Joined July 2010
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MKnight Tech retweeted
Jun 13
Fable isn't the first.
In 1999 the department of defense blocked exports of the PowerMac G4 for crossing the 1 gigaflop threshold.
Steve Jobs turned it into an ad.
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Jun 14
Fuck the White House they are cowards looking for bribes here from @AnthropicAI
Jun 13
NEW: Inside the 24-hrs before WH slapped export controls on Anthropic
- Last Thursday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns about Fable jailbreak to Trump admin
- Friday AM, Sean Cairncross, Bessent, Susie etc. held WH call to discuss
- Then White House started reaching out to Anthropic to speak with Dario Amodei, who was at a wellness retreat.
- When Amodei was finally available past 1pm, he had three tense phone calls with a combo of ppl including Cairncross, Bessent, Lutnick, Kessler, Will Scharf, Richard Walters, and Walker Barrett.
-Amodei tried to clear up what he assumed was a misunderstanding. He defended the guardrails and distinguished between universal and non-universal jailbreak
- Cairncross and Bessent were unmoved and asked Amodei to take down Fable and work with the admin to fix the vulnerabilities. (A WH official said Amazon’s findings were run past the NSA and they felt they had “proof.”)
- Amodei asked for more time and info, but he made no commitments to pull the model
- Bessent told Amodei directly at one point that he was making a “bad decision”
- By Friday evening, the Trump admin imposed its export controls.
- “Export controls were a last resort after begging them for hours to work with us,” senior WH official said.
W/ @cheyennehaslett
politico.com/news/2026/06/13…
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MKnight Tech retweeted
Jun 13
Fable is banned. Long live local AI.
Full episode breaking down exactly how to get good at local models. the runtime, the hardware, quantization, connecting it to Hermes agent and local AI startup ideas (25 minutes)
Jun 13
The takeaway from Fable 5 being BANNED by the government: GET GOOD AT LOCAL MODELS SO YOU HAVE 100% CONTROL.
My entire weekend was going to be building my craziest ideas with Fable 5. That's now cancelled.
So instead of building with Fable this weekend, I've decided I'll go deep on local models:
1. Start with the runtime. Download Ollama or LM Studio first. This is the thing that actually runs models on your machine.
2. Match the model to your hardware. A model's size is measured in billions of parameters (7B, 32B, 70B). Bigger is smarter but needs more memory. Rule of thumb: a 7B model runs on almost any laptop, a 32B needs a good Mac with 32GB RAM, a 70B needs serious hardware like a DGX Spark or a maxed-out Mac Studio.
3. Know which model for which job. Qwen 3 is the best all-around choice for most tasks. DeepSeek for reasoning and coding. Gemma 4 when you need something tiny that runs on a phone. Llama when you want the biggest community and the most fine-tunes.
4. Quantization. You can shrink a model to run on weaker hardware with barely any quality loss. Look for versions labeled Q4 or Q5. This is how a model that "needs" a server runs on your laptop. Learning this one concept changes everything.
5. Connect it to your agent. Point Hermes or your agent stack at a local model.
6. Context window is your real constraint locally. Cloud models give you huge context for free. Local models make you pay for it in memory. A bigger context window eats RAM fast. Keep your sessions tight and your prompts lean or your machine chokes.
7. Learn to give local models tools. A smaller local model with web search, file access, and code execution beats a giant model with none. The capability gap closes fast when you wire up the right tools. The model is the engine but the tools are the wheels.
8. Fine-tuning is more accessible than you think. You don't need this on day one, but know it exists. You can take an open model and train it on your own data so it gets good at your specific domain.
I'll probably do a breakdown at some point on this @startupideaspod if people are into it.
The lesson from this ban is basically don't build your entire workflow on something that can disappear with a single letter. Own part of your stack. Local models are insurance.
It reminds me when people realized they don't own social media accounts. And then you saw people build email lists etc.
I remember running a startup and my biggest traffic source was organic FB. All of a sudden, algo changed, and I lost 99% of my traffic.
Same sorta moment (but bigger) for AI.
This is a wake up call.
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Jun 13
Lmao the Amazon dude? He salty about AI taking down his site last month still?
Jun 13
Amazon CEO’s Talks With U.S. Officials Triggered Crackdown on Anthropic Models: WSJ
Information Andy Jassy shared with the Trump administration sparked an abrupt, sweeping move to halt foreign access to the company’s powerful AI tools
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MKnight Tech retweeted
Jun 13
Marc Andreessen explains how to identify fake founders
“There are definitely people that come in [to pitch us] and present themselves to be something they’re not. They’ve read all the books. They will have listened to this interview. They study everything and they construct a facade…. And the amount of this is exactly correlated with the NASDAQ.”
As Marc explains, when stock prices are high and tech is hot, there are a lot people who decide being a tech founder is a fast track to high status:
“They’re fundamentally oriented for social status — they’re trying to get the social status without the substance. And there are always other places to go to get social status. So after 2000, the joke was B2B meant back to banking and B2C meant back to consulting — which is, the people who showed up to be in tech were like, yeah, screw it. This is over. I’m going to go back to Goldman Sachs or McKinsey where I can be high status. So you get this flushing kind of effect that happens in a downturn. But in a big upswing, you get a lot of people showing up with, let’s say, public persona without the substance to back it up.”
How does Marc identify these people? He uses the same technique that homicide detectives use to find out if you’re innocent — keep asking increasingly detailed questions:
“You ask increasingly detailed questions and people have trouble making things up and things just fuzz into obvious BS, and fake founders basically have the same problem. They’re able to relay a conceptual theory of what they’re doing… But as they get into the details, it just fuzzes out. Whereas the true people that you want to back can do it. What you find is they’ve spent 5 or 10 or 20 years obsessing over the details of whatever it is they’re about to do. And they’re so deep in the details and they know so much more about it than you ever will.”
Source: @hubermanlab (Sep 2023)
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MKnight Tech retweeted
Jun 13
META IS AN ABSOLUTE MESS INSIDE RIGHT NOW
Wired just dropped an exclusive, and the details are wild.
This week someone interrupted a livestreamed Meta meeting, open to thousands of employees, with an expletive-filled rant about "being the company's bitch." They told the presenters to find a specific Meta AI executive and "tell him that he's a piece of shit."
A presenter covered their face with their hands. Employees in the chat called the start "spicy."
Here is what's behind it.
Meta's AI restructuring cut 8,000 jobs last month, 10% of the company. The same restructuring feeds a unit called Applied AI, where 6,500 engineers and product managers have been drafted in waves since April. There is no application process. You get selected, and your options are join or leave the company. Members call themselves "draftees."
The new job: writing puzzles and coding problems to train Meta's AI models, two tasks a week. People hired to build apps for billions of users now assemble training data for hundreds of AI scientists.
"It's literally the gulag," one employee told WIRED. "You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week."
Another: "Most people find the work soul-crushing."
At the same time, Meta started recording US employees' clicks and keystrokes to generate more AI training data. Over 1,600 employees signed a petition demanding it stop. The concession: employees can pause the tracking for up to 30 minutes.
Zuckerberg's response came in an internal memo Friday: "We've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more." He repeated his promise of no more mass layoffs this year. His fixes: limits on the manager ratios Meta had deliberately pushed to 50-to-1 on some teams, bigger budgets for team events, a hackathon next month, and assigned desks by the end of the year.
That same memo says Meta's north star is "to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact."
The most talented people in the world are writing puzzles for a model and asking permission to pause the keystroke logger.
META declined to comment.
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MKnight Tech retweeted
Dear US government,
Since you've just blocked Fable and Mythos on critical national security grounds, here are some other tools that pose a similar threat to the American people:
- Microsoft Teams
- SAP
- Salesforce
- Jira
- Outlook
Please do what you must to save America 🇺🇸
‼️🚨 BREAKING: Amazon researchers snitched to the US government about jailbreaking Fable 5 and Mythos 5, forcing Anthropic to immediately shut down worldwide access.
A security export control directive from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick enforced the action.
Anthropic is fighting the directive and calls it a misunderstanding.
This isn't the first clash. The Trump administration had already tried to get Anthropic to pause the release of its latest models before this directive landed.
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MKnight Tech retweeted
Jun 12
Fable achieved a significant breakthrough in one of our open problems. This is a problem where ChatGPT 5.5 could not even begin anything useful. The breakthrough seems legit (although not 100% checked yet), and Fable even claims to have a full solution. >10 hours total runtime so far. A 30 page document with the proofs of some lemmas not yet spelled out. We can not yet know whether Fable indeed has solved it, but even if it is just a partial solution, we are absolutely amazed. More details will follow, and once we are at the end of the story, I will also write a full substack post. Collaboration with István Vona, a postdoc in my group.
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MKnight Tech retweeted
Jun 12
So you’re telling me that one of the largest hyperscalers out there who has already spent $250 to $300 billion since 2023 is limiting their own employees usage of AI to curb costs?
And that doesn’t strike you as odd?
Jun 12
META MOVES TO CURB EMPLOYEE AI USAGE AS AI COSTS REACH BILLIONS – THEINFORMATION
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Jun 13
RT @BurggrabenH: There are plenty of warning signs
In 2025, Google spent $80 billion on AI CapEx, which it funded mostly from its enormous…
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MKnight Tech retweeted
Jun 12
Nassim Taleb: the richest man in the Roman Empire woke up every morning pretending he was poor.
Seneca had more to lose than to gain from his wealth - so he rehearsed losing it. Every so often he'd live on bread and water as if shipwrecked, just to make the downside familiar and harmless.
That's the whole game, Taleb says: arrange your life so you have far more upside than downside - then randomness stops scaring you.
"Make more when you're right than you lose when you're wrong - that's antifragile."
"Always keep more upside than downside from random events."
"The Stoics aren't unmoved by the world - only by bad events."
~70 min, free. the oldest trick for surviving a world you can't predict ↓
Jun 11
Daniel Kahneman: the day Saddam Hussein was captured, the same news "explained" both the bond market going up and going down.
Treasuries rose - Bloomberg's headline said the capture made the world safer. Half an hour later treasuries fell -the new headline said the capture boosted appetite for risk.
Same event, opposite stories. The market moved first; the pundits reverse-engineered a reason. That, he says, is how financial commentary actually works.
"Our confidence comes from the coherence of the story - not the evidence behind it."
"The conclusion comes first. Then we believe the arguments that support it."
"System 1 is largely indifferent to the quality and amount of evidence."
~55 min, free. why the market's "explanations" are stories told after the fact ↓
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MKnight Tech retweeted
Clearly, Fable is doing a lot of work, and unleashing a ton of agents. To review a short technical note, it released 31 agents, coded simulations to verify my results, did "adversarial reviews". Eventually, it only made the assumptions slightly more rigorous. It is all good. For a four-page technical note a little code, though, it consumed all my Pro session tokens, *plus* $17 worth of credits. It is ridiculously expensive. I have 20-page reports that are way more complex than this. I can see how Anthropic has entered the phase of market-clearing prices, yield management, and pre-IPO.
I recall Boris Cherny saying in a podcast, "run Opus [4.6], not Sonnet. It's worth it". I feel comfortable saying that running your top-shelf model is *not* worth it anymore.
Decreasing returns, on most tasks. Like in the real world, some people can be real smart, but real expensive.
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Jun 12
META could just use Lamda and save all that money. Oh wait, we’re being told that’s ARTificial intelligence masquerading as real AI. Zuck is truly all for show
Jun 12
SCOOP: Meta plans to clamp down on skyrocketing AI costs inside the company by imposing limits on employees’ token usage, the company told staff in a memo on Tuesday, just weeks after it pushed them to adopt AI tools in their work.
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MKnight Tech retweeted
Fidelity waiting for me to sell my 1 SpaceX share so they can immediately ban me for life
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MKnight Tech retweeted
Jun 12
17 years ago, spacex was the company that introduced me to the ambition, and potential, of the technology industry. elon has inspired a generation. so happy for him and his entire team. congratulations 🇺🇸🚀
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MKnight Tech retweeted
Jun 12
Jeff Bezos just bet $12 billion that you'll be able to support your whole family on a single paycheck again.
his reasoning: AI will let companies make more stuff with fewer people and less money.
and when something gets cheaper and easier to produce, and lots of companies can do it, they compete and the price drops.
it's why a flatscreen TV that cost $2,000 a decade ago is $300 today.
bezos thinks AI will do that to almost everything you buy.
in his words, it raises "the basket of goods people can afford."
your paycheck buys more without anyone handing you a raise.
the problem: look at which prices have actually dropped.
so far, AI has only made *digital* things cheap, like code and content.
but the stuff that really eats your paycheck is *physical*.
rent, cars, medicine. cheaper code doesn't lower your rent.
that's exactly what bezos just spent $12B on.
Prometheus, his new company, is building AI tools that help engineers design and manufacture physical products faster
things like cars, machines, and medicine.
the goal is to make building physical things as fast and cheap as writing software.
if it works, 1 income starts covering what used to take 2.
which is when his prediction kicks in:
"perhaps one of those earners will choose not to be in the job market, so they'll become a one-earner household." or "some people who are working overtime will stop working overtime, because they don't want to."
one paycheck covering a whole family again, like the 1950s.
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MKnight Tech retweeted
BREAKING: The average price of US ground beef rises 13% YoY in May to a record $7.06 per pound, with prices now up 58% since 2020.
Steak prices surged 16% YoY to $12.80 per pound, the 2nd-highest on record.
This comes as the US cattle herd has shrunk to its lowest in 75 years, with drought conditions, elevated production costs, and a New World screwworm outbreak in Texas limiting supply recovery.
Meanwhile, nearly 80% of US cattle are currently located in areas facing dryness or drought, threatening to keep beef prices elevated well into 2027.
American consumers are paying record prices for beef.
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MKnight Tech retweeted
Jun 10
Our Anthropic bill is about to jump from $400K → $1.4M/yr.
Not because usage exploded, but because we're about to cross 150 seats.
Past 150 seats you're forced into Enterprise tier. Seats stop including any usage, every token bills at standard API rates. At our current run rate that's 3.5x overnight.
Unfiltered thoughts on AI spend:
1. We should spend tokens to grow as aggressively as possible. But most people (me included) aren't conscious of what they're spending.
2. Visibility comes first. People see their personal number and they're shocked. I accidentally spent $4,000 in 3 days in Claude Code.
3. For engineering the spend is clearly worth it. Pay for the best model, it saves more than it costs.
4. For a lot of other roles it's questionable. Apps nobody uses, skills someone already built. No ROI.
5. Spend limits are coming. We already require approval for more tokens on our support team.
The era of token-maxxing is coming to an end.
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