
Fireside Alpha
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Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models “I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that. “With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor. “You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something. “That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’ “I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”
Fireside Alpha13,676,966 views • 4 days ago

Chamath says IP and software were "effectively rendered worthless" this week, after people decompiled Adobe's core products and published open-source versions, as every service goes headless "The more important point I want to make though, is I sent this to Nick, there's been a couple things that happened in the last couple days, which I think are incredibly important." "There have been people that decompiled the entire, the entire big five. What is the big five? Adobe has five very, very important products in their product suite. Freeberg may know them all, but I just know Photoshop. There's like a bunch of others. Okay." "And these folks decompiled it, distilled it, and published open source versions of these things. And Rust, yeah. And I was so shocked, because I was like, hold on a second, these are like profound products that have existed and have had moats for years, and now they're just open source versions." "And then Nikita was, I think, trolling, and he was building on that idea, and just talking about GTA, because it's about to get released. I think GTA 6 is about to come out, and we'll reconstruct this." "Why is this important?" "I think that IP and software was effectively rendered worthless two days ago." "Because if you think about it, when everything is headless, so when Elon makes his services headless, Benioff made Salesforce headless a few months earlier, when all of these things are headless, and you can wrap them in agent tools, and you can connect them via MCP to other experiences, the value of IP does no longer exist in software. It doesn't exist." "And I think that probably is the most profound implication." "So, like, even in our business, we would argue with some of our customers all the time, because we'll say, oh, we'll build this for you, we'll own the IP. They'll say, no, we want the IP. We don't know how to negotiate it. And two days ago, I walked into the 8090 guys, I said, who cares? Who cares? But before, it was always a negotiation and a set of trade-offs. Now it's a who-cares thing, where, like, the IP is irrelevant." "It still takes a while for the machinery of a business, and frankly the market, to understand. But that is the most important thing that happened this week in AI, in my opinion."
Fireside Alpha1,192,042 views • 1 day ago

Qualcomm CEO reveals AI companies want phones running 100-billion-parameter models continuously by 2028--and confirms some are building phones Cristiano Amon: “I have to be careful not to disclose names, but some AI companies—some of the companies at the forefront of AI—are telling Qualcomm, ‘By 2028, I need to make sure that I have the ability to run at least a 100-billion-parameter model in a phone, and I need to have this thing running kind of all the time.’” Alex Heath: “So you’re saying there are AI companies that are talking about—” Cristiano Amon: “Well, AI companies are starting to do phones.”
Fireside Alpha448,273 views • 1 day ago

David Sacks says Anthropic is run by a "religious cult" and is doing the very things it says it fears most, like opening a wet lab while warning of bio risk, and that there's an argument for sending in a federal SWAT team "But I do think that there are potential externalities from having the number one frontier model company run by a religious cult." "So, for example, they are opening a Claude-powered wet lab in the middle of San Francisco. But at the same time, they're warning of bio risk. At the same time, they say that we have to pace the frontier, they're extending the frontier. At the same time that they are saying that there's a risk of superintelligence growing beyond our control, they're programming it to grow beyond our control." "I think there are potentially huge externalities to the way they approach these things. And it's, like, insane that they call these decisions "safety." These are not safe decisions. These are crazy decisions, it seems to me." "This is why I've called this a schizophrenic company, is they appear to be not only hypocritical, but they're doing the things that they say they are most afraid of." "Like, what is going on here? This is bizarre. And I don't know where this all leads. I do think there's an argument for a federal SWAT team to come blasting in there."
Fireside Alpha609,298 views • 1 day ago

Palmer Luckey reveals Oculus repeatedly found wiretap electronics hidden inside product samples from Chinese factories, and says they would listen in and transmit voice samples over cellular radio “Here’s another example. How many computers exist in the Japanese government, critical utilities, infrastructure and the military? Millions, at least millions of computers. “So then the question becomes: how many of them are compromised by Chinese intelligence operations placing listening devices or false components in them? Some people would say zero, and I think they’re crazy. “I actually have personal experience with China placing listening devices into sample products that I would receive from Chinese factories. This was at my previous company, Oculus VR. My first company was a virtual-reality company I started when I was 19 years old. “There were multiple times when we discovered actual wiretap electronics in product samples that were given to us. They would listen to us and transmit the voice samples over a cellular radio. “If I experienced them trying to steal our technology and our decisions even as a small company, surely they’re targeting every government, every military, and every company.”
Fireside Alpha435,690 views • 1 day ago

$ANET Andy Bechtolsheim says AI has made optics demand about 10 times bigger in five years and the industry is only at the "very beginning" "So I guess I don't need to tell you that AI has been driving this incredible increase in demand for high-speed optics, which is probably now 10 times bigger than it used to be five years ago..." "And what I want to talk to you today is that we're not at the end of this journey, but rather the very beginning. There's easily another order of magnitude increase in bits needed for the next generation kind of data centers." "So what I want to talk about first is what's happening at the data center level, and how we as an industry have to get together to solve these problems of this very rapid and high demand growth as fast as possible, since AI can't wait." ______ For full set of takeaways to Andy's AI Datacenter and Optics lecture:
Fireside Alpha1,994,338 views • 5 days ago

Peter Thiel explains why aliens with faster-than-light travel must be demons or angels: only a demonic totalitarian mind meld or perfect angelic altruism could keep any one of them from launching a warp drive weapon "...If you have faster than light travel, if you have a warp drive, which is probably what you really need to cover interstellar distances, you know, what that means for military technology is that you can send weapons at warp speed and they will hit you before you see them coming. And there is no defense against a warp speed weapon." "And so it tells us that I think that if you have faster than light travel, there's something really crazy that has to be true on a cultural, political, social level. And there may be other solutions, but I'll give you my two." "You have a demonic totalitarian control of your society, where it's like you have like parapsychological mind meld with everybody, and no one can act independently of anybody else. No one can ever launch a warp drive weapon." "And then I think the other version, socially and culturally, is they have to be like perfectly altruistic, non-self-interest. They have to be angels." "It's not that they might be demons or angels, they must be demons or angels if you have faster than light travel. And both of those seem pretty crazy to me."
Fireside Alpha159,475 views • 22 hours ago

Instinct CEO Noah Shinn says agents will let restaurants give tables to birthdays and anniversaries over whoever clicks first "And traditionally, because of the way that the internet has worked, at least for reservations, it's been first come first serve. So anyone that comes in, no matter how important or how not important it might be, whoever gets in first gets the reservation." "But what if you had the ability for the agent to be able to communicate on both sides, communicate, hey, this is important. This is actually the person's spouse's birthday, the 30th birthday, a very special event is coming up." "And the restaurant too can say, let's actually prioritize birthdays or major decade birthdays or major anniversaries or these certain people, I don't know, whatever it might be, right?" "So now with the ability, with all of the logistical burden of having to describe exactly what your case is and what's happening and why it's important. Now we have the ability to perfectly match what does the restaurant want? What does the user want?" "And that will result in more special events for the users being able to actually have a spot in the restaurant."
Fireside Alpha4,575,522 views • 13 days ago

Ex-Anthropic Jacob Coxon says he's 90% certain China already has spies inside both OpenAI and Anthropic Jacob Coxon: “Right now, if we just stopped, they would try and catch up. But I think one really important thing people don’t realize is that China already has spies at OpenAI and Anthropic. China has the ability to hack at any time. If we pull ahead, that doesn’t give us a big lead. They can just step in, steal our progress at any time and catch up.” Patrick Bet-David: “How certain are you that they already have spies there?” Jacob Coxon: “Ninety percent. Yeah, it’s almost certain that they have spies.”
Fireside Alpha832,877 views • 4 days ago

OpenAI's Noam Brown says air-gapping the computers may not stop a misaligned AI, because two air-gapped machines can still talk by running a CPU hot and reading the temperature change "But I think the major takeaway from the incident is that people underestimated the AI. And we never want to be in a situation again where we underestimate the AI. It's a weird world, because AI progress is so fast that people are consistently underestimating the AI." "So to be in a situation where you don't underestimate it again, when it comes to safety and alignment, you have to have a very, very, very high bar." "You could even go as far as to say, "Well, we should air gap the computers." And I'm not convinced that that would be sufficient." "There are studies, and this is mostly academic, where you can have two computers next to each other that are air-gapped and they're still able to communicate with each other because they have temperature sensors." "One of them is able to run their CPU really hot, and then the other one can actually detect the temperature change, and then that actually gives them a mechanism to communicate." _________ Link and more key quotes from OpenAI's safety related conversations:
Fireside Alpha4,816,196 views • 24 days ago

Dana White says Mark Zuckerberg is an animal and reveals Meta board meetings go from 9am to 6pm, dinner, then another three hours, extending into two days "I'm on the board of Meta and I just got home last night from a Meta board meeting, and it's one of the best decisions I've ever made was when Mark Zuckerberg called me and I said yes to that." "And you sit in this room, and not only the people that he runs through the room all day, which are some of their high-level employees there, but the rest of the board, you literally have the smartest people in the world trying to tackle problems that are, you know, a whole another level." "There's levels to life and to business." "So Zuckerberg is an animal, okay. These board meetings start at nine o'clock in the morning, they go till six, then you go to dinner and it's basically another three hours of the board meeting, right?" "And every time we'll be in there, you know, two days in the room, and every time I walk out of those board meetings, I'm so fired up and inspired by the other board members and the people who work at Meta."
Fireside Alpha2,863,356 views • 19 days ago

Sam Altman admits he was wrong on AI's timeline and says society and the economy will adapt more slowly "I thought when we got to GPT-4, which was back in 2023, that very quickly after that there was going to be much more disruption, software businesses up for grabs right away, than it turned out to be." "I think I was wrong about a few things, but one in terms of the speed: the economy just has so much inertia." "People keep doing the same things, buying from the same company, wanting to use their tools the same way. I think this is actually a positive in many ways, and it's going to make this big transition go smoother and slower. I'm grateful for it." "But it means we've all been too ambitious on timelines. Even with this incredible technology, society and the economy will adapt more slowly."
Fireside Alpha6,397,197 views • 1 month ago

David Friedberg warns crypto wallets with public keys may be at risk because the absence of major cryptography proofs in OpenAI's math drop suggests big breakthroughs were made but held back "On cryptography, a number of people noted that there were no major proofs shared in the space of cryptography, which indicates probably the fact that there were some pretty major breakthroughs in cryptography." "And the reason is, it is unlikely the case that you made absolutely no progress in any of the cryptography related proofs, given all of the other progress that we saw." "And if they made minor progress, then they would have published on it, because there wouldn't have been implications for systems of cryptography." "So the absence of evidence suggests that maybe there were some pretty major breakthroughs made in cryptography." "And then there were a number of people that posted that cryptographic wallets with public keys are now very seriously at risk. And so there's a bit of a panic underway in the crypto community about what do we do now?" "And if this ends up having a set of mathematical solves for number factorization that could lead to breaking public key cryptography before quantum computers come around, which is what everyone assumed would be the thing that would break public key cryptography, then we have a real problem."
Fireside Alpha86,084 views • 1 day ago

SemiAnalysis' Jordan Nanos reveals the OpenAI engineers scrolling their own kernel code had no idea what it did line by line, and it didn't matter because the AI does "It's not slop, because it performs, but it's literally just AI-generated assembly basically puked out in Gluon, this low-level kernel programming language that they built on top of Triton, which uses this really interesting programming model." "The point is, the guys who were scrolling through this code with us, it was kind of clear that they know a whole bunch about hardware, they know a whole bunch about the concepts in the system, and they just have no idea what this MLA kernel that they're showing us for DeepSeek actually does." "You can go line by line and it's like nope, nope, nope." "But it doesn't matter. The AI understands it, the AI tests it, and you see the results. It produces correct kernels that perform really well." "And I think this is just a sign of what's to come again." "That actual code is not necessarily something that a human has to reason about deeply, if the AI knows how to manipulate the data movement and the processing elements on the hardware that you've given it." ________ More takeaways from OpenAI's Jalapeno development:
Fireside Alpha4,567,204 views • 1 month ago

Satya Nadella reveals his coding agent pulls every hyperscaler and neoclouds' SEC filings into a dashboard that refreshes every day for real-time ROIC "And this is the other aspect of it, which is the enterprise context combined with the world's context. In fact, I go to the SEC filings of every cloud provider, hyperscaler, each of these neoclouds. It's in real time." "I have a data runner in Fabric that brings all that data, puts it into a semantic model that then gets read by my coding agent and then surfaces it as a dashboard. And every day it's fresh." "So I have the entirety of every SEC filing that goes out there, plus all of my internal analysis constantly coming together, giving me real-time ROIC by layer."
Fireside Alpha1,266,999 views • 16 days ago

Anthropic's Sholto Douglas says AI capex could rise from $1 trillion this year to $4 trillion in 2028 and begin doubling humanity’s GDP by the early 2030s “Over the course of the last four or five years, we’ve been 2x-ing or 3x-ing the amount of compute capacity devoted to AI every year." "And so I think that’s roughly, together, the hyperscalers are spending about a trillion dollars this year on capex related to AI. A very interesting question will be, will that trend line hold, and so will it go to $2 trillion next year and then $4 trillion in 2028?" "And if that trend line broadly holds, and you can expand that to encompass the broader robotics industry, then that means that in the early 2030s, you start to get to the point where you’re actually effectively doubling the GDP of humanity, which, again, is a little bit of a ridiculous concept, but requires a lot of things to go right.”
Fireside Alpha547,401 views • 8 days ago

Jacob Coxon says Anthropic employees call themselves “ants” and sacrifice their careers for the company’s singular pursuit of superintelligence, while calling OpenAI "distracted and messy" “At Anthropic, it felt a lot more like—well, for starters, the employees call themselves ants. They’re ants in the anthill. Everyone is like a worker ant trying to make Anthropic’s mission go well. “People are very willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the mission. They’ll take on work that’s less interesting, less big, bold and exciting, and less flashy. They’ll do it at a hit to their own interests for the good of the company. “That’s because every decision comes back down to, ‘Is this going to get us to superintelligence faster?’ “You’ve seen Sora, the video platform OpenAI made. Anthropic would never make Sora because it’s not on the core path to artificial superintelligence. OpenAI is distracted and messy. One guy says, ‘I want to do Sora,’ or, ‘I want to build a little device,’ and they let them do it because it doesn’t have the same focus. At Anthropic, that would never happen.” Patrick Bet-David: “Who would shut it down? The seven co-founders?” Jacob Coxon: “They’d all agree. It would be like, ‘This video isn’t the right direction for heading straight to superintelligence.’”
Fireside Alpha253,848 views • 4 days ago

Mark Zuckerberg: the whole industry treats AI agents as a single-player game but the real unlock is agents interacting with each other, which Meta has been running internally "Right now I think most of the industry is thinking about agents as like a single player game, right? It's like you have your agent and you use it." "And there are going to be all these interesting things that basically you can do by having the agents interact with each other." "And we already have all these interesting examples internally where people have their agents interacting with each other." "This isn't, like, for the most part rolling out in this release, but it's going to be like an important part of how I think this works over time. As more of the people who you know start using Muse, it just gets better."
Fireside Alpha2,274,494 views • 1 month ago

Steve Eisman says Michael Burry’s AI depreciation thesis “too academic” and says an OpenAI failure is the much larger risk “I think, with all due respect to Michael, I think his argument is too academic." "Put it this way: if AI succeeds because Anthropic and OpenAI grow like crazy and the hyperscalers do well, et cetera, et cetera, it’s not going to matter if the depreciation schedule changed from three to four years to five to six years." "At the same time, if OpenAI fails and the whole chain goes in reverse, we’ll have a massive correction which has nothing to do with the depreciation schedule." "I mean, I think what he’s deep down trying to point out is maybe there’s something wrong here, but I don’t think the thing that he’s pointing to as being wrong is important enough.”
Fireside Alpha391,792 views • 7 days ago

Brian Chesky says he generates roughly 30,000 ideas a year and uses AI to rescue ideas he initially thought were stupid "It’s more the good ideas jump off the page. So, for example, I basically have a notebook, and every thought is, like, a sentence or a couple sentences. And I probably write maybe a thousand words a day. So that's probably 300,000 words a year." "So maybe each line is a sentence, there’s, like, 10 words. So maybe that’s a hundred ideas a day. So that’s maybe 30,000 ideas a year." "And so then what I do is say I have 30,000 thoughts a year. 99% of them are not useful, right? Just something. You write something down, anything that comes to your mind, I just keep writing it down. At the end of every day, I bold the things that jump out at me." "And so if I wrote down, like, a hundred things, a hundred lines, I bold five to ten. And then each day I bold them." "At the end of every month, I look, and my AI now can just read the bold ideas. I used to have to manually pull out the ideas and read them. Now the AI can pull out the bolded ideas. The AI can also read and find ideas I thought were stupid, and it can tell me really good ideas." "It can see patterns, and then those become my short list. And then I iterate them, iterate them, iterate them."
Fireside Alpha439,561 views • 9 days ago