Chad Smith

Pro

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history. https://t.co/2zX5bHdhsa

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.

The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.

But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.

So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.

TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.

[Ejaaz @cryptopunk7213]

so just to recap this week (so far)

- musk industries is real (spacex, tesla, xai merger)

- clawdbot explosion leading to a bankrun on mac minis but then anthropic released their own version

- tesla dropped the bomb they’re halting production on model s and x to scale 1M optimus humanoid robots this year instead

- china dropped the mother of all open source models kimi k2.5 that turn video into production-ready apps but then google dropped a gemini update ON THE SAME DAY that does the same thing gg

- google said fuck it and also launched the worlds greatest world model genie and switched on gemini for 3.8B chrome browser users AND released alpha genome model that one-shots 1M dna base pairs for 3000 researchers across 160 countries AND teased new veo model

- microsoft crushed earnings, launched a new ai chip but stock still tanked 10% because they *only* grew rev 39%

- anthropic round 2X oversubbed raised to 20B 🏌️

- openai raising another $100B, 750B val 🏌️

- intel leaked they’re gonna help produce nvidias next gen feynman gpus - hello americas tsmc

- a robot (built by figure) washed the dishes with zero human interaction

- apple acquired stealth startup for $2B that can lip read - integrating their tech for new ai consumer airpods with cameras and mics

- demis confirms google glass 2.0 coming this summer

fckin hell

[a16z @a16z]

Charlie Munger's advice to Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen: “The key to success is dumb competition.”

“I always say that to people who are building AI companies. What a nightmare. Your competitors are literally AI geniuses.

You should find a way to apply AI in some other domain so you're not competing with the smartest people on planet Earth.”

@Flexport CEO @typesfast on The Knowledge Project Podcast with
@shaneparrish

[Paul Graham @paulg]

In many domains it's an advantage to have a culture of doing things fast and cheaply. But organizations never shift toward this as they age; if they shift, it's always in the other direction. So the only way to have this culture is to start with it and not lose it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

This image is increasingly our reality. On many important dimensions, China is ahead. If they win the technology race, they will win the economic and military ones as well. If the win all three, they become the leading force in the world. We can’t let that happen. We’re losing headed into the fourth quarter.

We need infinite power, infinite compute and simpler legislation if America is going to catch up to China and beat them.

Infinite power means preserving the status quo (ITC credits + transferability) while green-lighting as many new projects as possible across all power modes - nat gas, coal, nuclear, wind and solar.

Infinite compute means rapidly replacing Taiwanese dependencies on chip manufacturing with American ones.

Simpler legislation is self explanatory. Wading through myriad laws and rules that often conflict with itself makes moving quickly impossible. For every new rule or law, remove 10 old ones.

We need to move quickly but winning is still possible.

[Ben's Bites @bensbitesdaily]

Cloudflare’s new tool blocks AI bots, scrapers and crawlers with a single click

https://t.co/OwbcKWj5fP

[Chad Smith @techsmitty]

@Hilbe I’m in Canada. Early R1S reservation holder. Curious to see what number comes out. Thanks in advance.

[Wim Deblauwe @wimdeblauwe]

Microservices: what could have been a JOIN, is now a 1000 network calls

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Engine ignition and liftoff of Starship on Flight 4 as seen from the launch tower

[GURGAVIN @gurgavin]

BREAKING: NVIDIA IS NOW WORTH MORE THAN THE ENTIRE CANADIAN STOCK MARKET

CANADIAN STOCK MARKET -> $2.72 TRILLION

NVIDIA -> $2.81 TRILLION

$NVDA

[Chad Smith @techsmitty]

@echipiuk And it gets better…

https://t.co/od1PfG3Kjv

[SwiftOnSecurity @SwiftOnSecurity]

Hard drives will go down as a lost pinnacle technology we will lose the ability to produce. A literally unbelievable architecture and competency, like mechanical phone exchanges before. At our tech today now, this will increase more and more. You fall now – and you fall forever.

[Balaji @balajis]

BITCOIN > BUDGETING

We’re in the looting-the-treasury phase of imperial collapse. The dynamic described below isn’t just happening in San Francisco; it’s also the $100B wasted on Californian high speed rail and the rapidly growing $35T+ national debt at the federal level. And there are at least four responses.

1) Deny it’s happening and assert that it’s just business as usual.

2) Try to valiantly fix it through the political process.

3) Give up and simply feed yourself at the trough, either enthusiastically or resignedly.

4) Starve the beast with Bitcoin, which is money they can’t easily seize or print.

The last is radical but actually realistic. Because you aren’t going to defund the NGOs one by one. They are leeches attached to the body politic. SF alone is spending $10B+ per year to cover the city in syringes and feces. Now add up everything else at the state and federal level.

Too many are dependents, so nothing can be cut. Thus, the spending grows to the sky. Deficits are now at $10B/day and growing. And the system is heading for a financial reckoning. We don’t know exactly when — but Dalio sees it, Fink sees it, Elon sees it, and Druckenmiller sees it.

En route to that, everything gets pulled into the black hole of a ravenous state. It starts with inflation and ends in confiscation. At $10B/day, even a tech unicorn pays for just a few hours of this machine’s operation. Anything that can be seized will be consumed.

Think about the freezing of Russian assets and Canadian trucker bank accounts, the weaponization of Delaware against Elon and NY against Trump, and the legalization of squatting and homeless encampments. Private property will not be protected by the state in a bankrupt Blue America.

Fortunately, we have Bitcoin, which isn’t dependent on the state and can’t easily be seized. Every asset on a DC-controlled ledger may get pulled into the maw, but Bitcoin holders *may* be unaffected.

Of course, it’s not going to be as simple as that. The system can’t seize Bitcoin with a press of a key, so it may resort to knocking on doors. It won’t go down without a fight and it won’t let Bitcoin holders alone. As a consequence, Bitcoin Maximalism will win many converts.

But at least it’ll be obvious then that budgeting can’t save us. Only Bitcoin can.

[Mckay Wrigley @mckaywrigley]

This reads like the opening to a movie.

AGI is near.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Time flies by when you're using addictive apps and games. But many of the most important things in life have at least soft deadlines. This is a very dangerous mismatch. If you're not careful, a lot of windows are going to close on you.

[Edmonton Oilers @EdmontonOilers]

While you're here...

#NHLAllStarVote Zach Hyman ⭐

1 repost = 1 vote

[The Food Professor @FoodProfessor]

A month ago, the Bank of Canada initially reported that the carbon tax was responsible for a mere 0.15% increase in inflation. Dalhousie University sought an explanation, only to discover that these calculations were overly narrow in scope.

However, just yesterday, the Governor revised this figure to a staggering 0.6%, which, when considering the compounding impact of the tax over a four-year period, represents a fourfold increase. With the current inflation rate standing at 3.8%, the Bank of Canada now contends that the carbon tax contributes to a substantial 16% of our current inflation rate.

This adjustment underscores the significant impact of the carbon tax on inflation, and the earlier estimate by the Bank of Canada may be viewed as a misleading representation of its effects.

[Chad Smith @techsmitty]

@Yampeleg “Harder to sell an AI if it is deemed conscious” - there’s the line of the decade