Unreal that I got to judge a hackathon organized by @browser_use at @ycombinator!

Bootstrapped startup founders after managing product, sales, support and marketing alone without breaking down:

happy SpaceX IPO day :)

"Misanthropic." I've never seen the AI community so angry at a major new model release. I asked my AI (an agent that @blevlabs made for me) to gather all the backlash. THE BACKLASH AGAINST CLAUDE FABLE 5'S RESTRICTIONS The best analysis of why this matters: @EnoReyes — "It's about who gets to decide, and whether you ever find out when they do. Fable won't fall back to a different model and tell you. It just limits the output through prompt modification, steering vectors, or PEFT. You won't be told when it happens to you." x.com/EnoReyes/status/206451… THE VIRAL TAKE: @0xBalloonLover — "anthropic won't let you use fable for biology, chemistry, ai research, or anything that accelerates human progress. that makes it the perfect tool for developing blockchains" x.com/0xBalloonLover/status/… POWER CONCENTRATION: @ClementDelangue (HuggingFace CEO) — "Concentration of power, capabilities and economic wealth is the biggest risk in AI. We need open science and open-source more than ever!" x.com/ClementDelangue/status… @jeremyphoward (fast.ai) — "Anthropic has chosen the opposite of the safe path: they are allowing themselves, the current top lab, to use their top model for frontier AI research. They've said they'll sabotage others who try." x.com/jeremyphoward/status/2… @gneubig (Graham Neubig, CMU) — "First they came for the model builders... I feel we're getting a glimpse of a future where AI is only provided to a privileged few, and that's not a future I want to live in." x.com/gneubig/status/2064451… OPEN RESEARCH: @askalphaxiv (AlphaXiv open science) — "As believers of open research, we are disappointed to see Anthropic silently degrading Fable 5 for AI development." x.com/askalphaxiv/status/206… @willccbb — "it is the first publicly available model that i am explicitly not allowed to use for my work, because anthropic holds the view that the work i do to facilitate open model research is harmful. capability and alignment research are coupled. anthropic wants to be the only lab." x.com/willccbb/status/206450… NOUSRESEARCH / HERMES (which Anthropic has nerfed multiple times): @Teknium (NousResearch co-founder) — "What's crazy to me is that Fable is blocked from life sciences broadly, nerfed even if you get passed the classifiers and filter level blocks. The whole point of AGI/ASI is to cure all diseases. Everything else is just nice to haves. But Anthropic wants to close off that path." x.com/Teknium/status/2064570… THE MECHANISM: @kimmonismus — "When the model is used for frontier LLM development, it apparently does not simply refuse or warn the user. Instead, it quietly limits its own effectiveness through techniques like prompt modification, steering vectors, and PEFT." x.com/kimmonismus/status/206… MEDICAL COMMUNITY: @DeryaTR (immunologist, BSL-3 certified) — "The word 'cancer' is flagged as a biosecurity risk by Claude Fable 5! I also tried to code a website on cancer mutations & Fable 5 was immediately removed from my list!" x.com/DeryaTR/status/2064414… @DeryaTR — "I can't even say 'hello' to Fable 5 except in incognito mode (memories off), because it knows I am a biomedical researcher!" x.com/DeryaTR/status/2064602… @DeryaTR — "I am not even allowed to use Fable 5 with memories on! Apparently the model thinks I am a biosecurity risk, though I had been certified to work in biosecurity level 3 labs! Not a single Anthropic person has tried to reach out to help either!" x.com/DeryaTR/status/2064605… @banteg — "claude fable 5 refuses completely benign tasks like analyzing bloodwork." x.com/banteg/status/20646076… @bneyshabur — "Working on AI for cancer? Sorry, I can't help you. Working on AI for Alzheimer's Disease? Sorry, I'm becoming a bit dumb when it comes to the AI part of it." x.com/bneyshabur/status/2064… SUBSCRIPTION CANCELLED: @bubbleboi — "Have canceled my team subscription for Claude Pro. Idc how good that model is, it's not good enough for me to support people who actively stifle innovation and gate keep knowledge that they didn't even create." x.com/bubbleboi/status/20646… BILLING AND PRIVACY: @GergelyOrosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) — "Things I really dislike about Fable: 1. Anthropic collects my prompt history, stores it, and does whatever they want with it for 30 days. No opt-out. 2. They can nerf their most expensive model without telling me, billing me the same amount, wasting my time. Whenever they want." x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/20… THE KARPATHY QUESTION: @SanthProject — "the old @karpathy would never support a company that fucks other llm researchers. Were the stock benefits that good?" x.com/SanthProject/status/20… THE MONOPOLY CHARGE: @tunguz (TabulAI founder) — "Starting to suspect that Anthropic's putative security and safety considerations are largely posturing and performative." x.com/tunguz/status/20644379… @BlancheMinerva — "Anthropic is choosing to make decisions that make the world a significantly worse and potentially more dangerous place." x.com/BlancheMinerva/status/… @LinusMixson — "Dario personally, and Anthropic as a whole, have been extremely straightforward about wanting a monopoly for a long, long time." x.com/LinusMixson/status/206… @TheAhmadOsman — "I started warning people about Anthropic more than a year ago... Today I am vindicated, everybody knows that company only acts in bad faith." x.com/TheAhmadOsman/status/2… WHY REGULAR PEOPLE WILL EVENTUALLY CARE: @DanJeffries1 — "The fury is real and what all of us in the open community have been saying for years and yet regular folks don't get it yet because nothing they care about is restricted or taken away for 'safety.' They will care a LOT in the future when AI is integrated into every aspect of [life]." x.com/DanJeffries1/status/20… Full analysis: alignednews.com/ai

To date, the longest running agent I've deployed and it didn't miss. Codex (@OpenAI) is a beast!

Token costs are why there will be no saas apocalypse / good dev tools are cached intelligence for agents! The popular theory goes: agents can write code, so they'll just rebuild every tool from scratch and hit raw APIs. no more dev tools, no more CLIs, no more software layers. just agents and endpoints! We just tested this and the data says the opposite. We benchmarked Claude Code and Codex on real Hugging Face Hub tasks (~1,000 graded runs), with two setups: the agent-optimized hf CLI vs the agent hand-rolling curl or SDK calls from scratch. Hand-rolling burns up to 6x more tokens on multi-step tasks and fails more often (84% vs 94% task success). And that's just dropping one abstraction layer. It would obviously be orders of magnitude more tokens and a dramatically higher failure rate if the agent tried to bypass HF altogether and rebuild model hosting, versioning, and distribution from scratch. Every time an agent re-derives a workflow from raw API calls, you pay for that reasoning in tokens. every single run. a good CLI compresses that entire chain into a few high-level commands the agent can't get wrong. In a world where everyone is complaining tokens are too expensive, abstraction is leverage: thousands of hours of design decisions your agent doesn't have to re-reason about at inference time. Good tools are cached intelligence for agents! So no, agents won't rebuild everything from scratch. they'll gravitate to the most token-efficient tools, because that's what their owners pay for. The software that survives won't just be accessible to agents, it will be accurate and cheap for them to drive. We're seeing it happen with HF, which is becoming the platform for agents to use AI: ~49M requests in just two months, and growing fast! huggingface.co/blog/hf-cli-f…

thanks claude, imma stick to opus 4.6 seeing 4.8 is a marginal upgrade that just gibbles up tokens faster than i can <insert relevant analogy>

Brand marketing at its peak! Hats off @figma 🙌

Sometimes they're a good reason to work on something. When people say a market is "crowded," what that often means is that there's a real problem and none of the solutions are good enough yet.

Is this a glitch or did @AnthropicAI drop Opus 4.8?

Meta was easily the most toxic company I've worked for. There's a reason the Chinese call it "Squid Game". Others refer to it as "Hunger Games" or "Lord of the Flies". I think they're all accurate. The company culture is basically every man/woman for themselves. The performance review process (PSC) not only doesn't incentivize helping others, if anything it actually discourages it since everyone is stack ranked against each other. Imagine working on a team where every 6 months, one of you is going to get axed. Of course it's going to become toxic. "Bottoms up" culture is a complete farce - it's just a way for leadership to offload accountability. The Tech Leads (TLs) have all the power - owning the relationships and tribal knowledge to gatekeep projects to their buddies. Managers are "people managers" with limited technical understanding, who basically aggregate TL feedback and create performance review packets to calibrate with other managers and IC7 . The takeaway is that your destiny is in the hands of the TLs, and TLs unlike managers have no responsibility for your career. There are no repercussions for unethical behavior. I've seen managers and TLs throw others under the bus and get away with it. The only mission bonding the company together is individual self-preservation. Save your own ass to survive for another stock vesting, and throw someone else under the bus if you need to. That's why layoffs rarely impact directors/VPs or tenured IC7 despite the fact that they're paid by far the most. Even this recent mass layoff that was supposed to "flatten" managers layers barely affected directors/VPs/IC7 , and fell predominantly on M1s - the lowest rung of the management chain. The culture is extremely performative and focused on box ticking and optics. Everything is about PSC (the performance review system) and perception. This means tons of meetings, useless AI slop posts, and top-down initiatives that don't benefit anyone but maybe help tick off the impact box of some go-getter at the top. Impact is not enough - it has to have sufficient complexity. So complexity is added for complexity's sake. The org I was in (Facebook ads) is 90% Chinese, and the entire leadership chain up to the VP level is Chinese. Mandarin is the primary language at the office, except in official meetings with non-speakers. Chinese work culture is very different from American work culture, with 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days/week), top-down nature, emphasis on saving face (eg. don't question your superiors), and toxicity being quite common. Naturally when an org is completely dominated by a single ethnicity that's notorious for not integrating, elements from their work culture seep in. Of the layoffs I witnessed in this org, 3/4 were not Chinese (just to be clear, most Chinese are very kind so don't take this as an attack. But it is a reality that I think most people outside this company are completely unaware of, and I question if leadership is even aware despite the fact that we're talking about the company HQ) I had the most toxic manager of my life here. I watched him deliberately set up a new hire to fail, driving them to needing to see a psychiatrist for anxiety depression, and getting them fired. Then he suddenly disappeared for 8 months, before leaving the company. I could go on and on, but this is already pretty long and I think you get the point. Yes there are a lot of great, kind people here. I managed to transfer out of my first team into a new team with a great manager where everyone was very smart, supportive, and hardworking. But the company has its Squid Game reputation for a reason. Company culture comes from the top. It seems leadership is either too removed to notice, or maybe don't really care anymore because I guess they already made their billions and us plebs are expendable these days.

sales cures all - @mcuban

always love a good office-hours session w/ gstack (by @garrytan) -- already applied!

Lava take: LinkedIn works if you can make it work. Companies make millions off of it.

being a founder means suffering through an existential crisis every other day and still believing you’re right

@eshear you're a F legend and I'm so glad to see you know your worth!

Sam Altman texts Mira Murati November 19, 2023

The co-founder requirement was largely about execution ability/capacity, not vision. AI changes that math. Carta's solo founder report 52% of successfully exited startup are solo-founded, and solo founder company formation has roughly doubled over the last 10 years. I think it's lonely, but it can work! carta.com/data/solo-founders…

I did the thing @ycombinator - let’s go!

you know what all of these "which is better" polls are silly use codex or claude code, whatever works best for you i am grateful we live in a time with such amazing tools, and grateful there is a choice

Codex: *just coding away tirelessly* Me: *bored watching it do the work*