Elon Musk 🇺🇸🚀📈🔥

The response to Applied AI has been incredible. The second cohort, starting July 4, sold out before the early bird deadline. One thing I have learned from running cohorts over the years is that smaller groups lead to better discussions, deeper brainstorming, and more meaningful learning. So instead of increasing the batch size, I am opening a new batch. Applied AI - Cohort 3 starts on July 11 with a morning IST schedule. If you are hearing about this for the first time, this is a 3-week, highly hands-on cohort designed for engineers who want to move beyond calling LLM APIs and learn how to build real AI systems. The goal is simple: "I know how to call an LLM API" -> "I can design and build production-grade AI systems." This is not an ML or Deep Learning course. There is no model training, fine-tuning, or deep dive into model internals. Instead, we focus entirely on Applied AI - how to take LLMs and build reliable systems around them that can actually survive production environments. Over 6 live sessions, we will cover: - 24 working prototypes and demos - 7 real-world AI systems and architecture breakdowns - Agents, memory architectures, and tool calling - System design patterns for AI applications - Production lessons and failure modes - Live brainstorming and design discussions - Working code behind every concept Most of what I teach comes directly from building AI systems in production and spending countless hours understanding what works, what breaks, and what scales beyond demos. This is the third iteration of the cohort, and every batch has helped refine the content, demos, and discussions even further. If you are serious about building AI products and systems, I think you will find this cohort valuable. Details on curriculum, schedule, and enrollment are linked below. Early bird pricing is currently available :)

In 1995, Elon Musk applied for a job at Netscape. He sent his resume. He even went to their office. But he was too shy to talk to anyone. So he went home & started his own company. 31 years later, that shy kid who couldn’t ask for a job became the world’s first trillionaire.

Introducing the #Forbes250 America’s Most Successful Historic Immigrants. To mark America’s 250th anniversary, Forbes ranked the immigrants who most successfully achieved their own American Dream during their lifetimes. forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2… Illustration: Mr. Nelson Design

This is a bigger trend. Cracks forming fast. Lots of schools are going to fail.

There you go. The United States is built on a limitless ethos of entrepreneurship, innovation, and excellence. Canada is built on feminized and "empathetic" parasitic taxation fuelled by envy and resentment toward those who produce.

Every engineer is quietly asking the same thing right now: "Is AI coming for my job?" Yes. But only for part of it. And it is not the part you think. Here is how to tell which part is safe and which part is already gone. 🧵

The first fundamental truth is that FDE is not a role, it is a product strategy. It has to originate from the fount of the product org. You judge an FDE org by the fruits they bear! What new product was discovered, what Thielan secrets were mined and refined into weapons grade product? (but hey, what do I know about FDE 🤷‍♂️)

Happy Flag Day, America 🇺🇸 From sea to shining sea, to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, the great journey continues…

Worked for me!

The dev’s job has always been solving human problems. @kelseyhightower, former Google Distinguished Engineer, on why he’s adopted ‘zero token architecture’ and the importance of thinking for yourself: “My entire career, I always thought about writing code as decision making. So before we do anything, we all figure out what needs to happen and then we have to convince the computer to do it. And every key word, every if statement, every function call is a decision we're making. And of course, the syntax kind of gets in the way from time to time. So Stack Overflow, we go. The importance of thinking for yourself in the age of gen AI: Then gen AI comes out and in early stages it's kind of like people were just talking to the machine and I've never been impressed by talking to a computer - I'd rather talk to real people. So I don't really care too much about that part. Yes, it mimics human capabilities for people that want to talk to a computer, knock yourselves out. I'll post things like, ‘hey, I'm adopting the zero token architecture’. People're, like what's zero token architecture? Instead of burning tokens, you learn things and you think for yourself and just complete tasks. And they're like, oh, why would you want to do that? I was like, we taught the machines. I don't know why people skip this step. ‘Hey Kelsey, there's going to be this artificial intelligence going to do all the things’ like, but we trained it. So all of those times I'm writing code, the books I've published, the comments back and forth on helping people solve problems - it's all in there. Maybe it's arguable that they have their own worldview based on that, and maybe it's slightly different. But I can never put the machine over a person - under any circumstance. Engineering has always been solving human problems with the best tool for the job: And I think there's a subset, and I don't want to say everyone in the space is doing this, but there is a healthy subset of people who really believe what is the purpose of a person? Why do we need them to write code? Why do we need them to build software? It's like maybe you don't understand what the job has always been. We are trying to solve human problems and we use whatever technology is required. In some cases, the technology happens to be software and software ain't required for every human endeavor.”

How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html

Game theory from here is super interesting: Original Mags (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta) now have a serious non-zero opportunity to tank the frontier labs. Go to the government, kneecap the labs’ motion of putting the latest models out in the wild, become the trusted gatekeeper between the labs and the public at large (including internationally) by having the labs go through their clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) and implement strict KYC to seal the deal. The frontier labs should have seen this coming years ago and implemented a robust KYC for just this moment. The fact they didn’t is kind of concerning. Why did they not do it? Best guess is because it would have changed the run-rate revenues (downward) which would have then changed funding dynamics - lower valuations, more dilution, less secondary. A valuation reset may happen now anyways, except the labs may end up with less control and more restrictions at the end of it. At the same time, everyone is already clamoring about token prices of the old models from the labs anyways… This couldn’t be a better setup for open source and neoclouds. Big question is can they meet the moment? There are too few of them and their progress seems sporadic at best.

Stanford CS107 - Computer Organization and Systems The course content and lecture notes are amazing. web.stanford.edu/class/archi…

Elon Musk came to the US with no money & graduated with over $100k in debt, despite scholarships & working 2 jobs while at school. Today, he’s worth $1.1 trillion.

The only truly wasted time is time spent wishing you were somewhere else.

Imagine what's next. @SpaceX $SPCX

One person helped build companies spanning electric vehicles, space exploration, brain-computer interfaces, AI, and underground transportation. The combined value created is measured in trillions. That's not just wealth creation. That's industrial-scale innovation.

MOST PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA HOW GOOD OF AN INVESTOR GOOGLE IS 6% OF SPACEX 14% OF ANTHROPIC 75% OF WAYMO $900M INTO SPACEX IN 2015 → NOW WORTH $115B $13B INTO ANTHROPIC → NOW WORTH $140B WAYMO JUST RAISED $16B AT A $126B VALUATION → GOOGLE’S STAKE WORTH ~$95B. THOSE THREE BETS ALONE ARE WORTH OVER $350B AND THEY HAVE 100’S MORE SMALLER ONES $GOOGL

SpaceX will help expand humanity out to the stars. It makes me excited for the future! Huge congrats to Elon and the SpaceX team 👊