Joined April 2011
1 Photos and videos
Snir Kodesh retweeted
May 14
Building an AI-native @Coinbase means rebuilding everything, especially the hardest parts. We've put a lot of time into redefining compliance, where the stakes are incredibly high, and we have to be extremely thoughtful about implementation. We have invested heavily in rebuilding our compliance ops around AI with that reality as our starting constraint, not an afterthought. Here is an overview of what we've learned and what we built. Most people assume compliance work is mostly checking whether a name appears on a sanctions list. That is the easy 5%. The other 95% is interpretive judgment under uncertainty: a customer claims their wealth came from real estate. Do the property records actually support it? Does the timeline hold? Is the documentation legitimate, or does it feel too polished? You need compliance staff and investigators who understand what “suspicious” actually looks like in context. That's part of why compliance is so hard to automate—and so expensive. The first obvious AI approach is to hand the model the existing procedures and ask it to run them faster. That approach misunderstands what procedures are for. Good procedures are not bad investigations; they are deliberately incomplete investigations. Their job is to create consistency, auditability, and a minimum standard across thousands of cases. They excel at saying what must happen. They are far worse at capturing everything a strong analyst actually notices: which sources they trust, when they widen the search, when a document feels off, when an explanation technically fits but still does not feel earned. Procedures also carry the shape of the old operating model: fragmented systems, time pressure, queue pressure, and the hard limit of how much one human analyst can read, cross-reference, and hold in working memory at once. That is not a flaw in the procedure. It is how you design a process for humans. AI changes the constraint set. Reading, searching, comparing documents, and tracing inconsistencies no longer have to be treated as scarce analyst time. Done carefully, with proper controls and human review, models can explore more context, test more hypotheses, and surface more inconsistencies than any single analyst could reasonably do case by case. So if you simply automate the procedure exactly as written, you may gain efficiency. You will not unlock the full value of AI. You will just make the old bottleneck run faster. The better question is not “Can AI follow the analyst playbook?” It is: once the cost of reading, cross-referencing, and testing hypotheses collapses, what should the investigation become? A second tempting approach: feed it historical Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) and let it learn from outcomes. This breaks down too. You rarely have the full state of what the analyst actually saw during the investigation. A case that looks straightforward today might only look that way because information surfaced later. A fraud indictment that didn't exist when the original analyst made the call, news articles that hadn't been published yet. Hindsight can contaminate your training data. Also, regulators themselves acknowledge that SAR decisions can be subjective. The architecture has four layers. The first is data: continuously enhancing the coverage, quality, and architecture of the signals the system depends on. The second is classical machine learning models that cluster and classify alerts to determine what type of investigation needs to run. The third is the investigation agent itself: a multi-agent system that orchestrates specialized agents to execute the investigation end to end. The fourth is a safety filter that runs independently of typology, ensuring no risk vector is missed regardless of how the alert is classified. Each layer is independently auditable and learns from the feedback provided by human reviewers. Inside the investigation agent, specialized sub-agents run across the full case surface: alert context, customer and identity signals, access patterns, risk indicators, transaction behavior, source-of-funds, onchain activity, and public adverse media. Each writes its findings into a shared case memory. A coordinator agent reconciles and challenges them. When sub-agents disagree, such as when source-of-funds marks activity as “explained” while adverse media surfaces a recent indictment, the coordinator attempts to resolve these disagreements knowing the common patterns. The narrative agent prepares the final report with all collected evidence and suggested resolution. The last self-validation agent acts as a guardrail: if the system cannot support its conclusion with sufficient confidence or data quality, the case is routed to manual investigation instead of being surfaced as an automated result. Before any of this touched a real customer case, we built what we call a “Golden Set” - historical cases with known right answers. "Known right answers" in compliance is harder than it sounds. It meant re-investigating old cases, getting multiple senior analysts to independently agree on what the right call would have been, then debating the disagreements until consensus. Months of work before we could even start measuring. Here's an important part (for now) - cases currently get BOTH the AI's full investigation AND a senior human review. We didn't reduce scrutiny, in fact, we added more of it until it no longer proves valuable. Cases resolve significantly faster AND get more eyes than they ever did before. Every human correction feeds back into the model as a training signal. It gets better because it's wrong in front of people who know how to fix it. None of this would have shipped without clearing structural blockers most financial institutions are still stuck on. Security and privacy sign-off to send customer data to LLMs at all. Senior compliance officer alignment on AI-assisted human decision making. Model Governance team embedded since December - they observed the entire Golden-Set Evaluation process and are running a formal validation review with our Internal Audit team now. Today this handles roughly 55% of our US fraud case volume with significantly less analyst time per case. Time freed goes to the harder cases AI can't yet handle - and to teaching it. Our internal compliance and quality teams are the ones who are building this system with the engineers, training it, validating it, and continuing to shape how it improves. In the process, they've developed skills that are incredibly valuable: how to design evals, how to think about model bias, how to think about human bias, how to architect human-in-the-loop systems, skills that are becoming among the most valuable at any company. This entire project started ~6 months ago with a whiteboarding session between @galpa42 and I, and was built by an AI-pilled cross-functional and it’s just the first pod - there's a multi-month roadmap,rebuilding compliance from the ground up with AI. Huge thanks to everyone involved and congratulations to @galpa42 for shipping two babies to production this month :) The future of high-stakes work is not AI replacing judgment. It is AI making judgment scalable, auditable, and continuously improvable.
23
25
257
247,920
Snir Kodesh retweeted
Apr 23
We're thrilled to be investing in @PetualAI. Audit and compliance are among the most universal – and most painful – functions inside large enterprises. What makes this market so compelling, and so ripe for disruption, is its combination of scale, uniformity, and pain. Petual is a domain-specific AI platform built for audit teams. It automates the long tail of drudgery that internal audit teams must do. And SOX is just the beginning. Petual will turn every audit and compliance team into a proactive, AI-powered control system for the enterprise. Petual's founder @snirkodesh is a second-time founder who has previously led engineering at Retool and held senior engineering leadership roles at Lyft. Petual is a world-class team transforming how the largest enterprises in the world function, and we’re excited to be backing them.
Today, I’m excited to share that @PetualAI has raised $20 to move audit from process-heavy work to judgment. Our raise includes a $17 round led by @a16z (a16z) and a $3.2M round led by @firstround , with participation from @CowboyVC , @eladgil , the founders of Lyft, Opendoor, and more. SOX compliance and internal audit are among the most manual, resource-intensive processes in any public company. Auditors wade through hundreds of support files per control test. PDFs, spreadsheets, emails, screenshots, and more. Just to determine whether a control operated correctly. Tens of millions of hours and $8 BILLION are spent on this every year. We knew this had to change. That teams deserved to apply more of their judgment and manage risk, rather than get buried in the mechanical. That's why we built Petual. Petual brings agentic AI to SOX testing and internal audit, autonomously gathering evidence and generating auditor-ready work papers in minutes instead of hours. Our customers -- S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 companies spanning energy, infrastructure, SaaS, manufacturing, financial services, and more -- can see 68–80% efficiency gains on SOX workflows. Huge thanks to our investors, early customers like @Navan and @PoweredByEos , and the many other customers who’ve been part of this journey; and of course, our incredible team. If you're in audit or compliance and want to see Petual in action, let’s talk.
10
13
156
47,484
Today, I’m excited to share that @PetualAI has raised $20 to move audit from process-heavy work to judgment. Our raise includes a $17 round led by @a16z (a16z) and a $3.2M round led by @firstround , with participation from @CowboyVC , @eladgil , the founders of Lyft, Opendoor, and more. SOX compliance and internal audit are among the most manual, resource-intensive processes in any public company. Auditors wade through hundreds of support files per control test. PDFs, spreadsheets, emails, screenshots, and more. Just to determine whether a control operated correctly. Tens of millions of hours and $8 BILLION are spent on this every year. We knew this had to change. That teams deserved to apply more of their judgment and manage risk, rather than get buried in the mechanical. That's why we built Petual. Petual brings agentic AI to SOX testing and internal audit, autonomously gathering evidence and generating auditor-ready work papers in minutes instead of hours. Our customers -- S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 companies spanning energy, infrastructure, SaaS, manufacturing, financial services, and more -- can see 68–80% efficiency gains on SOX workflows. Huge thanks to our investors, early customers like @Navan and @PoweredByEos , and the many other customers who’ve been part of this journey; and of course, our incredible team. If you're in audit or compliance and want to see Petual in action, let’s talk.
31
11
146
127,770
20 Sep 2024
Is "AI-powered XYZ" hero messaging actually working for conversion? I personally want to know what a product actually does and not that it wraps an LLM.
1
4
928
Snir Kodesh retweeted
You don't murder hostages if you want a hostage deal. All Hamas have ever demanded is concessions that legitimise hurting Jews for being Jews. For instance they are currently demanding the right to import weapons across the Egyptian border. For years they demanded concrete.
1 Sep 2024
Hamas isn’t negotiating a hostage deal. It’s demanding an Israeli capitulation to terms that would let it try to take more hostages in future, while executing the hostages it has been abusing for 11 months. That is the grim reality.
6
34
245
21,609
Snir Kodesh retweeted
28 Jul 2024
Wow. This headline. Just, wow.
At least 10 dead, including children, in a rocket attack on a soccer field in Israeli-controlled Golan Heights that Israel blames on Hezbollah cnn.it/3WovPEN
10
3
109
21,778
Snir Kodesh retweeted
28 Jul 2024
The thing people should realize is that the Hamas-Hezbollah-Houthi attacks are ultimately all sourced at the same place. Those are all proxies of the Islamic Republic of Iran that are fully reliant on that regime. Same for the constant attacks on US forces in Iraq and Syria. The Obama-Biden-Harris appeasement approach toward that regime has been a complete failure and the main source of destabilization in the Middle East. Iran is funding, arming, and fueling all of these proxies to create chaos in the region. That is only possible because of the extensive financial relief they have received and lack of consequences. Our response has been to consistently try to restrain our allies in the region (& I don’t just mean Israel) instead of punishing these enemies. But that actually encourages escalation because those enemies consistently respond to perceived weakness by crossing new lines. It took the Biden admin 3 years to recognize their border policies were a failure and change course recently, which has led to a substantial decrease in border crossings. When will they wake up and recognize the same about their appeasement policies when it comes to the Iranian regime?
34
226
980
45,778
Snir Kodesh retweeted
The 12 Druze-Israeli Children and Teenagers that were Killed today by a Hezbollah Rocket Attack on their Soccer Match within the Town of Majdal Shams, in the Golan Heights of Northeastern Israel.
727
2,048
6,159
524,745
Wow, @waymo with the nice touch! April Fool's Joke about stopping to get gas in an EV Jag.
1
3
526
PG&E continues to underperform on its already poor standard. 36 hour outage here we go!
2
4
667
Snir Kodesh retweeted
In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about. I first became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts. How could this be? I wondered. When I saw President Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly, thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students. A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge. I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus. I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment. Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant. I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more. What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology. Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.” Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist. As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology. In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one. After the death of George Floyd, the already burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question which challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label which could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation and more. Being called a racist got people cancelled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear. The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk. The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly-acquired world views. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and cancelled. These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression. When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country since its founding has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society. The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country. You can say things about white people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be costly and severe. To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors. Martin Luther King’s most famous words are instructive: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use skin color to effect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless) and in government (also I believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the content of one’s character. As such, a meritocracy is an anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed. And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed. I have always believed that the most fortunate should help the least fortunate, and that our system should be designed in such a way as to maximize the size of the overall pie so that it will enable us to provide an economic system which can offer quality of life, education, housing, and healthcare for all. America is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to do. Steps taken on the path to socialism – another word for an equality of outcome system – will reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times. Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history – a fact which is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors – it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people generations after the abolishment of slavery should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists. An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups. The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity, i.e, fairness, in how DEI operates, that contributes to this resentment. I was accused of being a racist from the President of the NAACP among others when I posted on @X that I had learned that the Harvard President search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former President Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring. When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in important leadership positions, and it is therefore an important moment for celebration. I too celebrated this achievement. I am inspired and moved by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring at the pinnacle leadership position at perhaps our most important and iconic university as an important and significant milestone for the black community. I have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities including by investing several hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic assets to help communities in need with economic development, sensible criminal justice reform, poverty reduction, healthcare, education, workforce housing, charter schools, and more. I have done the same at Pershing Square Capital Management when, for example, we completed one of the largest IPOs ever with the substantive assistance of a number of minority-owned, women-owned, and Veteran-owned investment banks. Prior to the Pershing Square Tontine, Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for big corporations occasionally to name a few minority-owned banks in their equity and bond offerings, have these banks do no work and sell only a de minimis amount of stock or bonds, and allocate to them only 1% or less of the underwriting fees so that the issuers could virtue signal that they were helping minority communities. In our IPO, we invited the smaller banks into the deal from the beginning of the process so they could add real value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was one of the largest and most successful IPOs in history with $12 billion of demand for a $4 billion deal by the second day of the IPO, when we closed the books. The small banks earned their 20% share of the fees for delivering real and substantive value and for selling their share of the stock. Compare this approach to the traditional one where the small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees – they aren’t given that opportunity – yet, they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It only creates resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative action. While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a large IPO soon so we are looking forward to working with our favored smaller banks. I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to the right thing to do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am. All of the above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not qualified to serve in that role. This appears to have been the case with former President Gay’s selection. She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly after October 7th, but there were many signs before then when she was Dean of the faculty. The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay. The Harvard board should not have run a search process which had a predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay? One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into the Corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent. Unrelated to the DEI issue, as a side note, I would suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include capable business people for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a Dean of the Faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the university. It therefore does not make sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management. The president’s job – managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management – are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president. Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the University is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5% annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets. The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades, (I believe it has grown about 7-8% per annum) and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard College. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school. The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20%. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20% in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices? In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems which I have identified above. The Corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department. The Board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students. And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s research, the Board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it threatened the NY Post with “immense” liability if it published a story raising these issues. It was only after getting the story cancelled that the Board secretly launched a cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms, i.e., “duplicative language” to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility. The Board’s three-person panel of “political scientist experts” that to this day remain unnamed who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the University and its reputation for academic integrity as the whistleblower and the media continued to identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter. According to the NY Post, the Board also apparently sought to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention to the University’s whistleblower protection policies. Despite all of the above, the Board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the Board. In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the Board nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them. So what should happen? The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats. The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done. Then new Corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board. The Board should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure. The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy. Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible? Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences. Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus. Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy. These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done. A number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new constitution which can be found at pennforward.com, which has been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president. A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect. Today was an important step forward for the University. It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves. We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.

8,713
18,248
76,512
36,026,345
Snir Kodesh retweeted
24 Oct 2023
1/: Today, after working somewhat under the radar, we're sharing more about smlXL: our vision, mission, and tech. blog.smlxl.io/making-public-…
17
55
216
68,910
Snir Kodesh retweeted
Specifically, when there is a massacre somewhere, there is a surge of sympathy in the West for the victims. The more brutal the massacre, the greater the surge. With Jews it's always the other way round. It's a weird effect. It happened before, during and after the Holocaust too.
It's a telling fact.
39
71
539
123,477
Snir Kodesh retweeted
As the mother of babies, it has been heart wrenching and physically painful to see the images of Israeli families killed or taken hostage by terrorists, but I’m grateful for an open platform showing us the truth, no matter how horrific it is to see. The New York Times is an embarrassment to journalism. What a shame to see the institution fall so low.
28
30
597
200,429
Snir Kodesh retweeted
8 Oct 2023
I would add: Media networks who give platforms to Hamas-justifying spokesmen. I've just watched one on TV who promised viewers that Hamas is very careful to adhere to Muslim rules of military engagement, especially in regards to women and children.
People who defend this People who equivocate People who "both-sides" it People who stay silent People who look for nuance People who squirm & spin & suffocate truth People who call it resistance People who "understand" it People who use the word "but" All of you are complicit.
4
29
99
31,896
Snir Kodesh retweeted
The extent of the horror in Israel today has been significantly under-reported The acts of brutality, rape, beheading, torture and murder are unspeakable and are being suppressed for now by media. The number of casualties is much higher, I fear, than the 250 reported. And dozens of Israelis — children, women, elderly — are being held hostage and likely to be murdured in Gaza. The scope is truly unimaginable for a country so small where everyone knows of a casualty. It will take a long, long time for Israeli society to come to terms with this. In meantime, justice must be done — #endhamas and everyone associated with it.
32
185
620
70,116
11 Sep 2023
1/n A few episodes back, @DavidSacks was talking about how (direct quote!) "every enterprise wants it's own internal chatbot, it's own internal chatGPT, where the employees can ask questions and the AI has access to the companies information. AND it understands permissions and
1
6
19
10,011
11 Sep 2023
Full abstraction of LLM features like summarization, sentiment extraction, support for vectors and local embeddings, builder-driven selection of LLM model, and all running on top of Retools enterprise stack: audit logs, permissions, on-prem, etc.
1
6
738