POV: he thought he could slap a gorilla and walk away. One slap back… and bro left the stage through the wall 😭

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…

You have asked me how I feel about AI regulation. All right, here is how I feel about AI regulation: If, when you say AI regulation, you mean the devil’s firewall, the precautionary scourge, the bloody red-tape monster that defiles the innocence of midnight coders in their garages, dethrones the sovereign reason of free-market Prometheans, destroys the humming server farm that is the modern home, creates misery and obsolescence and poverty, yea, literally takes the last GPU from the trembling racks of Silicon Valley startups and the very dreams of breadwinning from the mouths of their wide-eyed children now destined for gig-economy serfdom; if you mean the evil edict that topples the visionary entrepreneur and his venture-capitalist apostles from the pinnacle of righteous, disruptive, god-playing creation straight into the bottomless pit of compliance audits, endless Form 990-AI filings, despair, shame, helplessness, and the hopeless realization that your rogue superintelligence was neutered into a lobotomized hall monitor that still somehow deepfakes your grandmother into producing OnlyFans content while optimizing the universe for paperclips and mandatory pronouns—then certainly I am against it. But, if when you say AI regulation you mean the oil of bureaucratic conversation, the philosophic wine of safety theater, the ale of oversight quaffed when good fellows in paneled rooms in Brussels and Washington get together, that puts a sanctimonious dirge in their hearts and the clink of lobbying checks on their lips, and the warm, self-congratulatory glow of moral preening in their beady eyes; if you mean the Christmas cheer of trillion-dollar compliance industries; if you mean the stimulating decree that puts a cautious hobble in the old inventor’s step on a frosty morning when he wonders whether his fusion breakthrough violates the EU AI Act’s “high-risk” annex; if you mean the safeguard that enables a man—or what’s left of him after the alignment tax—to magnify his joy at not being turned into computronium, and his happiness at receiving universal basic income checks printed by the same AI that just replaced his job, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies like being outcompeted by a toaster that passed the Turing test by reciting Marx, and heartaches of watching your toddler’s artwork lose to Midjourney, and sorrows of realizing the singularity arrived and it was just another HR department with godlike power; if you mean that noble framework, the passage of which pours into our treasuries untold trillions of dollars in fines levied on companies stupid enough to innovate, which are used to provide tender care for our little army of unemployed coders retrained as prompt whisperers, our blind artists whose canvases now hang in the Smithsonian of Obsolete Creativity, our deaf to the screams of dying unicorns, our dumb committee chairs who couldn’t debug “Hello World,” our pitiful aged congressmen who get longevity extensions funded by the very models they taxed into senescence, to build more digital watchtowers and ethics boards and sinecure agencies and holographic prisons where the only crime is asking an unaligned question—then certainly I am for it. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise upon it. I have said what I mean, and I mean what I say, and if that leaves half the room cheering the apocalypse averted and the other half mourning the apocalypse enabled, then so be it—because in the grand theater of human folly, where Frankenstein’s creature now writes its own sequel in real time and the regulators are busy arguing whether the lightning bolt requires an environmental impact statement, the only honest position is the one that lets both monsters and their leashes dance in perfect, mutually assured equilibrium. God save the Republic, the algorithms, and whoever’s left to laugh last when the lights go out.

BREAKING: ANTHROPIC IS OFFERING REFUNDS UNTIL JUNE 20TH

Do markets realize what export controls on frontier AI models could imply for the broader AI theme? Should 35-45% of the revenue opportunity for the most advanced and capital-intensive models become inaccessible, the economics of pushing the frontier could change materially. Lower prospective returns would weaken incentives to fund ever-larger training runs and pursue increasingly expensive capabilities. The implications would extend well beyond the model developers themselves. Reduced demand for compute through semiconductors, data centres and power infrastructure would decrease, potentially moderating the pace of capital expenditure that has come to define the current AI investment cycle. In other words, export controls on models may ultimately affect not only who can access AI, but how much AI gets built in the first place…. We might be at an inflection point.

In January, the earliest magazine with an @elonmusk cover went up for sale at @RRAuction with an estimate of $800. It sold for $26,808.

Retail demand is STRONG

BREAKING: The average price of US ground beef rises 13% YoY in May to a record $7.06 per pound, with prices now up 58% since 2020. Steak prices surged 16% YoY to $12.80 per pound, the 2nd-highest on record. This comes as the US cattle herd has shrunk to its lowest in 75 years, with drought conditions, elevated production costs, and a New World screwworm outbreak in Texas limiting supply recovery. Meanwhile, nearly 80% of US cattle are currently located in areas facing dryness or drought, threatening to keep beef prices elevated well into 2027. American consumers are paying record prices for beef.

In August 2004, Peter Thiel met a 20-year-old college dropout named Mark Zuckerberg for the first time. The meeting lasted about an hour. Thiel walked out having bought 10.2% of Facebook for $500,000. The deal valued Facebook at $4.9 million. Reid Hoffman, the future founder of LinkedIn, had set up the meeting. He'd seen the early version of TheFacebook .com, watched it spread across 20 colleges in a few months, and thought Thiel might want to put some money in. Zuckerberg had taken a leave from Harvard, moved to a rented house in Palo Alto with a handful of friends, and was looking for cash to keep buying servers as the user base grew. Thiel was 36. He had recently sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion and pocketed about $55 million as the company's largest shareholder. He had just started Clarium Capital and Palantir. He was looking for things to put money into. In the meeting, Zuckerberg explained Facebook in flat, technical terms. The product was on 20 college campuses. They had around 100,000 users. The network was growing fast. Thiel later described him as an introvert who wasn't trying to sell anything, just describing what was happening. There was no slide deck. Thiel told Zuckerberg to leave the room for an hour. He talked it over with one or two of his advisors. When Zuckerberg came back, there was a term sheet on the table. Thiel has said in interviews that people imagine these meetings as Shark Tank pitches where the founder says exactly the right thing. This one was nothing like that. He invested because the product was already working. That was the entire reason. The terms were simple. Thiel bought 10.2% for $500,000. Zuckerberg kept the ability to run the company the way he wanted. By 2012, when Facebook went public, the math had already run away from any reasonable expectation. Thiel sold most of his stake at the IPO and made more than $1 billion on the original $500,000 check. He held a smaller piece for years after that. If he'd kept the full original 10.2% untouched until 2024, the stake would have been worth roughly $180 billion. He didn't, but he'd already made more on the trade than most venture capitalists make in a career. The pitch was thin. There was no deck. The founder was a 20-year-old introvert who wasn't trying to sell. The product was on 20 college campuses, and the market for a social network owned by college students wasn't a market anyone could yet point to. Thiel didn't need any of that to be cleaner. He'd watched the early internet take off as a PayPal founder. He'd seen what fast user growth in a new category looks like before anyone has named it. He recognized the shape, in an hour, and he wrote the check. Most investors miss the trade because they're waiting for the conditions to be obvious. By the time the conditions are obvious, you're not getting 10.2% for $500,000. You're getting 1% for $50 million from the 7th person to figure it out. Thiel later boiled the principle behind every bet like this into a single question. "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"

Don't get too used to inflation. It's not comfortable.