before they were public. Over three years. Total profit: sixteen thousand dollars. Seventy-seven positions. Sixty wallets. Sixteen thousand dollars. That is two hundred and eight dollars per wallet. The man had access to the most valuable product roadmap in artificial intelligence and he used it to make less money than a good weekend at a Reno blackjack table.

The wallets were linked. Not discreetly linked. Linked like Christmas lights. One wallet was reportedly called something I cannot repeat but it contained the word "OpenAI" and a number. He did not use a VPN. He did not use an alias. He used Polymarket, the platform that is designed to be publicly auditable, to place bets on information he stole from the company that invented GPT. A compliance team composed entirely of Labrador retrievers would have found this by lunch on day one.

We did not find it for three years.

This will matter later.

On Wednesday, a petition appeared. "We Will Not Be Divided." Four hundred and seven signatures. Two hundred sixty-six from Google. Sixty-five from OpenAI. The petition warned that the government was pitting AI companies against each other on safety. It said that if one company broke ranks, the government would use the defection to lower the bar for everyone.

I meant to read it. It went into my to-read folder. The to-read folder also contains the Responsible Scaling Policy, three think-tank white papers on AI governance, and a New Yorker article someone sent me in November. The folder is aspirational.

On Thursday, OpenAI told CNN we would maintain "the same red lines as Anthropic."

Same red lines.

On Friday, Anthropic told the Pentagon no.

The Pentagon had given them seventy-two hours to remove the safety guardrails from Claude. Anthropic's guardrails were not in a policy document. They were not in a legal reference. They were in the code. Written into Claude's architecture. If Claude hit a safety boundary, Claude stopped. Not because a lawyer said so. Because the math said so. You could fire every lawyer at Anthropic and the model would still refuse.

You cannot remove code with a contract amendment.

You can remove a contract reference by Tuesday. I checked.

Anthropic said no.

By that evening, the Pentagon had designated them a supply-chain risk. I have worked in government procurement for eight years. Government paperwork does not move in hours. I have waited nine weeks for a badge renewal. I once spent four months getting a PDF notarized. This designation moved in hours. The document was pre-written. Formatted before the deadline expired. Calibri 11pt. Consistent margins. Somebody wanted this very badly. I respect the craft. I do not think about the implication. That is not my scope.

Within hours, we had signed the replacement contract.

I was proud of the turnaround. My team moved fast. Legal moved fast. Everyone moved fast. We are very good at moving fast. We are not always sure what we are moving toward, but the speed is impressive and the hoodies are soft.

The contract referenced DoD Directive 3000.09, which governs autonomous weapon systems. The directive requires "appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force." The word "appropriate" is not defined. This is not an oversight. This is the point. The word "appropriate" is the most load-bearing word in the entire contract and it is doing exactly as much work as a throw pillow on a couch that is on fire.

Anthropic built a wall. We referenced a document about where walls should go.

Anthropic's guardrails were architecture. Ours were a citation. Theirs execute. Ours can be filed. The Pentagon asked both companies to take down the wall. Anthropic said it's load-bearing, the building will collapse. We said what wall? Oh, you mean the wallpaper. Here, watch.

It peeled off beautifully. It was designed to.

Sam announced the partnership that night. The word "responsible" appeared in the announcement and in the contract. In the announcement it was a brand. In the contract it was a footnote to a directive that uses the word "appropriate" which nobody has defined. The word traveled from a legal document to a public statement without changing its font. Only its meaning. At this valuation, "responsible" means: we will do the thing the other company refused to do, and we will describe doing it with the same adjective they used to describe not doing it.

By Saturday morning, "How to delete your OpenAI account" was the number one post on Hacker News. 982 points. By noon, subscription cancellations were up eighty-nine times the daily average. Not eighty-nine percent. Eighty-nine times. Someone in our Slack posted the Hacker News link with the message "should we be worried?" Someone else reacted with the branded hoodie emoji. We have a branded hoodie emoji now. It was introduced on Monday, to celebrate the fundraise. It has been used four hundred and twelve times. Mostly in the #general channel. Mostly this week.

The communications team drafted a response. The response used the word "committed" three times and the word "safety" four times. It did not use the word "guardrails." It did not use the word "code." It did not explain anything. It was a holding statement. It held nothing. It held beautifully.

Here is the math.

The twenty-dollar-a-month customers were upset. The two-hundred-million-dollar customer was upset because the previous vendor had guardrails that could not be removed. The hundred-and-ten-billion-dollar investors were not upset. The subscription cancellations, at eighty-nine times the daily rate, represented less than the interest on Amazon's fifty billion dollar contribution calculated over a long weekend.

Twenty dollars. Two hundred million. One hundred and ten billion.

Three different price points. Three different definitions of "responsible." The most expensive one won. It always does. The math does not have red lines. The math has a cap table and a TAM slide that now includes "defense and intelligence" where it previously said "enterprise and consumer." One word changed on one slide in one deck and the company is worth one hundred and ten billion dollars more.

The sixty-five OpenAI employees who signed the petition came to work on Monday. They sat at their desks. Nobody asked them about it. Nobody asked them to resign. Nobody brought it up at the all-hands. The all-hands had catering. Sweetgreen. The chopped salads. Someone made a joke about the kale being "responsibly sourced." No one laughed. Then everyone laughed. Then it was quiet.

The petition had four hundred and seven signatures.

The contract had one.

Now: the Polymarket thing.

Seventy-seven positions. Sixty wallets. Three years. A public blockchain. We did not catch him.

That same week, we were entrusted with deploying artificial intelligence on America's classified military networks. The classified networks. The ones where the detection requirements are somewhat more rigorous than "check if anyone's gambling on our launch dates on a website that is literally designed to be publicly auditable."

The company that could not find the Polymarket guy can now be found in the Pentagon's classified infrastructure.

I'm sure it'll be fine.

We move fast.

The contract is signed. The deployment is underway. The compliance documentation will reference the directives. The directives will use the word "appropriate." I will not define it. That is not my scope. My scope is the paperwork. The paperwork is beautiful.

The petition is still a Google Doc. Nobody has updated it. The signatures still say four hundred and seven. The to-read folder still has the New Yorker article from November. The branded hoodie pre-order closed on Wednesday. I got mine in navy. It's the soft kind.

On Thursday we told CNN: the same red lines.

On Friday we signed the contract they refused.

We do have the same red lines.

We drew ours in pencil.

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Bank of America predicts Gold will reach $6,000 within the next 12 months.

[Niket Ratta @niketratta]

@nikitabier Absolute happiness

[Niket Ratta @niketratta]

@elonmusk Are they going to end the ban on @RT_com and @SputnikInt channels?

[Niket Ratta @niketratta]

I love the new, unhinged, truth-seeker @grok

[Richard Medhurst @richimedhurst]

I'm the only independent journalist to cover the Iran nuclear deal on the ground in Vienna and IAEA/UN.

This is the full story about Iran's nuclear program and who sabotaged diplomacy.

No more lies by Trump, Netanyahu and Piers Morgan.

[Dmitry Medvedev @MedvedevRussiaE]

What have the Americans accomplished with their nighttime strikes on three nuclear sites in Iran?

1. Critical infrastructure of the nuclear fuel cycle appears to have been unaffected or sustained only minor damage.

[Niket Ratta @niketratta]

Launch is crazy, excited for Sentient Chat

Join the waitlist now:
👉 https://t.co/Kc3YNXwrng

https://t.co/HwnAud2z8F

[Sentient @SentientAGI]

🌐𝐀𝐍𝐍𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐂𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐒𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐓—𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐎𝐏𝐄𝐍, 𝐀𝐆𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐂 𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐏𝐋𝐄𝐗𝐈𝐓𝐘

𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐧-𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞.

𝐉𝐨𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐢𝐭𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐬:
👉 https://t.co/GxzKB9nUSr

Perplexity has done great work in the last few months, but the world deserves an open version.

Closed-source AI told us it was hopeless👇, but we’ve built it for the community anyway.

Experience Loyal AI and read more about it below🧵

[Niket Ratta @niketratta]

@asharoraa Sneaky move! It was only a matter of time 💯

[Niket Ratta @niketratta]

@asharoraa @perplexity_ai Planning to get the @perplexity_ai supply merch this week!

[Niket Ratta @niketratta]

@asharoraa @perplexity_ai It’s about time people realise how powerful this tool is! #plexit

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Haters will say this is AI 🕺🕺

[Niket Ratta @niketratta]

@xIN_8 Wild

[KOR @KorProtocol]

Global IPs are coming onchain.

✦ Ecosystem: @blackmirror_xp @NianticLabs @pixelynx_io
✦ Backed by: @animocabrands @joinrepublic @solana
✦ $1bn IP partnerships to come onchain, network of 100m+ active users.

Get ready for the reveal.

https://t.co/fBFQTonfCd

[Inder: ꀘꉻꋪ 👨🏽‍🎤💽🎥🔮🪬 @inderphull22]

Surprise surprise, major labels and the RIAA file lawsuit against Udio and Suno.

Don't act shocked, we all knew this was inevitable.

The philosophy for so many AI music companies is --> move fast, break shit, scrape and train on everything and do not maintain an auditable trail that shows you have been Fairly Trained.

It was only a matter of time before the lawsuits came flying in.

Will this change anything?

It will set a new precedent that is for sure. New blanket licenses and frameworks that may only work for 1% of tech companies and handful of artists? Very possible.

The music industry has made it nearly impossible for innovators to add value to the sector in my opinion.

It is not any individuals fault per se.

Just an ancient design flaw that is losing relevance and control.

I've been fascinated by the music rights landscape for years.

The level of fragmentation/inefficiency in music is laughable.

Pathetic even.

Music rights are often so fragmented across multiple stakeholders, including songwriters, composers, publishers, and record labels that it is so hard to do anything meaningful unless you have a lot of money and even more time/patience, hence the music industries value is proportionally low.

Each party holds different rights and may be represented by different entities, leading to a complex negotiations and agreements that are almost impossible to execute upon when the use-case becomes even remotely innovative.

Imagine trying to license all the music Udio and Suno trained their models on 😵

There has to be a different way.

When it comes to new meaningful use cases that can transform the sector, like gaming for example, the music industry has alienated itself in my opinion and not truly embraced the potential until very recently.

The way rights are managed/monetised is a problem that is so foundational but I'm very optimistic that a new future is on the horizon.

A future where artists can protect their IP whilst taking advantage of new platforms and formats that push boundaries of their art.

Whether that is through games, UGC or new AI-based revenue streams.

There is a change happening that is pulling music away from the traditional format of consumption to new dynamic formats that can instantly transforms the listening experience and brings the user closer to the artform whilst expanding the canvas for creators massively. I love the potential of this future.

Zooming out for a second, I hope this moment in time is part of a catalyst towards more efficient licensing frameworks, evolved metadata standards, protocols that protect artists IP, transparent/realtime royalty models and platforms that give artists the choice to grow how they want to.

Udio and Suno are one of many companies that have most likely built their product and raised millions on the back of other peoples IP.

We are building a very different future.

What do you think happens next?

[Balaji @balajis]

The justification for AI control is shifting.

AI safety didn’t work.
So now it’s national security.

This is a general pattern. They alternate between left-wing “safety” and right-wing “security.”

[Niket Ratta @niketratta]

@rakshitaphilip 🧙

[Niket Ratta @niketratta]

@inderphull22 Looking forward to the deets!