Tom Setzer

Product director of software by day, master of the grill by night.

[Tom Setzer @tomgamer]

Figured out what happened at the game tonight. #lightning (from a friend)

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.

You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.

I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.

But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.

Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.

Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.

So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.

If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

[Tom Setzer @tomgamer]

@itsolelehmann Vernon Vinge wrote about this in 2006 in "The Rainbows End". A great writer and he saw the future.

[Max Anderson @MaxAnderson]

As someone who has personally spent $500k / mo+ on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty:

This revenue growth in Search is artificial & extremely unhealthy for Google’s business long term

Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries

Google’s response?

Manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics. I.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly did not approve Google to charge them for

A few examples to illustrate:

For all of its history until recently, Google operated on a 2nd price auction model

I.e. if you bid $5 CPC and the next highest bidder bids $1 CPC, Google charged you $1.01 for the click (one penny more than the 2nd highest bidder) rather than the $5 you bid

This was a genius move by Google early on as it incentivizes advertisers to input their true maximum willingness to pay rather than trying to play the game of bidding low and constantly adjusting to try to stay just ahead of the next highest bidder while still not paying too much

However recently, Google silently deprecated the 2nd price auction and began charging advertisers as much as their bid and budget caps allow, regardless of what anyone else is bidding

It’s a short-sighted cash grab at the expense of the long term health of the advertiser ecosystem

Making thing worse, Google also recently nerfed keyword targeting precision

Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers pick individual search phrases to bid on, defined down to the character w/ exact match or phrase match targeting

This was one of the core features that made search advertising magic, enabling advertisers to run extremely precise campaigns based on exactly what their target customer typed

But now, even if you bid on a specific term or phrase using the strictest exact
-match targeting settings, Google will show your ad across 1000’s of unrelated keywords, labeling them as as “exact match (close variant)”

The definition of “close variant” means whatever they want it to and changes constantly. The result is advertisers get billed for clicks that are totally irrelevant to their business and that their targeting settings explicitly forbid Google from targeting. Google does it anyway and there’s no ability to turn this off

So now exact match is broad match, and broad match is just meaningless spam

This is all very bad for advertisers, but for Google, it allows them to show your ad and bill you for clicks across 1000x more searches that were previously going unmonetized (mainly because they’re garbage queries no one wants)

This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes

Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day

And the extra spend is entirely on the garbage keywords Google arbitrarily throws in as “exact match (close variants)” which have no value to our business, but can’t be turned off

Google offers no refunds nor any recourse for overspend or spend on keywords you explicitly did not target

These are not the actions of a healthy business. These are the actions of company whose core business is in decline but desperately needs to pump quarterly earnings so Wall Street will continue to fund insane capex while hopefully looking through their rapidly deteriorating negative free cash flow

Google operated a benevolent monopoly for the better part of 25 yrs

Meaning the value Google captured from Search was but a small fraction of the value it created, and that spread produced a potential energy that justified expectations of high earnings growth far, far into the future

This is now no longer the case

At the alter of AI capex, Google is sacrificing the golden goose

[Tom Setzer @tomgamer]

@CableWrangler @oldguy_steve There's a window?

[Tom Setzer @tomgamer]

@JhanHky Great post, BTW.

[Tom Setzer @tomgamer]

@JhanHky What about Guentzel? How do you see that fit into your view?

[Tom Setzer @tomgamer]

@Dimocracy_ @horsetwting Ms. Cow.

[Tom Setzer @tomgamer]

@jmbfn @fasc1nate The taxes, obviously.

[Tom Setzer @tomgamer]

@Jbanklestankle1 Needs bacon

[Tom Setzer @tomgamer]

@javilopen Ha still 6 fingers

[Tom Setzer @tomgamer]

Very cool. Lots of potential uses here.

[Akshay 🚀 @akshay_pachaar]

knowledge graphs are INSANELY good at giving agents human-like memory!

today, we're building an MCP-powered memory layer that can be shared across all your AI apps like Cursor, Claude Desktop etc.

it's built using a real-time knowledge graph.

100% open-source and self-hosted.

[Tom Setzer @tomgamer]

@CityofTampa can't login to pay utilities bill, getting 500 error

[Tom Setzer @tomgamer]

@atorrrr Looks like i can still choose, but only after a response

[Tom Setzer @tomgamer]

@atorrrr Yeah, quite annoying

[Tom Setzer @tomgamer]

@TheFawcette Secondary tarrifs. Anyone buying from Russia will face 100% tarrifs. There was mention of India and China.

[Tom Setzer @tomgamer]

What is Warren Buffett doing right now? 👀

[Steven Walker @swalker_7]

NEW: Florida's proposed cuts to AP, other classes leave schools 'deeply concerned'

“There’s no way we could continue the breadth of advanced studies courses that we are currently offering without the funding. Period.”

My latest for @OrlandoSentinel: https://t.co/0LTz189VAV

[Paul Cottle @PaulCottlePhys]

K-12 budget in Florida House would cut incentives to high schools for AP, IB, AICE, dual enrollment and career and technical education by half https://t.co/TunJEnlos5