Fireside Alpha
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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 Alpha5,816,806 views • 2 days ago
Martin Shkreli reveals he was shorting Moderna at $80 a couple weeks ago and says the drug came out of nowhere since everyone had written the company off as a dead Covid asset, but "that's biotech for you." "This drug was a little bit out of nowhere. Everyone had written it off, left it for dead." "All that was left was the shitty COVID assets that were barely alive, and then all of a sudden, that's biotech for you." "I was playing around shorting this thing at 80 bucks a couple weeks ago. I think a lot of people were." "I bet you a bunch of people got fired today all across the Street. You don't even, you know what's going on, you just leave the building, bro."
Fireside Alpha794,722 views • 5 days ago
Chamath admits his own hurt feelings cost him $3-4 billion in Facebook stock "It made me do a couple things that in hindsight are really stupid. Part of my compensation was levered to unique users." "At 750 million uniques, I would have gotten an extra quarter basis point of stock to get to a billion, which today would be like three or four billion dollars." "And I was like, "Nah, I don't need that." Of course I need that. That's insane. That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard." "But I was hurt. But why was I hurt? He's a businessman who owns this company making a business decision. So that's an example of me being an incredible impediment in my own success."
Fireside Alpha347,833 views • 2 days ago
Merck's Dr. Dean Li explains the cancer therapy as training your immune cells to be hunting dogs, with Keytruda letting "the dogs out" and Moderna's personalized vaccine giving them the scent of your specific tumor "The concept is if you could train your immune cells to be like hunting dogs, chasing the tumor, and you could unleash them." "But not only unleash them, if you could entrain them to smell out that prey, that would be something..." "What Keytruda does is it's a key, it's a Keytruda, it unlocks the key to let the hound dogs out, let the dogs out." "But what's critical about the technology Moderna has created is it's a personalized cancer treatment that allows the immune cells to get the scent, the signature."
Fireside Alpha716,154 views • 5 days ago
Gavin Baker reveals that Dario has said internally that Anthropic may be the only private company in the world at some point, based on Baker's trusted sources "Internally, Anthropic is very confident. I have been told by multiple people I trust that Dario has said that Anthropic might be the only private company in the world at some point." "Think about that. And in this vision, an Anthropic-maximalist vision, there's Anthropic and then there are governments, and that's it."
Fireside Alpha871,875 views • 10 days ago
David Sacks says an open-source AI ban is coming, disguised as holding open models to the same standard as closed "I got bad news for you, Chamath. An open source ban is coming. They're not going to call it that." "You know what they're going to say? They're going to say that we simply have to apply the same standards to open models that we apply to closed." "Okay, here's how they do it step by step. Let me explain how regulatory capture actually works." "So first of all, you got to get this regulatory apparatus. Okay, Dario wants an FDA for AI, but he doesn't have enough political support for that, so instead they do this Trojan horse of a FINRA for AI." "They call it self-regulating, it's not really, but anyway that gets them off the ground. Now they've created the standard-setting organization. Now they've got pre-release model testing. Then the pressure grows to codify that in law."
Fireside Alpha231,444 views • 3 days ago
![David Sacks says he's heard from Anthropic employees who thought they could 10x ARR in one year to $600 billion from when they were at $60 billion, now currently sitting at $80 billion and not slowing down. "I have heard from other people at the company -- I heard that when they were at about $60 billion of ARR, that they thought they could get to $600 billion in one year." "Meaning they thought they were on that 10x ramp from the middle of this year." "Now they're at over $80 [billion] and it doesn't seem to be slowing down." "So the big question is how fast can they grow next year -- does it go all the way from $100 or $120 [billion] to a trillion dollars?" "Look, if they merely got to $400 to $500 billion, that would make them the biggest software company." Baker: "If they get to $200 billion, that's an amazing outcome."](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2088385912531222656/amplify_video_thumb/2088380442429075456/img/8C643mYRCuEopRgA.jpg)
David Sacks says he's heard from Anthropic employees who thought they could 10x ARR in one year to $600 billion from when they were at $60 billion, now currently sitting at $80 billion and not slowing down. "I have heard from other people at the company -- I heard that when they were at about $60 billion of ARR, that they thought they could get to $600 billion in one year." "Meaning they thought they were on that 10x ramp from the middle of this year." "Now they're at over $80 [billion] and it doesn't seem to be slowing down." "So the big question is how fast can they grow next year -- does it go all the way from $100 or $120 [billion] to a trillion dollars?" "Look, if they merely got to $400 to $500 billion, that would make them the biggest software company." Baker: "If they get to $200 billion, that's an amazing outcome."
Fireside Alpha389,147 views • 10 days ago
Palmer Luckey reveals Anduril is building something that makes 50 years of firearms development irrelevant, but he can't tell you what that is today. "I'm building things today that we could have built 100 years ago and it would have changed everything." "We're building things, for example, that would have made the last 50 years of firearms development completely irrelevant." "Like, let's make every gun that has been designed since the 50s or so, since Eugene Stoner invented the AR platform at ArmaLite Rifle, we're going to make everything since that irrelevant. And you could have actually done this in the 20s." "I can't tell you exactly what it is."
Fireside Alpha864,212 views • 22 days ago
Sam Altman reveals building Codex was a "crazy kamikaze mission" to beat Claude Code and that most of the best coders he knows now use Codex. "We were way behind Claude Code, and it seemed like a kind of crazy kamikaze mission to try to beat them with a coding app." "The consensus is that this kind of thing never works, and you just move on to the next one. It's a fool's errand to try to win when someone else already has momentum in a particular product category." "But we decided we thought it was really important. We asked a team to do it, and they performed a legitimate, unbelievable, very rare in the history of business thing." "Now it is the product that most of the best coders I know use." "That felt like an impossible thing, but if we hadn't asked the team, hey, we have a really important but extremely hard mission for you, it just wouldn't have happened."
Fireside Alpha1,261,432 views • 1 month ago
Sam Altman admits even he hasn't adopted his own product Codex as much as he should and still uses his computer the old way "The thing that feels most psychologically inconsistent about myself is that I have for 20 years been using computers the same way." "I now have a magic thing called Codex -- so do you, so does everybody. That means I should completely be using my computer in a different way." "I should not be clicking around, pasting from one messaging app to another. I should not be scrolling mindlessly through my emails trying to figure out which one is least painful to open. I should not be keeping a to-do list and doing these rote computer tasks the same way I have for so long." "And yet there's something in my mind that is encoded, that doing this kind of stuff is what it means to work and to be productive." "If you asked me, I would never say I like doing it that way -- in fact I'd say the opposite, and I'd mean it." "But by revealed preference, I have a better way to do it now, and I still do it the old way. It makes no sense, other than I must secretly like it or feel good about it."
Fireside Alpha43,710 views • 1 day ago
![Chamath on the Burger King graveyard shift he worked at 14 years old and calls it the most valuable thing that ever happened to him "My dad was a diplomat in the embassy of Sri Lanka in Canada. This fucking war in Sri Lanka is crazy. He writes this essay, his life is threatened, so he files for refugee status. He gets it." "He gets kicked out of the embassy, so he doesn't have a job. My mom becomes a housekeeper, and we're kind of toiling in this poverty cycle." "So at 14, I had to get a job. I would take the money and I'd buy the bus passes, I'd buy some of the groceries, just trying to make it all work, right? And I got a job at the Burger King." "This is another example where I was like, I'm going to go get a job. "Hey, can you drive me to the interview?" And my dad's like, 'No. Get on your fucking bicycle and go.'" "And I thought, "Bro, we need this, you need the money more than I do, why are you making me bicycle?" But I bicycled, and I got the job, and I worked there." "I used to work the night shift. 14-year-old kid, man from fucking 8 to 2 in the morning." [Joe: Wow.] "And I'd have to clean this, like, 8pm to 2 in the morning." [Joe: And then you had to go to school in the morning?] "No, this was always like Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Thursday, Friday -- sorry, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And then, yeah, some days I'd have to go to school." "And why did I work until 2? Because when the restaurant closes, you get whatever food is left over, right? So you get a couple chicken sandwiches, the version of the McNuggets that Burger King had, a couple Whoppers, and you take them home." "But the amount of vomit I had to clean up in the bathroom -- you can't imagine, man. A downtown Burger King near bars after closing time, the shit you see" [Joe: Oh, wow.] "...and the shit you deal with. And all I could think of was, I just want to get the fuck out of here. But that was so valuable for me."](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2091372683464446092/amplify_video_thumb/2091370228362153984/img/KOTOAHbjs2n9xaEe.jpg)
Chamath on the Burger King graveyard shift he worked at 14 years old and calls it the most valuable thing that ever happened to him "My dad was a diplomat in the embassy of Sri Lanka in Canada. This fucking war in Sri Lanka is crazy. He writes this essay, his life is threatened, so he files for refugee status. He gets it." "He gets kicked out of the embassy, so he doesn't have a job. My mom becomes a housekeeper, and we're kind of toiling in this poverty cycle." "So at 14, I had to get a job. I would take the money and I'd buy the bus passes, I'd buy some of the groceries, just trying to make it all work, right? And I got a job at the Burger King." "This is another example where I was like, I'm going to go get a job. "Hey, can you drive me to the interview?" And my dad's like, 'No. Get on your fucking bicycle and go.'" "And I thought, "Bro, we need this, you need the money more than I do, why are you making me bicycle?" But I bicycled, and I got the job, and I worked there." "I used to work the night shift. 14-year-old kid, man from fucking 8 to 2 in the morning." [Joe: Wow.] "And I'd have to clean this, like, 8pm to 2 in the morning." [Joe: And then you had to go to school in the morning?] "No, this was always like Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Thursday, Friday -- sorry, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And then, yeah, some days I'd have to go to school." "And why did I work until 2? Because when the restaurant closes, you get whatever food is left over, right? So you get a couple chicken sandwiches, the version of the McNuggets that Burger King had, a couple Whoppers, and you take them home." "But the amount of vomit I had to clean up in the bathroom -- you can't imagine, man. A downtown Burger King near bars after closing time, the shit you see" [Joe: Oh, wow.] "...and the shit you deal with. And all I could think of was, I just want to get the fuck out of here. But that was so valuable for me."
Fireside Alpha52,039 views • 2 days ago
Head of Nemotron Bryan Catanzaro says NVIDIA is sitting on internal "teacher" models that beat everything it has publicly shipped and he's trying to release these as well "This technology of using teacher models and multi-domain on-policy distillation has been really key for us in these ways." "Now, what does that mean? Well, it definitely means that inside NVIDIA we have a collection of teacher models that are individually better at different domains than any of the models that we've released." "And actually, I'm trying to release those teacher models as part of the Nemotron project as well -- because as you know, Nemotron is not just a model." "Nemotron is an open technology effort. It includes data sets, it includes techniques, all of our ideas about how to build a model, which we publish." "Of course it includes the models themselves, but I think it should also include collections of teacher models." "I'd imagine this could be a really great way of federating open technologies for AI across the ecosystem." _______ Wrote more on a prior Bryan interview here:
Fireside Alpha23,079 views • 23 hours ago
Ben Thompson says the memory makers are Iran, and by making the Strait of Hormuz mistake are inviting the whole industry to build around them "The other thing, the risk they run, is Apple. Apple's lobbying to get Chinese memory, right?" "And what is the number one focus of algorithmic changes? How can we use less memory?" "I think the memory makers probably screw themselves in the long run by creating such a massive target on their back." "I've analogized memory makers to Iran. The issue with the Strait of Hormuz is it's very effective. It's more effective if you don't use it, cuz then it's always hanging out there as something you could do. Now they did it. Turns out it worked." "But the UAE and Saudi Arabia, they're going to build pipelines. They're going to build new ports. They're not going to let this happen again." "It's very painful right now. But say Iran wants to close the Strait of Hormuz in 2035. It's not going to have any effect, because it will have been built around." "My concern for the memory makers is they might have done the same thing. No one's going to let themselves get in this situation again as far as memory goes."
Fireside Alpha154,883 views • 7 days ago
Cathie Wood explains why she doesn't own memory stocks and how the inference chip providers come into play "Someone asked recently, why don't you own any memory stocks?" "And first of all, and this again, maybe experience is hurting me, it is the most cyclical part of a semiconductor food chain, the most commoditized." "And what we're seeing is companies like Cerebras, like Nvidia with Groq, and we owned Groq in our venture fund. Both of those, Cerebras and Groq, do not require high-bandwidth memory." "So, in technology, when prices triple or quadruple or go up tenfold, that is not the normal state for technology. That's actually a negative, but most people think it's a huge positive." "And from a cash flow point of view, I saw a chart a couple of days ago comparing the chip stocks' free cash flow to the hyperscalers' free cash flow. And they're opposite sides to one another. But that's fleeting." "And in technology, I mean, we've seen it many times with Tesla. If there's a supply chain issue, cobalt from the Congo, you know, using slave labor and all of that, Elon engineered it out of the batteries, right? Or mostly out." "And so we're seeing engineering out the need for high bandwidth memory when it comes to inference."
Fireside Alpha146,876 views • 6 days ago
Anthropic Technical Staff Jess Yan says the harness and the model cannot be pulled apart without giving up performance, though she flags her own bias. "I think I am quite biased but I also think that it is impossible to get the maximum possible performance without tying together the harness and the model." "Now the components of the harness and maybe the thickness of the harness will change over time as models get more and more capable." "However, when we test our models and when we are assessing their performance we always have to test it in conjunction with a harness." "And are we going to test it with all the different harnesses of the world? We're going to select the harnesses that we have built." "And so there is an aspect of the necessity of building models is that you have to be testing them with harnesses, and that sort of keeps them paired together."
Fireside Alpha584,074 views • 23 days ago
Lumentum CEO Michael Hurlston says AI's indium phosphide laser shortage will get worse than the memory crunch, and it's why Nvidia backed both $LITE and its biggest rival, Coherent $COHR. "The numbers of lasers that those kind of customers (telecom) would deploy are in the hundreds, right? Now we're talking about hundreds of millions." "So, for us to get our fabrication facilities up the curve to go from thousands of wafers to millions of wafers is no small feat." "You've covered us for a long time. We've now put online five different wafer fabs. There's a different material. This is not CMOS." "It's called indium phosphide, right? A very complicated name, but it's basically something that can emit light. It's a property, a material that can emit light, and we have five indium phosphide fabs that we're trying to ramp to scale." "We see a huge shortage, and that's one of the reasons, I think, Nvidia invested in Lumentum and invested in one of our largest competitors, who also has incredible indium phosphide manufacturing capability." "Between the two of us, I don't think we can service the demand that Nvidia and others are now putting on us to solve this resistance problem in the data center. And so, the shortage of indium phosphide, I think, will become even more acute than what we see from the memory guys."
Fireside Alpha615,214 views • 28 days ago
Ken Griffin says short-term alpha from calling the quarter with alt data is dying, and the next era of stock-picking belongs to those with a long-term horizon. "I think there'll be more focus and emphasis on those who have really good vision about what companies are actually creating transformative products that will change society. The market will reward that far more intensely in the future than will a company beat this quarter's earnings or not. I think the question of will a company beat this quarter's earnings has gotten far more difficult over the last 10 years because, for example, the rise of alternative data. I have access to the credit cards of millions of Americans. What are they spending money on? What's that mean for Starbucks revenues this quarter? What's it mean for McDonald's this quarter? This is a decade-old transformation, but the here and now is just becoming far more transparent, far more readily understood and triaged by the combination of really bright people and really good AI technology. Where this will leave us is those who are able to see what is unfolding over years to come will be in a very valued position on a relative basis."
Fireside Alpha934,498 views • 1 month ago
Sam Altman reveals he deliberately got himself addicted to TikTok while building Sora, then deleted it because it was too powerful like a drug. "I deleted TikTok because it was just too powerful. Here's a crazy thing that happened. When we were building the Sora app, I made myself get addicted to TikTok because I wanted to learn." "I'd never really used it before... And I loved it. I love TikTok, I really thought it was great." "And then I thought I could control it. I was like, oh, it's actually kind of fun, but I only use it for 10 minutes to wind down before bed and I'm totally in control of it." "And then it was an hour one night, and then some Saturday afternoon I was on the couch for like 3 hours, and I was like, this is really not what I thought the iPhone was supposed to be about." "Now I'm really enjoying it in the moment like a drug, but I can tell it's bad for me. And then I briefly got it back under control, down to like 5 or 10 minutes a night. Then I was just like, enough."
Fireside Alpha601,498 views • 1 month ago
HBM creator Kim Jung-ho reveals his lab's tHBM flipped stack publicly for the first time saying Samsung's zHBM with memory stacked on a hot GPU simply melts and is likely not the right fundamental direction "So the idea is, let's just put the HBM on top of the GPU. Then you never go outside the building, you only ride the elevator, and the speed jumps." "That's the structure Samsung is now proposing as zHBM. The z is, from the x, y, z axes we learned back in school, the vertical direction, so it means stacked in the z direction." "But unfortunately, I don't see that as the fundamental direction, because if you stack HBM on top of the GPU, the GPU gets hot and the memory melts." "So I suspect it's for very simple computation, the kind of use people call an LPU or an NPU. They showed it in passing as a fun technology, and the really important technology doesn't get shown at places like that." "So my lab researches tHBM. I believe today is the first time we're saying this publicly. We flip it, stack the HBM, and put the GPU on top of that."
Fireside Alpha110,837 views • 7 days ago
Gavin Baker re $SPCX: Investors should start to consider Grok when they think about SpaceX, very few of them talk about Grok at all "I talk to a lot of investors about SpaceX. And what's just amazing to me is everyone will have a nuanced view on Starlink." "Maybe they're a skeptic on Starlink direct-to-cell. I think the plan to use these distributed Starlink effectively almost as, we'll call them, small cells, femtocells, is interesting." "Everybody will have a nuanced view on orbital compute -- whether they're bullish or bearish, they will have a view. They'll have a view on terrestrial compute." "Very few of these investors talk about Grok at all." "And it is Pareto dominant on a lot of measures." "And we have an existence proof that Anthropic went from, whatever it is, $1 billion to $50 billion really fast." "And if Anthropic is worth, with the $2 trillion per the FT, $3 or $4 trillion, maybe the numbers settle out -- I said I thought that was a market-clearing price, I didn't say that's where I thought it was worth." "Maybe people should start to consider Grok when they think about SpaceX."
Fireside Alpha146,878 views • 10 days ago