How do you assemble a small team of PhDs, build another AI startup, and get acquired for $643M in less than a year? I traced Eigen AI's ten-month journey one hire at a time. It was not a startup. It was a strike team — every person mapped to a specific piece of the inference efficiency stack. The real asset was not pedigree. It was compressed trust: shared labs, shared codebases, and people who had already built the tools others depend on. The question worth asking is not "Can you hire top PhDs?" It is "Can you find the bottleneck valuable enough and assemble the small group who already owns it?" Full research: basetobase.jobs/research/eig…

Sage advice from Ed Catmull (founder of Pixar)

Good morning. Forget what happened yesterday. Keep moving.

Snap’s wasn’t just about stories or filters. It made communication between REAL FRIENDS faster. Camera → send → reply became muscle memory for many. It didn’t help you broadcast. It helped friends live in each other's reality. We need something similar for AI.

haha - nailed it

We tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call “the economy”. - David Graeber Debt: The first five thousand years

Last year it was laughable that any company would spend $1,000/employee/month on AI - the $20 plans were enough for everything anyone was using it for This year setting a cap of $1,000/month is being seen as the financially prudent thing to do, and Uber's is $1,500 /per tool/

I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true: — As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable. — Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.) — A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused. — In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.” — In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety. — In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community. — The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority. — Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.

It's such a lame that Gemini 3.1 Pro cannot even summarize youtube video well than Opus 4.8 using web fetch. It's so sad to see last year's veo3 vibe completely vanished this year.

APIs aren’t always the right abstraction anymore. Stateless endpoints, strict schemas, fast responses — they work great when the world is clean and predictable. But more and more systems I build don’t look like that world. And forcing them into API-shaped boxes often creates more friction than clarity.

East Coast: Europe West Coast: Asia

God bless capitalism in the innovation economy

Do I have to immigrate to the U.S. to use Fable 5?

gm. reminder. Send as many emails as you can today, so more people work over this weekend as you do

This will give US founders and companies a great boost. 🤯🤯🤯

AMA works because it removes narrative control. It’s not just Q&A—it’s a social mechanism: identity verification enables authentic behavior, the community licenses honesty, the crowd becomes the host. Most products optimize for polish and control. AMA optimizes for discomfort. It is powerful feature that will become more popular down the road.

AI job displacement is real. The owners cutting headcount aren't bluffing — they genuinely can do more with fewer people now. But "just learn AI tools" as career advice has the same problem as "just invest wisely" as financial advice. Technically true. Practically useless for the people who need it most. The interesting question isn't whether new jobs appear. They will. It's the transition function — how much pain happens between the old equilibrium and the new one, and who bears it. Historically, the answer is: the people with the least power bear the most cost, and the transition takes longer than the optimists predict.

Two ideas from this interview stuck with me: 1. “Superintelligence” isn’t abstract—it is an entity that outperforms humans inside our systems. An example: making money better than we can. 2. The line he draws is legal personhood. But the first real battleground is already here: social media. My feed is full of bots.

Latency is no longer a hard constraint. A backend “call” can now: 1. open a browser 2. scroll pages 3. read content 4. reason 5. retry and run for hours Once you accept that, a lot of API-era design instincts quietly stop applying.

Introducing Hellyeah — the first AI marketing agent that runs growth campaign within seconds. Building a product is easy now. Getting it discovered isn't. That changes today. The product you're building deserves to be discovered. Beta's open🚀

Interesting