Shea Licata

[Shea Licata @slicata23]

@BillAckman So true. One of the hardest parts is that the meter runs silently. We are either too young or too busy to hear it. You never feel the time being spent — you just look up one day and it’s the tail end. Drawing the chart is a helpful way to step back and see it before it’s gone.

[Shea Licata @slicata23]

Great video if you really want to learn how LLMs work from training, tokenization, evaluation… etc. Highly recommend watching.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

A really important and interesting interview with @JeffBezos and @andrewrsorkin about tax policy, AI, the economy, and space. Unfortunately it is only in audio form.

Bezos argues for eliminating tax on the bottom 50%, making the case that the 3% of tax revenue from this cohort should be made up for by eliminating government waste and fraud. I agree.

He says that instead of vilifying the top 1% who pay 40% of Federal taxes, we should have a real debate about tax policy.

Is making the tax system even more progressive the right answer? Will it generate more revenues or less?

Or should we endeavor to eliminate waste and shrink the size of government in order to eliminate tax on an even greater percentage of Americans?

On AI, he makes a powerful case for more jobs, in fact a labor shortage, due to growth driven by increases in AI-driven productivity.

A must listen.

The interview begins at 18:33.

https://t.co/GcIrtQrVx5

[Shea Licata @slicata23]

Trading and gambling continue to get younger and younger. One may call it democratizing, the other may call it stealing from the future.

Apps like like Robinhood (trading), Polymarket (gambling) and whatnot (breaks/rips) make it very easy for people to throw away their dollars

[Shea Licata @slicata23]

Just finished Range by David Epstein - loved his counter take on the 10,000 hours. He argues that in most fields — especially complex, unpredictable ones — generalists who develop broad experience across many domains ultimately outperform narrow specialists. Do you agree?

[Shea Licata @slicata23]

It’s that much easier to scale & grow now. AI has changed the productivity landscape and we are now seeing that play out more holistically. Lean and mean is the new motto. Many companies over hired during COVID to secure their workforce which has largely unraveled now. Thoughts?

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

A company with $24 billion in revenue and 24% gross profit growth just cut 4,000 people while raising 2026 guidance to $12.2 billion in gross profit. Stock ripped 20% after hours. The market added roughly $6 billion in market cap. That's ~$1.5 million in enterprise value created per eliminated role.

Block is the canary in the coal mine. And they're not alone.

ASML cut 1,700 jobs last month while reporting record orders and said they were "choosing to make these changes at a moment of strength." Salesforce cut 5,000 after AI agents started handling 50% of customer interactions. Amazon cut 16,000 in January on top of 14,000 in October. Every one of these companies was growing when they did it.

Dorsey said the quiet part out loud: intelligence tools paired with smaller teams have already changed what it means to run a company. He chose one massive cut over repeated rounds because, his words, gradual cuts destroy morale and trust. The restructuring charges are $450-500 million. At the operating income Block is guiding, that pays for itself in two quarters. After that, pure margin expansion. That's why Wall Street rewarded it instantly.

Here's what's coming. Goldman estimates AI is already responsible for 5,000 to 10,000 net monthly job losses in exposed U.S. industries. Citigroup is planning 20,000 cuts. Dow just slashed 4,500. 40% of employers surveyed say they expect to reduce headcount because of AI. 30,700 tech jobs gone in the first six weeks of 2026 alone.

Block went from 10,000 to 6,000 while growing revenue and raising guidance. Every CEO running a company with more than a few thousand employees is doing this math tonight. The canary just stopped singing.

[Ejaaz @cryptopunk7213]

yo so just to recap the week:

- google released gemini 3.1 but it disappointed tf out of people who claimed its not as good as they advertise

- BUT THEN google dropped an AI song generation model which kinda slaps (Lyria 3) AND a new feature that 1-shots product photoshoots putting photographers (and fashion models) out of a job (Google Pomelli)

- Microsoft pioneered a way to STORE DATA ON GLASS - stores data for up to 10,000 fucking years (🤯) and way cheaper than using silica.

- Taalus fused an ai model DIRECTLY into silicon processing 17,000 tokens PER SECOND which is 17X faster than openai’s quickest model but 10 TIMES CHEAPER than nvidia blackwell gpus. (smaller models tho)

- Apple is releasing 3 new AI devices: glasses, airpods with cameras and a pendant.

- anthropic wiped $10B off the stock market after launching an ai that finds and help fixes security flaws in your code. cybersecurity stocks dumped <1 hour after launch.

- BUT THEN Pentagon threatened to blacklist anthropic for failing to provide them uncensored access to claude.

- xAI dropped grok 4.20 spawning 16 specialised ai agents that work together to solve any prompt. the model self-improves EVERY WEEK.

- scientists discovered dna in meteorites suggesting humans could’ve originated from outer space (what)

- Meta dropped Manus Agents going head-to-head with OpenClaw.

- a cardiologist won 3rd-place in anthropic’s hackathon after vibe coding an app that helps his patients understand and act on their medical results. fucking hero.

- china announced a cure for diabetes 1 & 2 after creating stem cells that make insulin

- Moonshot labs is raising $500M immediately after raising $700M LAST WEEK.

- ex-Deepmind researcher raised europes LARGEST ever seed round $1B at $4B back right as europe announces $13B new fund to catch up with america.

- Stripe’s ai agents autonomously merged 1300 pull requests (up 30% from last week) suggesting top companies are now recursively improving using AI.

dear f*cking goodness GOODNIGHT

[Shea Licata @slicata23]

This part was a little chilling “We had overestimated the value of “human relationships”. Turns out that a lot of what people called relationships was simply friction with a friendly face.”

[Shea Licata @slicata23]

Super interesting thought article that is worth the read

[Citrini @citrini]

JUNE 2028.

The S&amp;P is down 38% from its highs. Unemployment just printed 10.2%. Private credit is unraveling. Prime mortgages are cracking. AI didn’t disappoint. It exceeded every expectation.

What happened?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

https://t.co/JzzwCrbJgS

[Shea Licata @slicata23]

But if AI can make certain tasks frictionless with zero attention to relationships will that hold? If one can build a relationship with AI, does that replace the human connections?

[Shea Licata @slicata23]

While not all of this will come true, it’s easy to see a path to a number of these scenarios playing out. I always say that relationship business are well insulated. We are social people and those relationships satisfy certain needs and desires.

[Shea Licata @slicata23]

@HuffPost Seriously one of the worst takes - stop making everything a political statement

[Jim Hanson @JimHansonDC]

This is how to win a gold medal for the USA
Completely wicked move by Megan Keller
Congrats to our Womens Hockey team

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

This is the best post-game interview in the history of sports.

24 year-old Jack Hughes from Florida, who scored the game winning golden goal against Canada for Team USA:

“This is about our country. I love the USA. I’m proud of Team America…”

🇺🇸

[Shea Licata @slicata23]

Let’s see how this plays out…

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Apple will either acquire this or sherlock it within 18 months. They can’t let a third party own the fastest path from idea to App Store.

Rork just abandoned their entire React Native stack for native Swift. This company raised $2.8M from a16z building cross-platform apps from prompts. Rork Max throws that away and bets everything on Apple-native. That’s a complete technical pivot, not an iteration.

The “replaces Xcode” line is the real announcement. Xcode is a 21-year-old IDE that Apple has zero competitive pressure to modernize. Every iOS developer complains about it. Nobody builds against it because Apple controls the entire toolchain from compiler to App Store submission. Rork is betting that Claude Code can generate Swift well enough to bypass that monopoly entirely.

The timing tells you something. They chose Claude Code and Opus 4.6 over GPT-5, which means they tested both and Anthropic’s code generation won for native Swift output. That’s a live benchmark result disguised as a partnership announcement.

If Rork Max can actually one-shot native Swift apps for iPhone, Watch, iPad, TV, and Vision Pro from a browser, the IDE, the build system, the simulator, the provisioning profiles… all of that complexity collapses into a website.

There are 34 million registered Apple developers. Most of them hate Xcode. Rork just showed them the exit, and Apple can’t afford to let someone else own the door.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

Th Epstein Files have reached the McCarthy-era stage where innocent people are being slandered. We need to distinguish between evildoers and those who ‘appear’ in the Epstein files, but have done nothing wrong.

I am hearing of totally innocent people being forced to resign from boards etc. because their name appears somewhere in the documents. Let’s return to a world where people are presumed innocent until they are proven guilty.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Anthropic just walked into Microsoft's house and asked for the keys.

Cowork launched on macOS a month ago. Within weeks, The Information reported the launch "reverberated through Microsoft's ranks." Now Anthropic is bringing full feature parity to Windows, the platform Microsoft has spent $60M+ in TV ads and $37.5B per quarter in AI capex trying to own with Copilot.

The math on Microsoft's side is brutal. 450 million Microsoft 365 paid seats, 15 million Copilot subscribers. That's a 3.3% conversion rate on their own customer base. Copilot's paid market share dropped from 18.8% to 11.5% in six months while the product was pre-installed on every Windows 11 machine on earth. They spent billions and 96.7% of users said no.

The reason is structural. Copilot inherits Microsoft 365's file permission system through the Graph API. If your company has lax internal permissions (and most do, with 15%+ of business-critical files improperly accessible), Copilot surfaces sensitive data to anyone who asks. Enterprises are pausing deployments to run months-long data governance audits before they can turn the thing on.

Cowork sidesteps this entirely. Sandboxed to a single folder you designate. No enterprise-wide permission architecture required. No Graph API inheritance. You point Claude at a directory and describe the outcome. Anthropic built it in a week and a half using Claude Code, which tells you everything about how they view the marginal cost of shipping new surfaces.

This is the classic platform unbundling play: find the incumbent's structural weakness (Microsoft's permission nightmare), build a product that routes around it (folder-scoped agent), and land on their platform (Windows) before they can fix the root cause. Microsoft can't simplify Copilot's permission model without rebuilding how M365 handles file access across tenants. That takes years.

Anthropic is converting Microsoft's demand generation into Claude subscriptions. At $100-200/month for Max, they only need a fraction of those 450 million seats to build a massive business on Microsoft's home turf.

[Shea Licata @slicata23]

@BojanRadojici10 Interested

[Shea Licata @slicata23]

Wow, that’s saying something - well done @sundarpichai

[Marques Brownlee @MKBHD]

Apple: "“After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models"

https://t.co/zS3NMuhgK6