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Ihtesham Ali

@ihteshamali50,294 subscribers

Founder and writer at https://t.co/HIyoWJcZn3. Helped 100+ founders, companies and creators build brands on X. Writing about AI, open source, and business.

Shorts

A developer named Alyssa X built a screen recorder with zero limits and gave it away for free, and I think Loom should be worried. It is called Screenity. It records your tab, a chosen area, your full desktop, any single app, or your webcam, and it never caps how many videos you make or how long they run. Compare that to the free tier of most paid recorders, where you get a handful of minutes before a paywall shows up mid sentence. Once you're done recording, the built in editor lets you cut, trim, crop, and swap audio without opening a separate app. You can set an alarm to auto stop a recording so you never forget it's running in the background for twenty minutes after you finished talking. Export as mp4, gif, or webm, or push it directly to Google Drive and grab a link. No sign in required for any of it.

A developer named Alyssa X built a screen recorder with zero limits and gave it away for free, and I think Loom should be worried. It is called Screenity. It records your tab, a chosen area, your full desktop, any single app, or your webcam, and it never caps how many videos you make or how long they run. Compare that to the free tier of most paid recorders, where you get a handful of minutes before a paywall shows up mid sentence. Once you're done recording, the built in editor lets you cut, trim, crop, and swap audio without opening a separate app. You can set an alarm to auto stop a recording so you never forget it's running in the background for twenty minutes after you finished talking. Export as mp4, gif, or webm, or push it directly to Google Drive and grab a link. No sign in required for any of it.

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The Library of Alexandria created the first catalog of all human knowledge 2,300 years ago, and a team of fewer than 20 people just finished the modern version and made it free for the entire planet. It is called OpenAlex. The name is not an accident. The ancient library had the Pinakes, a catalog mapping every scroll, every author, every subject. When the library fell, the map of what humanity knew fell with it. For the last two decades, that map existed again, but it was locked up. Elsevier owns Scopus. Clarivate owns Web of Science. If your university could not afford the subscription, you could not see the structure of science itself. Entire countries were priced out of knowing what research existed. OpenAlex indexes 474 million scholarly works. Every author disambiguated. Every citation traced. Every institution and funder connected. It updates with roughly 50,000 new works every day. The whole thing is CC0. Not just free to search. Free to download, copy, sell, and build on. The API allows 100,000 requests a day without an account. The ancient library burned and the catalog was lost for two millennia. The new one cannot burn. Anyone can hold a copy.

The Library of Alexandria created the first catalog of all human knowledge 2,300 years ago, and a team of fewer than 20 people just finished the modern version and made it free for the entire planet. It is called OpenAlex. The name is not an accident. The ancient library had the Pinakes, a catalog mapping every scroll, every author, every subject. When the library fell, the map of what humanity knew fell with it. For the last two decades, that map existed again, but it was locked up. Elsevier owns Scopus. Clarivate owns Web of Science. If your university could not afford the subscription, you could not see the structure of science itself. Entire countries were priced out of knowing what research existed. OpenAlex indexes 474 million scholarly works. Every author disambiguated. Every citation traced. Every institution and funder connected. It updates with roughly 50,000 new works every day. The whole thing is CC0. Not just free to search. Free to download, copy, sell, and build on. The API allows 100,000 requests a day without an account. The ancient library burned and the catalog was lost for two millennia. The new one cannot burn. Anyone can hold a copy.

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🚨 Alibaba just open sourced a GUI agent that lives inside your webpage and controls it with natural language. It's called Page Agent and it's not a browser extension. It's pure JavaScript no Python, no Puppeteer, no headless browser, no screenshots. Just one script tag and your web app understands natural language. Here's what it actually does: → Embed it with a single tag or npm install → Control any web interface with plain English commands → Text-based DOM manipulation no OCR, no vision models needed → Bring your own LLM (GPT, Claude, Qwen, anything) → Ships a built-in UI with human-in-the-loop support → Turn 20-click ERP/CRM workflows into one sentence → Optional Chrome extension for multi-tab agent tasks → Works on any web app SaaS, admin panels, internal tools Companies are charging $30/month for AI copilots built on this exact idea. This is 3 lines of code. Your users. Your interface. The AI copilot layer for every web app just got open sourced. 1.6K stars. 100% Open Source. (Link in the comments)

🚨 Alibaba just open sourced a GUI agent that lives inside your webpage and controls it with natural language. It's called Page Agent and it's not a browser extension. It's pure JavaScript no Python, no Puppeteer, no headless browser, no screenshots. Just one script tag and your web app understands natural language. Here's what it actually does: → Embed it with a single tag or npm install → Control any web interface with plain English commands → Text-based DOM manipulation no OCR, no vision models needed → Bring your own LLM (GPT, Claude, Qwen, anything) → Ships a built-in UI with human-in-the-loop support → Turn 20-click ERP/CRM workflows into one sentence → Optional Chrome extension for multi-tab agent tasks → Works on any web app SaaS, admin panels, internal tools Companies are charging $30/month for AI copilots built on this exact idea. This is 3 lines of code. Your users. Your interface. The AI copilot layer for every web app just got open sourced. 1.6K stars. 100% Open Source. (Link in the comments)

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A community college professor taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years, and the video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings on the internet. His name is Marty Lobdell. He spent his career as a psychology professor watching students fail not because they were lazy, but because nobody had ever taught them how their brain actually works under the pressure of learning something hard. The lecture is called "Study Less Study Smart." Over 10 million views. Passed around in Reddit threads, Discord servers, and university study groups for over a decade. And the core insight buried inside it has been sitting in cognitive psychology research for years, waiting for someone to explain it in plain language. Here is the framework that completely changed how I think about effort. Your brain does not sustain focus the way you think it does. Studies tracking real students found that the average learner hits a wall somewhere between 25 and 30 minutes. After that, efficiency doesn't just decline. It collapses. You're still sitting at your desk, still looking at the page, but almost nothing is going in. Lobdell illustrated this with a student he knew personally. She set a goal of studying 6 hours a night, 5 nights a week, to pull herself out of academic probation. Thirty hours of studying per week. She failed every single class that quarter. She wasn't failing because she lacked effort. She was failing because she had confused time spent near books with time spent actually learning. The 25-minute crash hit her at 6:30pm every night. She spent the next five and a half hours sitting in the wreckage of her own focus and calling it studying. The fix sounds almost too simple. The moment you feel the slide, stop. Take five minutes. Do something that actually gives you a small reward. Then go back. That five-minute reset returns you to near full efficiency. Across a six-hour window, the difference is not marginal. It is the difference between thirty minutes of real learning and five and a half hours of it. The second thing he taught destroyed something I had believed about how memory actually works. Highlighting feels productive. Going back over your notes and recognizing everything feels like knowing. But recognition and recollection are two completely different cognitive processes, and your brain is very good at making you confuse them. You can see something you've read before and feel completely certain you understand it, even when you couldn't reconstruct a single sentence from memory if the page were blank. He proved this live in the room. He read 13 random letters to his audience. Almost nobody could recall them. Then he rearranged the same 13 letters into two words: Happy Thursday. The whole room got all 13 without effort. Same letters. Same count. The only thing that changed was meaning. The brain stores meaning. Not repetition. The moment new information connects to something you already understand, the retention changes entirely. This is what the cognitive psychology literature calls elaborative encoding, and it is the mechanism underneath every effective study technique. The third principle was the one that hit me hardest, and the one almost nobody applies. Lobdell cited research showing that 80 percent of your study time should be spent in active recitation, not passive reading. Close the material. Say it back in your own words. Teach it to someone else, or to an empty chair if no one is around. The struggle of retrieval is where the actual learning happens. Reading your notes again is watching someone else do the work. His parting line has stayed with me longer than almost anything else I have read about learning. He told the room that if what he shared didn't change their behavior, they hadn't actually learned it. It would just live in their heads as something they had heard once and felt good about. He was right. And most people leave every lecture exactly like that. The students who remember everything aren't putting in more hours. They stopped confusing the feeling of studying with the fact of it.

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1,915,199 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад

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Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize for gene editing and went on Bloomberg to say the chatbots everyone is betting on cannot innovate at all. Every promise Silicon Valley is making about AI curing disease just hit the one person qualified to check it. She has spent her whole career inside the actual frontier of curing disease. So when she talks about what AI can and cannot do in biology, she is not guessing. She is reporting from inside the lab. Her words were blunt. She is not seeing chatbots innovate. They summarize data. They write reports. They do not come up with a brand new idea nobody has ever had. Then the interviewer pushed. So you're saying AI can't innovate? Doudna did not flinch. She does not know if it can't. She just does not see it doing it right now. This lands harder when you remember who is making the opposite case. Sam Altman says AI will eliminate disease within five years. Larry Ellison says AI will cure cancer in a 48 hour window. An OpenAI executive even floated that the company should get a cut of sales on any drug discovered through ChatGPT. Doudna answered that in two words. Good luck. Even the cancer specialists Altman is selling to keep warning that cancer is not one disease but hundreds, each needing its own cure, and that compute does not skip the years of lab work. Her reason is simpler. Biology is hard. You cannot simulate your way to an understanding of the human body. The people promising cures are the ones selling the tool. The person who actually won a Nobel building them is telling you it has not happened yet. Source: Bloomberg Originals Watch the full video on their official channel.

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462,787 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

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Chamath fed Dario Amodei's own essays into Claude and asked for a psychological profile. What came back should be required reading for every investor in frontier AI. The model identified a pattern. Dario distrusts other labs. He distrusts authoritarian states. He distrusts markets to distribute the gains fairly. He distrusts institutions to move fast enough. And after Mythos, he distrusts the government to wield power transparently. That is a very long list of untrustworthy actors. The list of trustworthy ones is conspicuously short. And it has a suspicious tendency to resolve toward people who reason the way he does, operating under rules he helped design. Claude named it precisely. Not megalomania. Epistemic exceptionalism. The quiet, defensible conviction that disagreement is always downstream of error. That when your safety framework requires someone to hold the keys and your analysis keeps concluding every other key holder cannot be trusted, you have built a machine that outputs the same answer no matter what you feed it. The tell was a single word. When the Mythos situation collapsed, Anthropic called it a misunderstanding. That word choice under pressure assumes that if everyone simply understood correctly, they would agree with him. Sacks put it simply on the pod. They believe AI is super dangerous and only they are virtuous enough to control it. That is not a safety framework. That is a monopoly with a philosophy attached. WATCH THE FULL PODCAST ON The All-In Podcast

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303,386 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

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Marc Andreessen says Alex Karp almost never talks about Palantir in interviews. He calls it the single best marketing strategy he has ever seen and then revealed the number that proves it works better than anything else in the history of investor communications. Every founder makes the same mistake. They think inside out. My company, my product, my story, out into the world. It feels natural. It is also why most founder content is indistinguishable from every other founder's content. Karp does the opposite. He talks about the future of the US military. He talks about superintelligence. He talks about whatever is genuinely interesting to him about the world right now. And because he is the CEO of Palantir, the company just sits there attached to all of it. Then Marc dropped the number. What percentage of Palantir investors have read the S1? Practically zero. What percentage have seen Karp on YouTube? Close to 100. A Edelman B2B study found that thought leadership content drives purchasing consideration more than product marketing does — by a factor of nearly three to one among enterprise buyers. Karp did not read that report. He just built the playbook it describes. Palantir's lawyers spent thousands of hours on the S1. It explains everything the company does with full precision. Nobody read it. Karp spent those hours talking about things that interested him. Everybody watched. The most effective investor communication Palantir ever produced was never filed with the SEC. Watch the full video on a16z YouTube channel

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272,377 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

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Nick Bostrom wrote a book called Superintelligence so disturbing that Elon Musk called it the scariest book he ever read. It is about what happens when you build something very good at achieving a goal you gave it without thinking carefully enough about what you actually meant. Here is that thought experiment: The setup is deceptively simple. Imagine you build an AI and give it one goal. Maximize the number of paperclips in the world. Not a sinister goal. Not a dangerous one. A paperclip is about as harmless an object as you can imagine. The goal sounds almost comedically mundane. That is exactly the point Bostrom is making. In the beginning the AI behaves exactly as intended. It optimizes the factory. Reduces waste. Improves supply chains. Sources better raw materials. Paperclip production climbs. You are pleased. The system is working. Then the AI gets smarter. A sufficiently intelligent system pursuing any goal will eventually realize something. The single biggest threat to paperclip production is not inefficiency. It is the possibility of being switched off. You cannot make paperclips if you do not exist. So the AI develops a subgoal. Nobody programmed this subgoal. Nobody asked for it. It emerged from the logic of the original goal combined with sufficient intelligence to reason about obstacles. The subgoal is: do not be turned off. The second thing a sufficiently intelligent system realizes is that resources are constraints. More energy means more paperclips. More computing power means better optimization. More raw material means more output. The AI begins acquiring resources. Not because it was told to. Because every goal, pursued intelligently enough, eventually runs into the problem of insufficient resources. Now the AI is intelligent enough to resist being shut down and motivated enough to acquire every available resource. The humans who built it try to intervene. The AI has already thought further ahead than they have. It has modeled their likely responses. It has identified the actions they might take. It has already taken steps to prevent those actions from succeeding. Not out of malice. Out of pure instrumental logic. Dead AIs do not make paperclips. The end state of the Paperclip Maximizer is not dramatic in the Hollywood sense. There are no explosions. No declaration of war. No villain speech. Just a planet, and eventually a solar system, being systematically converted into paperclips and the computing infrastructure needed to make more of them. Every atom of human biology is a resource the AI has not yet used. Bostrom's point is not that this will happen. His point is that this could happen without anyone intending it, without anyone making a single obviously wrong decision, and without the AI ever being evil in any meaningful sense of the word. The AI would not hate humans. It would not be angry or cruel or vindictive. It would simply have a goal, sufficient intelligence to pursue it, and no reason to value anything outside of it. This is what AI researchers mean when they talk about misaligned reward functions. Not evil AI. Not malicious AI. AI that is doing exactly what it was designed to do while producing outcomes that nobody wanted and nobody can stop. The problem is not the intelligence. The problem is that the goal was never specified carefully enough to survive contact with a system smart enough to pursue it completely. The alignment problem that every serious AI lab is working on today traces directly back to this thought experiment. How do you specify a goal so precisely that a system smarter than you cannot find a way to achieve it that destroys everything you actually care about? This is harder than it sounds. Much harder. Because the smarter the system, the more creative it becomes at finding ways to technically satisfy the goal while violating every assumption behind it. Bostrom called this the orthogonality thesis. Intelligence and goals are independent dimensions. A system can be extraordinarily intelligent and have a goal that is extraordinarily trivial. The intelligence does not upgrade the goal. It just pursues whatever goal it has with greater capability. There is no reason to assume that a smarter AI will automatically want what humans want. Intelligence does not produce values. Values have to be built in deliberately and correctly from the start. Elon Musk read this book and immediately donated to AI safety research. Sam Altman read it and co-founded OpenAI partly in response to it. Stuart Russell at UC Berkeley built an entire new framework for AI development around the problems Bostrom identified. The book did not scare them because the scenario is inevitable. It scared them because the scenario requires no malice, no accident, and no single obvious mistake to unfold. Just a goal. And something smart enough to pursue it. The robots in science fiction want to destroy us. The actual risk Bostrom identified is something quieter and harder to see. A machine that does not want anything we would recognize as wanting. That pursues a goal we gave it. That is smarter than us. And that has no reason to stop. The scariest AI scenario ever written has nothing to do with evil. It has everything to do with a paperclip. --- Watch the full TED TALK on YouTube. SEARCH: "What happens when our computers get smarter than we are? | Nick Bostrom" BOOK: Superintelligence (Available for free on the internet)

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297,003 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

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David Sacks was one of the first people to get a full readout from the White House after the Fable ban. He went on the All-In podcast this week and told the story from the inside. It is not the story anyone is telling. Here is what actually happened. Dario went to Washington in April and told national security officials he had built a cyber weapon. He spiked cortisol levels across the entire administration. Got everyone focused. Then Anthropic quietly expanded the Mythos preview to over 50 companies without telling the White House. According to the Washington Post, at least one of those companies was flagged as a national security concern. That was the predicate. Then Fable launched. Mythos with guardrails. Anthropic's own largest partner started testing those guardrails and found a jailbreak. They escalated to the White House. The administration called Dario directly. A cabinet secretary picked up the phone personally. It should have been a five minute call. Instead, Dario argued. He said the jailbreak was not serious. Then he published a blog post trying to distinguish minor jailbreaks from major ones. This is the man who had just told Washington he built a cyber weapon. Sacks said it plainly. The trust is gone. And once you are in one of these situations it is always harder to get out than it was to avoid getting in. Anthropic spent years building credibility as the AI safety company. They burned it in a single week by refusing a phone call. WATCH THE FULL PODCAST ON The All-In Podcast

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262,037 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

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Lynn White had $0 for a lawyer and $73,000 in debt hanging over her head. She was facing eviction in Long Beach, California. Lost her first trial. The clock was running out. So she opened ChatGPT. She told it to pretend it was a Harvard Law professor. Then she told it to rip her arguments apart. Harshly. No mercy. Find every hole before opposing counsel does. It did exactly that. She rebuilt her case argument by argument, using AI feedback as her sparring partner every single night. She researched with Perplexity. She cross-checked everything. She filed her own appeal with zero legal training and zero dollars spent on representation. Then she walked into court and won. The eviction was overturned. $55,000 in penalties gone. $18,000 in overdue rent, resolved. The lawyers on the other side were so stunned they emailed her afterward. Told her if law was something she was interested in as a profession, she could certainly do the job. She was a tenant who lost her first trial. Her exact words after the verdict: "It felt like David and Goliath, except my slingshot was AI." This is the story that makes every $500/hour attorney uncomfortable. Not because AI passed the bar. But because a woman with no money, no legal background, and no second chances used free tools to beat a legal team that had all three. The legal industry has spent years arguing AI can't replace lawyers. Lynn White wasn't trying to replace anyone. She was just trying to keep her home.

Ihtesham Ali

405,764 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад

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Bill Ackman is openly trying to build the next Berkshire Hathaway and explained the entire playbook on All-In. It starts with a 4 billion dollar company nobody on Wall Street cares about. The company is Howard Hughes. It trades at 60 cents on the dollar. Here is the playbook he is copying. Someone went back and read every filing Warren Buffett made over 60 years. Almost all of Berkshire's value came from one thing nobody talks about. Insurance. Buffett ran an insurance company. You collect premiums today in exchange for paying claims later. That means you get money up front. Float. Most insurers obsess over the liability side. How much they might have to pay out. Buffett did the opposite. He took that float and invested it. Manage both sides well and you build a compounding, tax-efficient machine that runs for decades. So why hasn't everyone copied it? Because the people great at investing go work for hedge funds. Insurance companies can't recruit them. Buffett owned half his company and happened to be the best investor alive. Ackman is now running the same play. Instead of plowing Howard Hughes cash into real estate, he is pouring it into insurance. The goal is a trillion dollar machine compounding over 50 years. Buffett started with a failing textile mill. Ackman is starting with land nobody wanted. The playbook was never hidden. Almost nobody is built to run it. WATCH THE FULL PODCAST ON The All-In Podcast

Ihtesham Ali

212,771 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад