prime

⚡️ @GoogleDeepmind

[skooks @skooookum]

Chest Pain

[Kobe Bryant @kobebryant]

Messi. #saynomore

[Daniel Tenreiro @TenreiroDaniel]

@hopes_revenge real redpill is that your personal life outcomes lowkey do not matter

[prime @primoh_]

@dascho_scribler @aarmlovi 7th st

[blaire @pissshit90001]

I think about this tweet Often

[prime @primoh_]

@cremieuxrecueil @razibkhan Would love to come!

[prime @primoh_]

@Baconbrix Whaaatttt!! Looking forward to what you do next!

[vivek @itsreallyvivek]

he is 26, skipped the phd route entirely, and already leads a mechanistic interpretability team at google deepmind. he helped build anthropic's research team early on and has mentored dozens of top researchers, but he talks about it all with this incredible, grounded humility.

sometimes you hear a conversation that quietly resets how you look at your own work. today that was @NeelNanda5 for me.

just writing down my biggest takeaways so i don't forget them:

> He became a DeepMind team lead mostly by accident. The old lead quit, and he just said yes despite feeling unready. We gatekeep ourselves way more than the industry does. The downside of trying is almost always zero.

> Stop treating AI like a search engine. He treats it like a chaotic coworker. He dictates hours of messy audio notes and uses "anti-sycophant" prompts. You literally have to tell the AI, "My friend wrote this, please brutally roast it," just to bypass the polite filters and get honest feedback.

> We cold email the wrong people. Reaching out to famous founders or senior leads is usually a waste of time. Email the junior dev who got hired six months ago. They actually have free time, remember what it feels like to be an outsider, and actively want to mentor.

> If you just need a task done, let AI write the code. But if your goal is to learn the underlying architecture, outsourcing it to AI ruins your understanding. Use it to build fast, but treat it as a strict tutor when you need to actually learn.

> Research taste cannot be rushed. You can learn syntax in months, but the intuition for what makes a project actually valuable takes years. You have to train your brain like a neural net by doing a bunch of low-stakes, messy projects until the deeper intuition finally clicks.

> The hidden cost of brilliant ideas. You can write the most elegant solution in the world, but if it requires tearing apart a massive, pre-existing tech stack, an organization will reject it. The best engineers write code that is frictionless for the rest of the team to accept.

the biggest realization is just how much agency we actually have. you can just do things.

[prime @primoh_]

@joinshiftX shift

[prime @primoh_]

⚡️⚡️⚡️

[Google @Google]

Gemini 3.5 Flash is built to help you execute complex, agentic workflows.

3.5 Flash rivals flagship models to deliver frontier performance for agents and coding, at the lightning speeds you expect from the Flash series.

[prime @primoh_]

KD joining the 73-9 warriors…

2016 is coming though…

[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.

[prime @primoh_]

@burby_geek @MurrayHillGuy1 hey man, just throwing out options. i get it

[prime @primoh_]

@burby_geek @MurrayHillGuy1 chelsea piers

[Vlad Feinberg @FeinbergVlad]

How to land a job at a frontier lab

https://t.co/oHIqLgBMbC

[prime @primoh_]

I hate to say that I actually related to this for a bit, and still do when I'm with my tech friends.

The solution for this was to get some perspective:
- nyc
- meet people not in tech...
- travel a bit
- use your money to make experiences... remember what life is all about

[Deedy @deedydas]

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.

Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).

Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.

Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.

As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.

2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"

3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.

4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."

I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.

Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".

Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

[prime @primoh_]

@alexkehr @anothercohen @rileybrown Where would you go after?

[prime @primoh_]

scrolling has to be the worst drug of all time

[Higgy @higgyboson]

This was the last text I ever received from my 34 year old Son, Edward. It was exactly a year ago today.

Within hours he was gone. He decided he wasn't "OK" and he took his own life just after midnight.

He was fighting on many fronts- Relationship problems, financial worry and issues with self esteem.

I think about him 100 times a day. I'd do anything to get him back, even if it was just for 5 minutes.

I'd say all the things to him that I didn't say when I had the opportunity. It's too late now.

Please take care of your loved ones. Watch over them. Many are struggling. Many are thinking dark thoughts. Many will take the decision to end their own suffering.

They need help and understanding. They probably won't get it from the "system" so it may be up to you.

Give someone a call today to ask how they're doing. Tell them Edward suggested it.

[prime @primoh_]

@fin465 do things that don't scale

[prime @primoh_]

@notPotus42 @politicalmath these phases are some of the best parts