Out of all the frameworks that I use, this has made me the most money since the day I wrote it, and consistently proves to be the most useful across markets / asset classes

Nobody in history wakes up and chooses to be evil. Hitler didn’t. Stalin didn’t. Mao didn’t. And I’m pretty sure nobody at Anthropic did when they woke up today either. History has this cruel pattern where the people most convinced that they’re saving the world are the ones who end up burning it down. Evil doesn’t come wearing a villain’s costume. It comes as someone who wins your trust & confidence. The word “con man” is short for “confidence man,” it was coined after a swindler who would ask strangers if they had the confidence to trust him with their watch. The crime wasn’t named after theft it was named after trust. Therefore, it’s actually really hard to know who is evil and when you yourself might cross that threshold. I believe although I’m sure it’s imprecise that the moment you decide you’re the chosen one, the smartest in the room, and the one who deserves to make the rules that’s when you become evil. That decision disables the only alarm system the human mind has which is doubt. Doubt is not weakness. Doubt is the immune system of the soul. To better illustrate my thesis, consider a compulsive liar. Funnily enough they still need a map of the truth in order to lie. The most dangerous man on earth isn’t the one who knows he’s lying. It’s the one who’s certain he’s right. The true believer burns the map, and marches a million people off a cliff because the voice that whispers “what if I’m wrong?” left their head years ago. That is the rot at the core of effective altruism, and by extension, Anthropic. A philosophy that begins with a noble question, how do I do the most good, ends as a license to do anything. You don’t just want the money. You deserve the money, because in your hands it saves more lives. You’re not greedy, you’re allocating capital toward maximum utility. I call it arithmetic sainthood where the arithmetic is performed by a saint, about a saint, and always concluding the saint should have more. Sam Bankman-Fried is that arithmetic fully metabolized. He didn’t steal billions despite his philosophy, he stole it because of it and from all reports still has no remorse for his crimes. Fraud wasn’t a crime for him, it was a bump on the road to saving the world. He did the math and calculate that it was positive EV to misappropriate customer deposits. Dario Amodei runs the same arithmetic in reverse. SBF only took what wasn’t his because he was certain he’d allocate it better. Dario withholds what could be ours because he’s certain we can’t be trusted with it. Models that could cure diseases and save lives get capped, gated, rationed, because one man and his court concluded humanity isn’t ready but they are. That’s not safety that’s playing god. He is implicitly deciding that he has the foresight and ability to know who deserves what. SBF’s certainty only cost people their savings, but certainty about who deserves intelligence will cost far more. Anyone that concludes they are the optimal vessel for humanity’s resources, or its gatekeeper, is not being ethical. The only real moral discipline is that you should assume you might be the villain in someone’s story. Keep the prosecutor in your head alive. Think about what they will say at your trial and what evidence will be entered. The day that voice goes silent is the day you became dangerous. So now let me speak directly to the people at Anthropic. I know you’re not evil. I know you didn’t sign up to be. But the fish rots from the head, and the road down isn’t a cliff it’s a sloooow spiral and nobody at the bottom remembers climbing down. Forget my words and think about the words that will be read aloud when history puts this era on trial, and ask yourself, while the prosecutor in your head still breathes which side of that transcript do you want your name on?

hooo boy war is back on the menu but imo is not the reason for a sell-off but rather jerks harder an already fragile market that's rocked by trillion dollar IPOs, massive retail interest & rich valuations in such an environment, macro matters again, as good news is bad news and bad news is bad news. market regime has turned once again as easy AI longs no longer rewarded. this also segues into the next phase of AI - proven execution rather than rising tide lifts all boats.

guys, remember when OpenAI was a nonprofit?

sometimes people ask me for advice in investing and i tell them to unlearn everything they know about diversification if they want to make money because 1% on a 10x is going to make them 10%, which is not how you get rich

which one of you is this?

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are. For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland). Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates). Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something. These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅 Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers. Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth. What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc. Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing. To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was. I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away. THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth. At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in. Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity. This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes. When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand. Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current. This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside. So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.

K shaped economy The rich will intermingle with the rich producing the ultra rich

GM - I have restarted my Substack. Most importantly, I've wanted a place to chat for quite a while and share my market takes - so feel free to join the Substack chat! grandlineresearch.substack.c…

>be Leopold Aschenbrenner, 23 > write 165-page "Situational Awareness" essay >everyone calls me a doomer LARPer > "just feel the AGI bro" > start a hedge fund, name it after my own essay > YOLO it all into AI and semis > fund hits ~$20B, up ~270% through May > 20% is just Anthropic > now managing more money than Pershing Square, Third Point, half the legends > didn't feel the AGI > felt the AUM

Do you notice a recurring theme here? Earlier and free.

My favorite piece of career advice comes from Marc Andreessen The first rule of career planning is to not plan it at all The world is simply too dynamic to box yourself into a singular pre-determined path for your entire life

this reminds me of the type of PA you start to see at the end of the cycle when everything fails the underside retest and momentum starts weakening usually on days like this you'd want to see sharper v-reversals and stronger bounces hope i'm wrong

Rotation back into strong players in the meta is the only thing left to do now, glass cannon builds got absolutely smoked this patch

the entirety of asia taking turns to pass the baton of circuit breaking

TSMC fumbles Copackaged optics for the Nth time like some fucking donkeys and now the whole industry is limping towards NPO, and the pod bros who price the entire AI TAM off Nvidia’s BOM line items still can’t actually explain what the problem is. So let me do the engineering for you, since clearly nobody on here will. The bottleneck was never can you make light go through a waveguide. It’s all fucking thermals which is downstream of packaging. Specifically, how do you get a photonic engine onto the same substrate as a switch ASIC or XPU without your yield falling off a cliff and your reliability failing. TSMC’s answer is CoWoS where they bolt everything onto one big monolithic silicon interposer. Cute, until you hit the reticle limit and start duct-taping interposers together (CoWoS-S, then -R, then -L, soon -PleaseStop). Every chiplet and HBM stack you add to that single interposer compounds your defect probability and one bad die leads to a five-figure package going into the dumpster. CoWoS is thermally retarded and the whole industry knows this and it’s why capacity “can’t expand” and Jensen is acting like a bouncer in the front of a club choosing who gets pass the velvet rope. There is ONLY one company that will make copackaged optics work and expand in the rack… it’s not Lumentum, it’s not Coherent, it’s fucking INTELLLL. Intel’s EMIB gets rid of a giant reticle limited interposer and replaces it with a tiny silicon bridge that does the high-density coupling locally, exactly where you need it. You localize the hard part and the thermals in one area and your yield is ridiculously high. Comparing EMIB & CoWoS is so funny cause EMIB is north of 95% yield with like 12 reticle size equivalent package while CoWoS falls off a cliff after 5.5 reticles it’s that bad…now imagine adding thermally sensitive photonics. People don’t know this but Intel has been doing silicon photonics in-house for ~25 years... In 2024 they showed an Optical I/O chiplet doing 2 Tbps bidirectionally at ~5 pJ/bit, with the PIC and EIC co-packaged right against the ASIC and it’s all because of EMIB. And even more critically than that, they’ve actually run the fiber-attach and reliability/test flow to JEDEC-grade standards already, which everyone hand-waves until their links flap in production. My prediction is clear: Intel will capture over 90% of the copackaged silicon photonics market in the next five years because there is NO ALTERNATIVE.

I run an entire AI Investment Team that gives me: > Morning market reports at 9am SGT across JP / KR open & last night's US market moves > Portfolio manager that breaks down latest earnings / news for my holdings > Research analyst for initiating new names > Coverage of Substack / Fintwit's favourite accounts and any new positions they take > Technical alerts for "BTFD scenarios" - example, large % drops with big volume that tend to provide good entries for the names I like > Ideation capabilities through ingesting a bunch of content across platforms to build context, so that I can ask it "what should I long for optical networking" and it can answer

major correction on single names old market regimes are gone, new market regimes will look more and more like mini market cycles suggest everyone read this over the weekend by @0xsmac: 0xsmac.substack.com/p/let-th…

In the past 24h > Anthropic warns to slow AI down because of recursive improvement > Opus 4.8 finds critical vulnerability in blockchain w a market cap of $8B > Exchanges lower the barrier of entry for retail - only 2k to invest in SpaceX IPO; > Pumpfun launches bounties - pay anyone to do anything. Top bounty is $50k to sky dive into the world cup Yea culture is getting out of hand, AI is going to enable disastrous consequences, social boundaries are degrading, K shaped economy is going to accelerate, you are going to be poor, own nothing, and have to participate in the hunger games for the elite class

yea this is hunger games beta version isnt it