Ken Griffin just revealed the only thing he actually looks for when hiring at Citadel.
Not your GPA. Not your pedigree. Not your internship list.
He wants one type of person: the athlete who excelled academically.
Here's why that combination matters to him.
The athlete knows what it takes to win. They've also felt what it's like to lose. That experience of pushing through both, and still showing up, is something you can't learn in a classroom.
The academic side tells him something different. It tells him the person knows how to manage their time. That they have the discipline to apply their mind under pressure. That when things get hard, they'll find a way through.
Griffin calls it perseverance and grit paired with high aspirations.
That's the profile he's building Citadel's AI team around.
Think about what that means for where the talent wars in finance and AI are headed.
The people running the biggest pots of money in the world aren't just looking for quants anymore.
Built for the mission. Built for speed.
Defense Unicorns is thrilled to announce our partnership with @spiremotorsport and @Mc_Driver for the NASCAR Cup Series inaugural visit to the streets of Naval Base Coronado in San Diego.
"Defense Unicorns was built by veterans for the mission, and sponsoring Michael McDowell in the NASCAR Cup Series race at Naval Base Coronado is our way of showing up for the people who make that mission possible and saying thank you." — @RobCSlaughter
Watch the car reveal. 👇
See you at the track. 🦄🔥
“Defense Unicorns, the Airgap Software Company, in partnership with the United States Air Force, successfully demonstrated a key enabler for continuous software delivery to the F-22 Raptor.
For the first time, software in the F-22 open mission system compute enclave was installed and upgraded on the aircraft in a matter of minutes.”
The next generation of warfare will be software defined.
Your ability to update your software on demand is your ability to adjust and adapt in the battlefield.
If you can deploy capabilities in real time, on-demand, and by the brave men and women serving in uniform operating these systems, you fundamentally have a capability none of our adversaries can keep up with.
At Defense Unicorns we are making software a strategic deterrent.
We can’t always talk about the technology and systems we support at Defense Unicorns 🦄 But every once in a while, we’re able to get an approved press release to give the world 🌎 a glimpse.
Read more in the press release:
https://t.co/WWAZ8Cktw9
🚀Warhacker applications are OPEN!
We’re calling on innovators from the military, industry, academia, and non-profits to join a first-of-its-kind working session built to break through real-world challenges.
Applications are open now, don’t wait.
https://t.co/3kjc0rh1gr
The Iran strikes make the Anthropic fight and that 5:01pm Fri deadline make a lot more sense
The Pentagon wasn’t arguing about hypothetical use cases. They needed unrestricted AI access for an operation they were launching THAT SAME NIGHT
Friday: Ban Anthropic. Sign OpenAI. Secure classified AI access.
Saturday: Bombs falling on Tehran.
Two aircraft carriers. Dozens of strike aircraft. Weeks of military buildup.
They weren’t debating the future of AI in warfare. They were fully preparing to use it
We are officially a UNICORN!!
Announcing our $136M Series B raise. $1B+ valuation. Led by Bain Capital Tech Opportunities.
Read the full release ��� https://t.co/tLMwbbJnmx
@BadCodeOnly @RobCSlaughter @andrewg_xyz
John: @ssankar told this amazing anecdote about the early days of Palantir. They built a piece of software. He goes to deliver it, and the machine that they tried to install it on had like 1MB of RAM or something, and so it just couldn't run the software.
@DefenseUnicorns CEO @RobCSlaughter:
"In these military systems, if you want to do a software update, you effectively have to update the hardware."
"That's why the hardware is so out of date, because for the new iterations of systems, they've struggled to integrate it. It hasn't worked successfully. So that latest and greatest program that was supposed to deliver, didn't deliver. So you're stuck with the legacy system."
"That happens two or three times, and before you know it, people are still stuck on Windows 95."
Just a reminder on why nuclear weapons will forever drive national politics.
The GBU-57, the “bunker buster” that was used operationally for the first time to target Iran’s nuclear sites, has a 5,300 pound explosive charge.
That’s the equivalent of about 2 metric tons of TNT 🧨
For context, “Little Boy” the first nuclear bomb was 15KT (kilotons) or 15,000 tons of TNT. That’s about 10,000 more powerful than the GBU-57.
Current nuclear ☢️ weapons for most countries ranges between 100 KT to 1MT (megaton), meaning most modern nuclear weapons are 10-100x more powerful than the ones first dropped in world war 2.
To put that in perspective, that’s 100,000 to 1,000,000 times more powerful than the GBU-57.
For more context, a firework is about 100 grams or 0.1 kg of TNT 🧨
Putting it on log scale:
GBU-57 is about 4 orders of magnitude from a firework 🧨
GBU-57 is 5-6 orders of magnitude from a nuclear ☢️ bomb
Meaning the GBU-57 has more in common with a firework 🎇 than a nuclear ☢️ weapon in terms of pure thermodynamic yield
This is why nuclear bombs are very scary. And why threats of developing, using, or distributing nuclear weapons gets taken very seriously.