Why is Brad Gerstner calling Cursor the thing getting the least attention as SpaceX goes public? Because if Grok 4.3 reaches the coding frontier, SpaceX will combine: - The largest proprietary coding dataset (more than the public internet) - The largest available compute cluster - The fastest-growing agentic coding product $10B ARR exit rate from Cursor in 2026. 1.5T parameter base model. Data injected into pre-training. @altcap says it is the upside scenario the market hasn't priced. The full breakdown on what that means for the IPO: podcastalpha.substack.com/p/… Source: BG2 Pod - youtube.com/watch?v=Tx9jT2c6…

Dara (CEO of Uber) on their AI spend: "We blew through our AI budget in a quarter, for the whole year. It is forcing us to adjust. We are going to meter headcount increases because to the extent that my engineers are getting much more efficient, their throughput is increasing. There's a cost to that, and it's a significant cost. AI adoption has been occurring in all parts of the business –– whether it's engineers and how they scope projects, how they build, debugging, platform migrations. I'm pushing the teams to fundamentally use the power of AI to rebuild systems and processes from the bottoms up. I do think it's a combination for us right now of encouraging adoption, but then driving efficiency. We're using the more expensive models to explore. Once we scale some of these experiences, we'll look to bring in more efficient models that are more efficient on a token basis or are open source."

Today Instagram had this massive exploit where hackers were just stealing rare handles left and right. Hundreds of accounts gone. People losing handles they’ve owned since 2010, some worth hundreds of thousands. I own a few rare ones so I was actually stressed watching this happen in real time, which I haven’t been in years. Obama White House account got hit. These aren’t some random new accounts, these are verified, locked down accounts and they still got compromised. The thing is the exploit is so simple it’s almost funny. Attacker goes to Forgot Password, says their account is hacked, turns on a VPN to match the target’s location (which now you can find on the about section of the page). Instagram’s AI support flow asks them to verify with a selfie. They grab a photo from the target’s profile, run it through an AI video generator to make an animation of the person’s face moving around, upload that to Meta’s AI as proof. And Meta’s AI just accepts it because it can’t tell the difference between a real selfie and an AI-generated video of someone’s face . Once verified they change the email to theirs. Password reset link goes to their email. They own it now. 2FA gets bypassed somehow in the process but honestly I don’t know exactly how, just that it did. Point is even locked down accounts went down. Then you try to recover your account and you’re talking to a chatbot that has zero ability to help. You can’t escalate to a human. You’re just stuck. Your asset is gone and there’s no one to call. The whole thing just highlighted how stupid it is to automate account security without any human in the loop. One AI fooling another AI while there’s literally no person anywhere to catch it. Meta took hours to even acknowledge it while accounts were getting stolen every minute. Now thankfully it’s patched but I don’t think it will be the last one. Stay safe!

Quick summary of what is happening with LLM model companies in China. 1) There is more VC $ available for open-weights than you think, 2) they are generating real revenue (as did open-source sw/saas companies in the West). crossingriver.substack.com/p…

This weekend read The Halo Effect: The core idea of the book is that when  a company is performing well financially, observers- journalists, investors, analysts- tend to retroactively describe its culture, leadership, strategy and people in glowing terms. When the same company later struggles financially, every previous attribute get recast as a flaw. The underlying reality may not have changed much  but our perception of the cause changes to match the outcome. I think that India is currently suffering from a negative Halo Effect. Because the market has not done well and needs to be rationalized the observers are finding all possible flaws to try and justify the reasons in hindsight. If we can separate the current performance from the – in this case negative- Halo, we can better understand whether this poor performance is temporary or something more permanent.

Everything in the AI world is happening at warp speed. Can't believe these headlines are just 8 weeks apart.

IMP story by @dishaacharya_ @puranchdET @ETtech Indian founders flip Y Combinator’s $25,000 AI tokens for quick bucks We spoke to multiple founders and builders who attended Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator’s first Startup School in India in Bengaluru on April 18. Of the 2,000 attendees, many sold their credits at 20-40% discount and several others found it difficult to use their credits to access Open AI and Claude.