The Upside

Growing newsletter for entrepreneurs turning AI into real businesses

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

https://t.co/TjAchMVhG0

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

One day after Meta's $145B AI bet rattled investors...

Leopold Aschenbrenner's $45B AI hedge fund reportedly unwound its public portfolio after AI infrastructure stocks sold off.

The AI thesis didn't break.

Higher interest rates make it harder to justify spending hundreds of billions on chips, data centers, and power today for returns that may take years to arrive.

That's why:

• Meta sold off
• AI stocks dropped
• Leopold got squeezed
• Long-term AI didn't change

The companies building AI are still spending.

The market is just becoming a lot less patient.

[Ivo @IvoAI3]

https://t.co/OSNv3iT0X2

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

@IvoAI3 Good post.

[Ivo @IvoAI3]

https://t.co/OSNv3iT0X2

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

If you read @TheUpsideAI then you know this.

$5.5 BILLION PORTFOLIO AT 23. THE AI BET THAT MADE SILICON VALLEY PAY ATTENTION.

They covered how Leopold Aschenbrenner went from managing hundreds of millions to building one of the fastest-growing AI-focused funds.

His thesis:

AI is coming faster than most people realize.

He wrote a 165-page paper explaining why AGI could arrive sooner than expected, then launched a fund focused on the companies powering the AI boom.

His biggest bets:

• AI chips
• Data centers
• Energy companies
• AI infrastructure

AI isn’t just creating new software.

It’s creating an entire economy around the hardware, energy, and infrastructure needed to build it.

The biggest winners of AI may not only be the companies building the models.

They may be the companies powering them.

[Leopold Stock Tracker @LeopoldTracker_]

Leopold Aschenbrenner's fund has lost roughly $600,000,000 in a single session today

But he's still up over 1,000% on most of these positions from his entry and his puts are printing:

• Bloom Energy, $BE, -$210,000,000 (-14.9%)
• SanDisk, $SNDK, -$180,000,000 (-11.0%)
• Core Scientific, $CORZ, -$54,000,000 (-9.1%)
• IREN, $IREN, -$41,000,000 (-8.6%)
• Nebius, $NBIS, -$104,000,000 (-4.5%)

In 1-3 years, the thesis he's betting on:
• AI inference workloads will demand more NAND storage than any prior tech cycle
• On-site power generation replaces grid connections for every major data center
• Ex-Bitcoin miners become the backbone of AI cloud infrastructure

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

If you read @TheUpsideAI then you know this.

MOST PEOPLE ARE ONLY USING 10% OF CLAUDE’S POWER.

They covered how one setup can turn Claude from a chatbot into a personal AI employee.

The setup:

• Give it your rules
• Add your context
• Let it remember you
• Build repeatable workflows

In simple terms:

You’re training Claude once, then letting it handle tasks the way you would.

AI is moving from answering questions to becoming a long-term assistant that understands your business, your preferences, and your way of working.

The people who learn how to build these AI systems will have a huge advantage.

[Leo @leoxbtt]

Bro… el ingeniero que CREÓ Claude Code soltó un video de 28 minutos y me voló la cabeza

Olvídate de los prompts genéricos que todo el mundo copia y pega

Este tipo te enseña exactamente cómo sacar el 300% de Claude: archivos CLAUDE.md, memoria permanente, sesiones paralelas y trucos de prompting que nadie te cuenta

Pagué cursos de 300 dólares que no llegan ni a la mitad de lo que él explica en los primeros 10 minutos

Y lo mejor: es gratis

No importa si estás empezando o si ya programas todo el día…

después de ver esto vas a usar la IA de una forma que ni sabías que existía

Guárdalo. Vas a volver mil veces 🔖

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

If you read @TheUpsideAI then you know this story.

In simple terms:

CHINA JUST RELEASED AN OPEN SOURCE AI MODEL THAT COULD CHANGE THE AI RACE.

They covered how Moonshot AI’s new Kimi K3 model is becoming a major challenger to America’s top AI companies.

China built a powerful AI model and is letting anyone use it.

• Strong at coding
• Free to use
• More AI competition
• Millions can access it

AI is no longer just a battle between a few giant companies.

Open-source models let smaller companies, developers, and everyday people build with the same technology.

The AI race won’t only be won by who creates the smartest AI.

It will be won by who gets the most people using it.

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Sam on Kimi, distillation, and open source:

“I have always assumed that there are going to be great cheap models in the world, and we better be the greatest and the cheapest.

You get a better deal today, at least at a particular latency, using OpenAI's models than Kimi. We distill our own models. That’s how we make smaller, cheaper models. That’s a very good thing to do.

There will clearly be an important place for open source models in the world and people that will want their own weights.

We have so much usage of our models that we do not need to be a gigantically high-margin business to be able to afford model training.

I would rather people not distill from us, for sure. But this is not in my top ten list of worries.”

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

If you read @TheUpsideAI then you know this story.

WE FOUND THE GUY USING REDDIT TO GENERATE HUNDREDS OF QUALIFIED LEADS EVERY MONTH.

They covered how entrepreneurs are replacing traditional cold outreach with Reddit as a growth channel.

His strategy:

• Find communities where potential customers already discuss problems
• Create valuable posts that attract attention
• Turn conversations into leads and users
• Build demand before ever sending a sales message

One Reddit post reached 2.1 million views.

Another reached 118,000 views.

Together, they helped him build a beta list of 550+ users.

The biggest shift?

Cold email interrupts people.

Reddit lets you meet them when they are already looking for answers.

The future of growth might not be about reaching more people.

It might be about showing up in the right conversations.

[James Shields @scaling_shields]

met a guy making $51,000/month by scraping reddit for the phrase "anyone got recommendations for" and emailing the posters within 2 hours

not joking

he opens reddit every morning
runs a search on 8 subreddits in his niche
finds people who just publicly asked for exactly what he sells
and emails them while the post is still on the front page

reply rate: 23%

average cold email: 0.3%

his is 76x higher

because these people literally just raised their hand in public saying "please take my money"

heres the exact phrases he searches every morning:

"anyone got recommendations for [service]"
"alternative to [competitor]"
"looking for a good [service]"
"got burned by [company], where do i go now"
"has anyone used [company] — are they worth it"

every one of these is a public declaration of buying intent with a timestamp on it

someone posted this 4 hours ago in r/[niche]:

"I need [service] urgently. Budget is $15K. Prefer someone who actually knows what theyre doing and isnt sketchy"

he saw the post at 9am
pulled the username
cross referenced linkedin
found the email
sent this at 10am:

"hey [name], saw your post in r/[sub] about needing [service] urgently. we do exactly that — last client we booked 34 qualified calls in a month. free 15 min call?"

reply at 10:11am
call at 2pm
signed $15K contract by 4pm

7 hours from public reddit post to signed deal

from reading reddit in the morning

this is the process:

step 1: find the 5-10 subreddits where your buyers hang out

step 2: run searches for "recommendation" "alternative to" "looking for" "anyone use" in those subreddits every morning

step 3: filter for posts under 4 hours old with clear buying intent

step 4: pull the username → cross reference linkedin → find their email

step 5: send a 2 line email referencing their EXACT post

step 6: warm call every positive reply within 30 minutes

thats it

last month:

- 187 reddit posts scraped
- 164 emails found (90% find rate)
- 38 positive replies
- 24 booked calls
- 11 closes
- $4,600 average deal
- $50,600 in revenue

from reading reddit while eating breakfast

heres why this layers perfectly on top of a normal cold email system:

your main campaigns are emailing 4,500 cold leads a day building pipeline at scale

reddit is a surgical strike on top of that

the guy on reddit literally JUST declared their problem hours ago

the declaration is the qualifier

theres no discovering pain points

they posted the problem
you showed up with the solution
the sales conversation is already 90% done before the call starts

its the highest intent cold email you can send because it might not even feel cold

they had the problem at 9am
you showed up at 10am
thats not a cold email thats a well timed introduction

and heres the part that should make every cold emailer sick:

every single person on this app is scraping apollo fighting over the same 50 million contacts

meanwhile reddit has 500 million monthly users posting their exact buying requests in public

timestamped
organised by niche
completely uncontested
free

nobody in cold email is scraping reddit

because nobody thinks of reddit as a lead source

they think of it as a place to post memes

while angry buyers are literally typing their credit card out loud every single day

one of the most profitable lead source on the internet has been sitting there for 15 years

organising itself
timestamping itself
qualifying itself
telling you their budget
telling you their pain
telling you what they just got burned by

and agency owners are still writing "hey firstname hope this finds you well" to marketing directors on apollo

go open reddit

search one of those phrases in a subreddit in your niche

youll find 10 hand raisers before your coffee gets cold

simples

p.s. if youre an agency owner with a proven offer and want us to setup a cold email system that books you 10-30 calls per month - DM me "EMAIL"

(you ONLY pay for qualified calls actually booked onto your calendar)

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

@rauchg A 10x cheaper model with near frontier results is the kind of improvement that changes entire markets.

We wrote about it in @TheUpsideAI this morning

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

@huxlab K3’s evolution from GPT-2 to KDA attention is a seven-year history lesson in AI architecture.

We wrote about it in @TheUpsideAI this morning

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

@staysaasy The hardest engineering leadership jobs today are not about managing teams, they are about rebuilding systems from the ground up.

We wrote about it in @TheUpsideAI recently

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

@SahilBloom AI can make intelligence cheaper, but it cannot make someone take the first step.

We wrote about it in @TheUpsideAI recently

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

@xikhar A 3D AI companion on your desktop is closer to the original vision of personal computing than another chat box.

We wrote about it in @TheUpsideAI this morning

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

@copiumfueled AI safety is moving from theory into a practical question of ownership, access, and incentives.

We wrote about it in @TheUpsideAI last week

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

@chrispisarski The future sales stack may be built by people who understand revenue and can orchestrate AI agents.

We wrote about it in @TheUpsideAI last night

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

@ns123abc The joke hits because data acquisition is becoming one of the biggest strategic battles in AI. We wrote about it in @TheUpsideAI this morning

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

@rohanpaul_ai Ilya’s point gets at the biggest AI question: intelligence may come from learning, not just knowing. We wrote about it in @TheUpsideAI this morning

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

@jackcoder0 The hidden skill in online marketplaces is learning the incentives on both sides of the transaction. We wrote about it in @TheUpsideAI this morning

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

@vint_98 The future of AI is not always a screen and a prompt, sometimes it is a system reacting before you do.

We wrote about it in @TheUpsideAI this morning

[The Upside @TheUpsideAI]

@0x0SojalSec A 2.8T model compressed into 700MB shows how quickly frontier AI research can move from labs to everyday hardware. We wrote about it in @TheUpsideAI recently