Prabal Gupta - prabal.ca

I make LLMs behave in prod.

• about me: LLM fine-tuning, inference, deployment

• consulting for ML teams

• ex-@azure • @uwaterloo eng

[Prabal Gupta - prabal.ca @prabal_]

3 prompts in and you've already burned 36% of your session limit.

The model feels dumber than it did last month.

It's not just you - and we have proof.

@Sarthak_m2000 and @saranshmahajan and I built ClaudeDown(.)com - a tool that crowdsources complaints about Claude across X in real time.

Rate limits, model degradation, usage costs - all tracked at an hourly cadence.

The status page says everything's fine. Meanwhile, hundreds of devs are independently complaining about the same thing.

ClaudeDown(.)com

[BBC News (UK) @BBCNews]

Cervical cancer deaths fall to zero in young women given vaccine https://t.co/JM73OorKHT

[Sebastian Caliri @SebastianCaliri]

I just tested my hand in a mini version of this scanner. Images that are higher quality than MRI, whole body captured in <1 minute, virtually free to run. This is going to change medicine.

Things get even crazier when you consider the possibility of using the same tank to focus ultrasound to ablate tissue, stimulate nerves, etc.

The FDA is not in the slightest ready for this. People will also complain about incidental findings but they are wrong and don’t understand how quickly software can improve and how inexpensive a time series of scans will be to generate.

[Alex Pfeiffer @AlexPfeiffer]

In the WSJ today

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report.

https://t.co/EuKgGWBRhS

[CP24 @CP24]

#BREAKING: Toronto police say they believe young people are being hired to carry out shootings at targets around Toronto, including Jewish schools and synagogues, and the U.S. consulate. https://t.co/gNM4lEu8s2

[𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗿𝘂𝘀𝗵𝗻𝗮— 𝗲/𝗮𝗰𝗰 @techwith_ram]

Someone wrote a blog here about research. I found this link in the comment & went and read the Richard Hamming's You and Your Research.

It's one of those essays that quietly changes how you think about work.

I think my biggest takeaway would be that great careers are not built by working harder alone. They are built by consistently working on important problems, staying curious, & putting yourself where luck can find you.

I would suggest this to read for anyone building, researching, or creating. I'm not into research to be honest. But it's not that big, and today is Sunday. So....

Read it in one go.😇

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Sam Altman: “If your product has any retention at all, you’re actually in really good shape”

Sam reflects on the first group of users that tested ChatGPT:

“This was back when the model was really bad. Very few of the users actually stuck with it. Retention was atrocious. But for the users that did retain, their usage increased over time.”

He admits that OpenAI almost didn’t even launch ChatGPT because of how atrocious early retention was. But after reflection, he believes this is a really important learning for startup founders:

“If you have a product that has any retention at all, you’re actually in really good shape. If it’s 5%, that can be totally fine. The default is almost all the way down in a straight line to zero. But I didn’t quite understand that as intuitively at the time.”

Source: @khoslaventures (Sep 2025)

[Akshat @star_stufff]

Wolfgang Pauli, the great physicist, had his personal life completely wrecked at a high time of his career.

[Eric Lombardi (EricForOLP.ca) 🇨🇦🚀 @EricDLombardi]

Let me be clear that when it comes to public order, I will put transit riders first.

That means I’d demand cities enforce strict rules against drug use, menace, occupying multiple seats, blocking aisles, playing audio without headphones, smoking, vaping, camping, and other anti-social conduct that drives paying riders off public transit systems.

Repeat offenders should face escalating consequences up to and including involuntary solutions.

We do not have to tolerate disorder. And I’ll invest in space to help those in need at the same time.

But we should not be a culture that valorizes bad personal conduct as empathy.

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

New scientific advances are poised to shift healthcare toward earlier disease prediction and prevention within the next five to 10 years https://t.co/EYruKD1r4R

[vivek @itsreallyvivek]

https://t.co/ZhOgyq7Vgn

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

“All new fails” - Zynga CEO Mark Pincus explains his favorite product principle

“All new fails. If all new worked, we’d be using new stuff all the time. But how often do you change what’s on the front of your iPhone? How often do the top 10 or 25 apps change? They haven’t changed in 8 years because all new fails. A million new apps a year — they all fail.”

This realization led Mark to develop a new approach to building products that he calls “Proven. Better. New.” And he explains how he used it to build Zynga Poker into the largest poker site in the world.

“De-risk it. Start with with what’s proven. You don’t have the right to change proven. You should copy every pixel of [an experience that already works — legally, of course]… What you think is ‘better’ is called ‘new.’ When you say it’s better, that’s because you’re naive. Grow up. I’m guilty of this too — we all are. We get emotional and fall in love with our own ideas, so we need something to hold us accountable.”

Zynga Poker copied every other online poker game as their starting point.

The next step is to add one thing that’s undeniably better for users. For Zynga poker this was not having to download the application. “You lose half your users every time they have to click download,” Mark explains. “I don’t even need to ask, I know that’s better.”

The last step is to add something new that might work. For Zynga Poker, this was adding pictures of real people — often your friends — to the game. The game was an instant hit.

Mark urges founders to look at the product through your user’s eyes — not your peers:

“This isn’t about getting respect in this little bubble [of Silicon Valley]… This is about normal, real-life humans. They don’t care if you copied. They don’t care how innovative it is. All they care about is, ‘Does it feel better?’ And they can’t even tell you why… Innovation often comes in smaller bits.”

Source: @a16z @speedrun (Feb 2025)

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.

The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

Access to all other Claude models is not affected.

We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.

Read our full statement: https://t.co/bwn0sximKZ

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

Jeff Bezos talking to the NYT about his startup Prometheus: 'All societal wealth is driven by invention. Six thousand years ago, somebody invented the plow, and we all got wealthier. Then, much later, somebody invented the steam engine, and we all got wealthier. What Prometheus seeks to do, is to offer a set of tools that dramatically accelerates that invention loop.'

[IPO Newsroom @IPONewsroom_]

JEFF BEZOS JUST EMERGED FROM STEALTH WITH A $41 BILLION AI STARTUP CALLED PROMETHEUS

$12 billion raised. Valued at $41 billion. Coming out of stealth today.

The backers: Bezos personally, JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, DST Global, and Arch Venture Partners.

The mission: do for engineering and manufacturing what large language models did for text.

Bezos is calling it an "artificial general engineer." Instead of training on words from the internet, Prometheus ingests data from the physical world to accelerate the manufacturing of skyscrapers, smartphones, jet engines, and everything in between.

In Bezos' own words: "Something that today was going to take 100 engineers 10 years to build, if you can change that to taking 10 engineers one year to build, you're just going to get way more things built."

This is Bezos' first CEO role since stepping down from Amazon in 2021. He's co-leading it with Vik Bajaj, former Google X executive.

(Source Semafor)

[Xin Eric Wang @xwang_lk]

If you really think about it, despite being mocked as “ClosedAI,” OpenAI has contributed enormously to the field: GPT, GPT-2, GPT-3, CLIP, the ChatGPT paper, the GPT-4 Technical Report, the Sora technical blog, and even open-sourced Codex.

Anthropic, meanwhile, has contributed far less to the public research ecosystem while increasingly promoting fear-based narratives and restricting access through heavy gatekeeping.

The world I least want to live in is one where the future of AI is controlled by companies that prioritize secrecy, gated access, and centralized control over openness, reproducibility, and scientific progress.

[Mickey Djuric @MickeyDjuric]

NEW: AI Minister Evan Solomon is expected to table legislation next week to modernize Canada’s privacy laws. The bill will make privacy a fundamental right, protect children and curb misuse of personal information, including for surveillance pricing.

[Canada Spends @canada_spends]

We have fiscal transfers and tax credits targeted to eliminate poverty. They are the federal government's biggest spending priority.

Are they effective? Can we do better?

We built FISCAL PLINKO to find out!

Change the policy and see how Canadians drop through the system!

https://t.co/3TpoyMEvBw

[Transformer Lab @transformerlab]

Our lab built the highest-quality quantization for running Ideogram 4 on consumer GPUs. Our Q4_K build outperforms the standard NF4 baseline in both image and text quality at the exact same 10.4 GB size, while our INT8 matches the uncompressed FP8 ceiling. 🧵👇 @ideogram_ai

[News from Science @NewsfromScience]

China has gained an unexpected ally in its struggle with rampant scientific misconduct: an independent video blogger who shines a light on problematic papers for millions of followers. https://t.co/MShSggogqd