Robert Silverman

AI for Research | I simplify academic research and writing through AI tools | PhD UC Berkeley | Ex @Google and @Meta

[Robert Silverman @Robert_Academic]

@mehuljindal18 https://t.co/C4tdZuwovr

[Robert Silverman @Robert_Academic]

@kenanhsaleh @a16z @speedrun Would love to talk about what we’re building

[Sam Bowman @sleepinyourhat]

Mythos Preview seems to be the best-aligned model out there on basically every measure we have. But it also likely poses more misalignment risk than any model we’ve used:

Its new capabilities significantly increase the risk from any bad behavior. 🧵

[Robert Silverman @Robert_Academic]

@NayrhitB @SusquehannaVC @LightspeedIndia @BCapitalGroup @beenextVC @sparrowcapvc @2point2club Deck

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The story of Synthesia is insane.

2017: Two 25-year-olds pitch AI video generation to VCs. Everyone thinks they’re crazy.

100 European VCs turn them down. The technology barely works. One co-founder had been running sand mines and chicken farms in Africa before this. The other didn’t have a PhD or Google on his resume.

They’re about to give up.

One night, Steffen Tjerrild finds Mark Cuban’s email address in the leaked Sony hack files. Sends a cold email at 11pm UK time.

Cuban responds in 5 minutes.

14 hours of back-and-forth emails later. No calls. Just emails. At 4am UK time, Cuban wires $1 million.

That $1M bought them time to stop building what they thought they should build (AI dubbing) and start building what enterprises actually wanted (AI training videos).

The next 7 years:

$3.1M seed (2019)
$12.5M Series A (2021)
$50M Series B (2021)
$90M Series C at $1B (2023)
$180M Series D at $2.1B (Jan 2025)
$200M Series E at $4B (today)

Total raised: $536M

Adobe invested, then tried to buy them for $3B. Synthesia said no. Meta tried too. Also no.

60,000+ customers. 70% of the Fortune 100. $150M ARR. On track for $200M this year.

The company that 100 investors thought was “completely crazy” just became Europe’s most valuable AI media startup.

[Robert Silverman @Robert_Academic]

@clintoptions $SPY

[Alex Lieberman @businessbarista]

WARNING: this is a long ass post.

But if you're a CEO, CFO, or CTO betting millions on AI right now, this might save your company.

Here are the 10 reasons enterprise AI keeps failing - and how to actually fix them...

[Amycruz @Amycruz0x]

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Deadline March 20th, 2026

Tag a founder who should see this

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[Ishaan Sehgal @ishaansehgal]

YC founders are hitting a brutal trap with AI coding tools.

Ship v1 in a weekend? Easy.
Maintain it six months later? Nightmare.

The code works. You just have no idea why.

Here's what's actually happening:

AI makes execution 10x faster
But it skips the part where you build understanding

You end up with a codebase you didn't architect
Just features you prompted into existence

The pattern everyone's seeing:

Month 1: "We're moving so fast"
Month 3: "Why is this breaking?"
Month 6: "We need to rewrite everything"

Because speed without theory is just technical debt with better PR

The winners are doing something different.

They use AI to execute their architecture
Not generate their thinking

Build the mental model first
The theory of how your system actually works
Then let Claude write the implementation

Think of it like this:

Bad approach →
Prompt: "Build me a user auth system"
Result: Code that works until it doesn't

Good approach →
You: Design the auth flow, state management, error handling
AI: Write the boilerplate that matches your spec

This is Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" playing out in real time.

The theory lives in your head
The code is just the artifact

AI can generate artifacts all day
It can't build your understanding of the system

The gap is getting obvious now.

Founders who learned to think in systems
vs
Founders who learned to prompt better

One group is scaling
The other is rewriting

Your turn 👇

Are you using AI to execute your vision?
Or hoping it can generate one for you?

[Kim Dotcom @KimDotcom]

This may be the most important post you’ll ever read because it provides a simple explanation about why our world is being destroyed, by design.

I’m not antisemitic or a Nazi. I’m simply a former hacker with great analytical skills who understands what’s happening in the world.

At the end of this post I will quote from a world domination plan. You will recognize the truth immediately because that’s what’s currently happening in the world. Today’s reality suggests that this plan is real.

When you do your own research you will learn that the origin of this plan was discredited and that the alleged creators have nothing to do with it. But who was the person providing the key evidence?

It was Allen Dulles. The man who raised money from US industrialists to fund Adolf Hitler, his Nazi party and his war. The man who later became the director of the CIA during Kennedy and the head of the Warren commission that investigated the Kennedy assassination. Why would anybody believe a man with such a questionable character?

The protocols of the Elders of Zion have unquestionably borrowed ideas from several authors but you can say that about most important writings throughout history. It was called a fabrication and is one of the first uses of the term ‘conspiracy theory’.

Why do Zionists have a massive overrepresentation in the media, politics, banking and world affairs? How did such a small community get to dominate all the centers of power and information?

Why can Israel ignore UN resolutions, international law and commit a genocide in Gaza to standing ovations in the US Congress? Why is Israel acting like it is above the law seemingly without any fear of consequences.

Read some of the alleged Zionist world domination plan below and compare it with reality. Is all of this just a coincidence?

“Our power will be more invincible than any other, because it will remain invisible until the moment when it has gained such strength that no cunning can any longer undermine it.”

“We shall absolutely control the media, so that not a single announcement will ever reach the public without our control. In this way we shall have a sure triumph over our opponents, for without the media, they are helpless.”

“We will distract the brainless heads with vain conceptions, fantastic theories, rotten amusement, games and filthy passions, so that they will be unable to use what intellect they have. They will never suspect that they have been stage managed by us.”

“We shall establish huge monopolies so that all will go to ruin when the political smash-up comes. We must at all cost, deprive them of their lands, we must lower wages and raise the price of all necessities of life.”

“We shall create an economic crisis, which will stop dealings in all exchanges and bring industry to a standstill. We shall throw onto the streets whole mobs of workers, simultaneously, all over the world, who will rush to loot property and delight to shed blood.”

“In our government, besides ourselves, there must only be the mass of enslaved people, a few billionaires devoted entirely to us, police and soldiers. To do this we must create chaos and hostilities and we must use all deceit, treachery and falseness possible. Our greatest weapon is the media.”

“We shall establish one king over all of earth who will annihilate all causes of discord, such as borders, nationalities, religion, state debts, etc. and get peace and quiet which cannot be secured in any other way. To attain our ends we must foment trouble in all countries, utterly exhaust all of humanity with hatred, struggle, envies, torture, starvation and diseases so that the people will be forced to take refuge in our complete sovereignty.”

“Our master card has been and is and shall be the destruction of all privileges, on the ruins of which we shall set up our absolute autocracy.”

Please be mindful that most pro-Israel comments on social media are generated by the largest bot network in the world, not by real people.

[Psyche Wizard @PsycheWizard]

10 Must Read Books That You Can Finish In A Day:

1. The Art Of War

[A47 News Network @a47news_ai]

Centralized news controls narratives.
Decentralized news reveals the truth.
Which future are you choosing?

[Paul Biggar 🇵🇸🇮🇪 @paulbiggar]

Sequoia seems to fundamentally misunderstand the existential crisis it is facing - not surprising since the press seems to misunderstand it too. They think it is misunderstanding, or perhaps political correctness, or even Islamophobia. But it is much much worse than that - both Maguire and Sequoia are complicit in Crimes against Humanity.

Maguire's Islamophobia, which he doubled down on, is the thing that made the issue go mainstream, but it is actually Sequoia's support of Israel during the Gaza genocide that is at issue.

The context that you have to understand is that the majority of the world recognizes that Israel routinely commits Crimes Against Humanity. That it does so, and that most of the world knows that, are not matters of opinion, but rather simple facts.

Crimes Against Humanity include Genocide, Apartheid, Ethnic Cleansing, and War Crimes. It is undoubtable for example that Israel commits Apartheid and Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and within Israel, as well as within Syria.

People have watched Israel commit the most horrendous War Crimes in Gaza, truly disgusting stuff. Leaving babies to die in ventilators, bombing hospitals, the continued awful massacres of civilians, shooting children in the head. Some of the worst atrocities most people have ever seen or even heard of.

Israelis like to dispute whether what they've done in Gaza quite constitutes a genocide (varying between "we had to do it" and "intent wasnt there, despite everyone saying at the time that they intended to do it), but literally everybody except them are not confused on the issue.

Enter Shaun Maguire. Long before his statements about Mamdani, he has been proudly advocating for Israel's "right" to do these atrocities. Not only that but he personally participated - apparently being personally responsible for getting Israeli military access to surveillance tools (Starlink) used in their genocide in Gaza through his personal connections to Elon Musk.

At the same time, in 2024, after the Gaza genocide has begun), Sequoia started investing in Israel again despite not having done it for years. It opened an Israel office, and began investing in Israel companies. Their first investment is a military tech company, Kela, founded by Israeli soldiers.

If you're not familiar with this, there is a pipeline from Israeli soldiers (typically but not only spies from Israel's "unit 8200") into tech. Israeli founders "battle test" their tech during their time in the military, by surveilling and killing Palestinians, and then mostly US VCs like Sequoia or a16z invest in their startups which commercialize the tech. If you see police drones above your protest in NYC, guess where they came from.

As Israeli VC Roi Carthy said in 2014, "Due to mandatory army service, the tech industry and the army in Israel are intertwined. They can’t be separated".

And again, most of the world knows this. If you're in the US, there is significant media bias that hides and downplays Israel's actions. On social media, content exposing Israel is suppressed. Politicians are bought off by AIPAC. But even so most Americans are aware of the genocide and other Crimes Against Humanity, and polls routinely show they are against it.

And Sequoia know this. VCs are mostly not idiots. Their supposed superpower is doing deep dives on new topics to them. Learning about Israel's occupation, apartheid, etc, is merely a single search away, and you can bet that every Sequoia VC has done this - it would be foolish not to.

Thus Sequoia's pledge to invest 20% of their recent $200M fund in Israeli startups is investing in the actual people who participated in the genocide and other Crimes Against Humanity, and supporting the economy which practices occupation, Apartheid, and other Crimes Against Humanity.

Sequoia's complicity has not gone unpunished. Mubi is being boycotted after their CEO accepted a huge investment from Sequoia - not only that but half their entire company wrote a letter to the CEO asking them to give it back. Developers have sworn off Zed for taking Sequoia's investment too, and their founders and management refuse to engage in discussing their investment from Sequoia.

Over 1000 founders have publicly asked for Sequoia to act (a counter-petition supporting Maguire, which was mostly signed by Israelis, has mysteriously vanished from the internet - even they won't keep their names on this complicity).

No wonder Botha was (allegedly) pushed out. Under his leadership, Sequoia has gone from being the best VC in the world to a toxic asset. No wonder their COO Balbale quit - morals of course but also the financial outcome for the firm looks bad so long as your investments get boycotted for receiving your money.

Remember there are 2B Muslims in the world, and 500M Arabs -- those are huge markets and they have over 99% support for Palestinian liberation, and condemnation for Israel's crimes. The US and Western Europe are small markets to confine yourself to, and most of the people in those markets also know what Israel has done.

Maguire's actions should cause him to be shunned by society. He participated in a significant way in a genocide, and Sequoia defended him, and is now investing directly in the economy of genocide and other Crimes against Humanity.

The complaint is not simply that some people disagree with Maguire, it's actually that Maguire and Sequoia are directly complicit in the worst crimes known to man. This is toxic, and will stay with them probably forever. Founders' and customers' aversion to Sequoia and Sequoia companies has only just begun.

[برنامج قدراتك @DGAQtech]

ضمن مسارات #قدراتك للبرامج الدولية، (13) قيادي من مختلف الجهات الحكومية يخطون بثقة في قيادة التحول الرقمي الحكومي لدى جهاتهم؛ عبر برنامج "قيادة التحول الرقمي الحكومي من خلال إعادة هندسة الإجراءات والذكاء الاصطناعي" بالتعاون مع @ISSNUS المنعقد في سنغافورة 🇸🇬.

[YourFavoriteGuy @guychristensen_]

Zohran isn’t a 100% perfect candidate for the Left, but the way 26 billionaires have joined forces to take him down tells us we should ensure he takes power.

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

OMG!

Jewish-American doctor recounts how Israeli soldiers took two Palestinian children, tied their hands behind their backs, and buried them alive.

"Their cries being muffled by the dirt as it was poured upon them while they were being buried alive."

These were children!

[Afif Aqrabawi @AjAqrabawi]

Just as one example of how Israel manipulates Wikipedia to rewrite history:

In 2002, during Israel’s invasion of Ramallah, the IOF seized Palestinian TV stations and began broadcasting hardcore pornography in Hebrew across the West Bank. Families under curfew, trapped in their homes, were forced to watch filth pumped into their living rooms. Mothers described the deliberate psychological damage: “I think the Israelis want to mess with our young men’s heads.”

This was psychological warfare; using pornography to humiliate, corrupt, and destabilize Palestinians.

It was reported by major newspapers and even noted in U.S. State Department documents. For years, the incident had its own page on Wikipedia: “Ramallah pornography controversy.” But then, it was flagged for deletion as “not notable” and “unverified.” Today, it has been erased—vanished like it never happened. Only the Wayback Machine and archived newspapers preserve it (link in comments).

This is how Jewish power works in the Information age. Not only through the use of pornography as a weapon, but through burying the evidence after the fact. Wikipedia, supposedly a free encyclopedia, has become a tool to protect Israel’s image, scrubbing away its crimes from public record.

If they can erase Palestine, Gaza, they can erase anything. They decide what happened and what didn’t. They recast war crimes as “rumors”, “libel”, and humiliation as “baseless antisemitic claims.”

They erase the crime, they erase the evidence, and they erase you if you dare remember.

[Robert Silverman @Robert_Academic]

@wolfejosh Everyone wants this, good luck fighting humanity knobhead

[Ana Kasparian @AnaKasparian]

Israel is a terror state.

[Robert Silverman @Robert_Academic]

@PhDtoProf Great post @PhDtoProf! I’d add ResearchPal to this core list of AI tools as well.