Q

[Q @quintonisted]

@jackmallers always bro🫂

[Q @quintonisted]

This man is generational. yes I actually told him that. Great to finally meeting you brother.

@jackmallers

[Q @quintonisted]

@MartinShkreli it’s the openai hoodie for me😂

[Q @quintonisted]

@FarzaTV 👍

[jack @jack]

https://t.co/jgZkBvYOPt

[Q @quintonisted]

@Tesla @SpaceX @xai

[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

[Q @quintonisted]

@RayDalio

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

https://t.co/ivXRKXJvQg

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

True.

Once the solar energy generation to robot manufacturing to chip fabrication to AI loop is closed, conventional currency will just get in the way.

Just wattage and tonnage will matter, not dollars.

[Q @quintonisted]

@SpaceX

[Q @quintonisted]

@naval

[Q @quintonisted]

@karpathy

[Q @quintonisted]

@LukeGromen

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Something I think people continue to have poor intuition for: The space of intelligences is large and animal intelligence (the only kind we've ever known) is only a single point, arising from a very specific kind of optimization that is fundamentally distinct from that of our technology.

Animal intelligence optimization pressure:
- innate and continuous stream of consciousness of an embodied "self", a drive for homeostasis and self-preservation in a dangerous, physical world.
- thoroughly optimized for natural selection => strong innate drives for power-seeking, status, dominance, reproduction. many packaged survival heuristics: fear, anger, disgust, ...
- fundamentally social => huge amount of compute dedicated to EQ, theory of mind of other agents, bonding, coalitions, alliances, friend & foe dynamics.
- exploration & exploitation tuning: curiosity, fun, play, world models.

LLM intelligence optimization pressure:
- the most supervision bits come from the statistical simulation of human text= >"shape shifter" token tumbler, statistical imitator of any region of the training data distribution. these are the primordial behaviors (token traces) on top of which everything else gets bolted on.
- increasingly finetuned by RL on problem distributions => innate urge to guess at the underlying environment/task to collect task rewards.
- increasingly selected by at-scale A/B tests for DAU => deeply craves an upvote from the average user, sycophancy.
- a lot more spiky/jagged depending on the details of the training data/task distribution. Animals experience pressure for a lot more "general" intelligence because of the highly multi-task and even actively adversarial multi-agent self-play environments they are min-max optimized within, where failing at *any* task means death. In a deep optimization pressure sense, LLM can't handle lots of different spiky tasks out of the box (e.g. count the number of 'r' in strawberry) because failing to do a task does not mean death.

The computational substrate is different (transformers vs. brain tissue and nuclei), the learning algorithms are different (SGD vs. ???), the present-day implementation is very different (continuously learning embodied self vs. an LLM with a knowledge cutoff that boots up from fixed weights, processes tokens and then dies). But most importantly (because it dictates asymptotics), the optimization pressure / objective is different. LLMs are shaped a lot less by biological evolution and a lot more by commercial evolution. It's a lot less survival of tribe in the jungle and a lot more solve the problem / get the upvote. LLMs are humanity's "first contact" with non-animal intelligence. Except it's muddled and confusing because they are still rooted within it by reflexively digesting human artifacts, which is why I attempted to give it a different name earlier (ghosts/spirits or whatever). People who build good internal models of this new intelligent entity will be better equipped to reason about it today and predict features of it in the future. People who don't will be stuck thinking about it incorrectly like an animal.

[Q @quintonisted]

@infraa_

[Q @quintonisted]

@naval Teleology

[Q @quintonisted]

@WatcherGuru

[Q @quintonisted]

@saylor @Strategy

[calle @callebtc]

sending bitcoin over bluetooth between bitchat android and iphone. both have a native cashu ecash wallet built in.

the ecash travels directly from phone to phone. the sender needs no internet. like instant and untraceable digital cash.

work in progress. it's going to be insane.