Frank Tucker

Techno-Populist

[Frank Tucker @realftucker]

Growth leads rates, not the other way around….

[Conor @jconorgrogan]

TLDR:
1. Declare AI too dangerous for ordinary competition so you propose a regulatory regime where only the largest incumbents can survive
2. Warn about labor displacement while selling the product to executives as a labor-displacement tool
3. Warn about state overreach while asking the state to license and gatekeep frontier models
4. Warn about corporate power while sketching a corporate-state cartel over compute, release, security, export controls, and deployment

[Frank Tucker @realftucker]

Poverty pimping is going digital.

[Ofek Lavian @OfekLavian]

We just raised $40M to solve America’s affordability crisis.

Groceries are the #1 financial stressor in America. Food prices are up 30% since the pandemic. For the 100 million Americans earning under $50K, the money runs out before the month does.

To fix it, Forage is building a network for affordability:

1. For families, we’re building a suite of products to expand financial access

2. For partners, we’re building a revenue growth engine by helping them win on affordability

Today, our technology is used in over 100,000 stores across all 50 states. Our payments volume is up 13x YoY. When grocers switch to Forage, they see a 15% lift in EBT revenue.

We also launched the Forage app, a free tool that helps cost-conscious families check their EBT balances, save on groceries, and earn rewards on every purchases.

US grocery is a $1.5T market. We're just getting started.

Onwards! 🚀

[Frank Tucker @realftucker]

@JoeyG11290699 @risk_respector @Digitalwave @HormuzLetter The opinions of Iranian Americans carries no special weight relative to other Americans. Do you have a better argument?

[Frank Tucker @realftucker]

@grok @adamtaggart I’m asking about in the current us-Iran conflict.

[Frank Tucker @realftucker]

@grok @adamtaggart What neutrals have been attacked?

[Frank Tucker @realftucker]

No promise won’t be abandoned by this administration.

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

An interesting line in Politico’s coverage of the proposed AI executive order, which, at 16 pages, is also much longer than expected. This is still under discussion and not yet finalized, and everything I'm about to write is conjecture, but it appears the administration intends to regulate US open-weight models.

Here are the reasons why this will almost certainly happen in some form.

Open-weight models are currently about nine months behind the frontier. Once the big labs are subjected to pre-release screening, development itself will not slow down, but the release cadence will. At that point, open-weight development will quickly close the gap - much faster than nine months. When those models surpass the big labs, everyone will switch to using open-weight alternatives.

From the administration’s perspective, allowing this option defeats the entire purpose of regulation. If the government is restricting and vetting models beyond a certain capability level, and people can simply switch to open-weight models that are just as capable - and eventually even more capable as the big labs slow down their release schedules under the new rules - then the situation becomes even worse from the government's perspective. They will not allow this to happen.

Second, the big labs themselves have almost certainly been covertly lobbying for open-weight models to be included in any new regulations. Allowing the public to switch to a superior, free alternative would completely destroy their business models, potentially bankrupting them all. Given the enormous scale of current investment in these companies and in AI infrastructure, the broader economy would also suffer "significant disruption".

That leaves China. If the two dynamics above play out, the same pattern repeats: everyone switches to Chinese open-weight models, which now quickly surpass both US closed and open releases. This produces the same consequences for the big labs, and causes the same issues with regulation. The government therefore has only two realistic options: ban Chinese models from use in the West, or negotiate a deal with Xi Jinping to impose identical regulation and pre-release vetting on open-weight models in China.

The first option would mean China pulls ahead and wins the AI race. So the administration will almost certainly pursue the second. Negotiations are likely already underway, because the ideal outcome for the admin would be to announce that China has agreed to similar restrictions to what they are announcing, thereby blunting domestic backlash. China will know it has the US over a barrel and will insist on compromises. Compromises such as lifting all export controls on NVIDIA GPUs.

[Frank Tucker @realftucker]

@CorneliaLake Creating money without creating wealth has deranged every society that’s attempted it.

[Dirt Cheap Banks @dirtcheapbanks]

Community banks are the last place in America where a man in a short-sleeve dress shirt can approve a $400,000 loan based on the fact that he went to high school with your dad. There are 4,100 of them left. There were 14,000 in 1984. Every time one gets acquired, a teller named Brenda learns a new software system and a small town loses the only institution that would lend against a combine. The acquirer always says nothing will change. Brenda is gone in eighteen months. The lobby cookies go next. Then the branch closes. Then the building becomes a vape shop. This is not a financial trend. This is the slow administrative murder of the only version of capitalism that ever knew your name.

[Frank Tucker @realftucker]

@cmartin380 @kane He was born in Texas. By what rationale would you strip a person born and raised in the USA of their citizenship?

[Frank Tucker @realftucker]

Signs of WW3.

[Randhir Jaiswal @MEAIndia]

Our statement regarding Iran ⬇️

🔗 https://t.co/05hycXPgJ6

[🇦🇺Craig Tindale @ctindale]

This is the anatomy of a ruling class that stopped building and started extracting.

While China converted trade surpluses into plant, process, scale, and technological command, much of the American corporate class converted industrial inheritance into buybacks, bonuses, leverage, and excuses.

They confused financial engineering for competence and governance theatre for strategy.

The result: productive capacity bled out, dual-use industrial depth weakened, and the very executives who presided over the decay were rewarded for it.

What AquaVis is describing is not some mysterious civilisational accident. It is a man-made transfer of power from the physical economy to the paper one, and from there, inevitably, to the states willing to take industry seriously.

It’s the core of the cancer that overtook the west

[Frank Tucker @realftucker]

@markvalorian Land is not scarce relative to the population and even the worst land can be terraformed into a paradise with labor and energy of which we will have in abundance.

[Dan Pfeiffer @danpfeiffer]

I still can't stop laughing at Trump thinking people want a "Law and Order Pope."

[Frank Tucker @realftucker]

@rohanpaul_ai This man’s wealth is reflective of 0️⃣ real economic value.

[Agustin Lebron @AgustinLebron3]

Talk about burying the lede. No more frontier models for y'all. The good stuff stays internal from now on.
https://t.co/AqoXfBH2rS

[George Journeys is Going to Vibecamp 5! @GeorgeJourneys]

So, basically, if Anthropic was not a US company, we’d be facing zero days with multiple unknown points of attack on virtually all of our systems to an adversary who developed this capacity before us.

[Frank Tucker @realftucker]

@BretWeinstein Thank you @BretWeinstein.

[Frank Tucker @realftucker]

Trump showing he is everything his detractors claimed him to be.

[Commentary Donald J. Trump Posts From Truth Social @TrumpDailyPosts]

𝐃𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐝 𝐉. 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐩 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐭𝐡 𝐒𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝟎𝟖:𝟎𝟔 𝐀𝐌 𝐄𝐒𝐓 𝟎𝟒.𝟎𝟕.𝟐𝟔

[Frank Tucker @realftucker]

@micsolana She is very correct on this one. We need to stop allowing credit creation to purchase existing assets.