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#CTO_RCA, long segment, bifurcation at the distal cap Single access AL 0.75 Corsair Pro #HDR No tip Fielder XT #DCB only CTO PCI Learn how to manipulate CTO wires and microcatheters, and find CTO Techniques in #CTOTOOLBOX3 available at Mauro Carlino Tsutomu Fujita MD Salman Arain Maksymilian Opolski Bilal...

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An educational rota burr entrapment case. When a burr is stuck, we pull on the burr. If that doesn’t work, then we think of complex manoeuvres: cutting the burr, removing Teflon sheath, guide extensions, parallel wiring/ballooning and ping pong guides etc… But we often forget the simple stuff. The 0.014 tip of rotawire is larger than 0.009 shaft that contains the burr. This prevents distal vessel injury but can help retrieve a stuck burr. If wire is intact, bring wire back to burr, but this can only be done with brake defeat on (this is often forgotten!!!). Once the tip is at the burr, just pull! Works in many cases of stuck burr. Here a case of LAD rotablation. Unrecognised calcific distal LMS disease, led to burr advancement and entrapment. Tugging the burr didn’t help. So brake defeat on and then pull the rota wire. Burr came out. Then rewired with new rotawire and used same burr to finish the job. #Cardiology #cardiotwitter #PCI #complexPCI #rotablation #complications CanCTO EuroCTOClub Sanjog Kalra Dr. Bill Lombardi Darshan Doshi, MD, MS Kambis Mashayekhi Stéphane Rinfret, MD SM Mihajlo Kovacic 🫀📕/🔋🕹️ Pierfrancesco Agostoni Neisser M Gregor Leibundgut Allison Hall Elliot Smith Luiz Fernando Ybarra Rustem Dautov Abdul Mozid Mohammad Almutawa Basem Elbarouni jcspratt Tom Kaier Anja Øksnes Raja Hatem Lorenzo Azzalini jedicath աǟզǟʀ.ǟɦʍɛɖ Tsutomu Fujita MD Farouc Jaffer MD PhD Mohaned Egred Stefan Harb Edney Boston-Griffiths Amir Ravandi Dr Imran Hanif Hashmi Omer Goktekin MD Maksymilian Opolski Kalpa De Silva Kalaivani Mahadevan Faurie Benjamin Michael Megaly Ignacio J. Amat Alex Truesdell Ziad Ali Ricardo Santiago sharmainethiru Jack Hall Salman Arain Mauro Carlino yasser sadek Masahiko Ochiai MD, FACC Sarah Fairley Margaret McEntegart

Bilal Iqbal

11,353 views • 1 year ago

CZ 🔶 BNB it’s great to see BNB Chain truly getting unleashed. So many great events happening ogle the founder of Glue is the advisor of world liberty and Glue is the partner of $Broccoli and will make broccoli accessible with ease in 180 countries. Strategies partnerships need to have use case and make sense and not to be used for hype as hype has no longevity or sustainability. $Broccoli is the first project to ever win the daily liquidity prize of 200k as well as the weekly prize of 500k (total 700,000$) by BNB Chain where CZ 🔶 BNB mentioned that he would add couple hundred BNB into liquidity to same of the round 1 weekly winners. Building matters and this is why $Broccoli is the only organic project that has earned it by building as a true CTO, not to mention $Broccoli is the only project to ever be listed on First Ledger. As well as the partnership which unlocks play, earn and learn crypto on Roblox unlocking education which could go hand to hand with Giggle Academy as $Broccoli already started “Broccoli academy” on there. And now we are talking on Roblox where there is 380 million active users monthly. What I’m really looking forward is Broccoli Park that will be released — a chill green zone where players can touch grass (digitally), relax, and meet our loyal Belgian Malinois (Broccoli)🐕💚 This is the community that has proven that true community can still win by building, this is the definition of building. And not using shortcuts and bribes for voting and many other short term strategies some other broccolis did, like sending over 1,500,000$ worth of tokens to CZ 🔶 BNB , CZ 🔶 BNB does not need that money and only wants to see community win. They thought they could bribe the man that spent the last decade building and making crypto a better place. But this also raises questions as the same project raised to 273mil in 13 seconds with only 43 members. If they send CZ 🔶 BNB over 1.5mil$ how much do these individuals that claim a CTO actually hold ? Non the less, the same project has also used the same logo and branding as $BROWNIE that was launched and managed by the same CTO team. Which was rugged at the time CZ released the real name of his dog. And now are using bribes and other unethical methods to win the vote. $Broccoli spent the whole time building while the noise was going around unbothered and focused on its mission and Will keep building to make this space a better place. Doing the right thing and being good always wins! CZ 🔶 BNB invented (4) Binance invented (SAFU) $Broccoli invented (Organic building ) Binance CZ 🔶 BNB Yi He BNB Chain $Broccoli ogle Glue

Memedaddy

18,896 views • 1 year ago

From Creator to Founder: The Rollercoaster Journey of Building Chatter Social Man, what a journey it’s been so far. Four years ago, I was just another creator, spending late nights on Clubhouse during the height of the pandemic. Like so many others, I was searching for connection, for community, for something meaningful. But what I found there wasn’t just connection—it was purpose. Alongside my brother, Jonathan Bing, we built a nightly show that reached over 5 million people. Imagine that: 5 million lives touched by conversations that felt real and unfiltered, all on a platform that at its peak had 10 million monthly active users. Clubhouse was magic. But then the decline began. Watching the platform struggle, I couldn’t help but reflect: what made it great? What went wrong? And what could the future look like if we did things differently? The Spark of Chatter As a content creator, I understood the needs of both creators and users. I knew what excited people, what kept them engaged, and what made them leave. Clubhouse had tapped into something special, but it had missed the mark on scalability and sustainability. By September 2023, I couldn’t stop thinking about the potential for something new—something that brought back the magic of real-time interaction but made it scalable, engaging, and sticky. And so, I set out to build Chatter Social. But I wasn’t a tech founder. I didn’t have a background in software development or a network of Silicon Valley insiders. What I did have was determination and the belief that if I could bring the right people together, we could build something extraordinary. Building the Team The journey to build Chatter started with assembling a team. Through my network from my days on Clubhouse, I found Samir, my first CTO. He believed in the vision and was instrumental in getting the project off the ground. Shortly after, I connected with Tyler, our Head of Design, whose creativity brought life to our ideas. A developer joined us soon after, and we were off to the races. By the end of 2023, Samir had to step away due to other commitments, and we promoted the developer to CTO. At the same time, I brought on Banko, a Sony music executive, as our CMO. Banko’s connections led to one of our biggest early wins: landing Davido, a global superstar, as an owner-ambassador. To this day, I still marvel at the fact that Davido believed in our vision when all we had were Tyler’s Figma designs. From Dream to Reality Early 2024 was a whirlwind. We hired Yurii and Vasyl, two developers from Ukraine who brought incredible skill and dedication to the team. Vasyl, in particular, stood out as a leader and has since earned an equity position in the company. But despite these wins, we were facing growing pains. Our new CTO struggled to meet deadlines, and as a result, I found myself constantly pushing back the launch date. What started as a January release turned into February, then March, then April, then May. By then, people on Twitter Spaces—where I had been hyping up the platform—started doubting if we even had a product. Launch and Lessons June 1, 2024, marked a turning point. It was the day my son Noah was born and the day we launched Chatter in private beta. We started with just 40 users, but by the end of the month, we had grown to 1,000. The engagement was unbelievable. Users loved it, even though we had launched with just one feature: live rooms. This represented less than 20% of what we had planned, but it was enough to show that we were onto something big. In July, we launched our public beta on the App Store as an invite-only platform. Within 48 hours, Chatter ranked as a top 30 social app in over 30 countries. But our invite system throttled access, and most users couldn’t get in. While engagement metrics soared for those inside, our AWS costs exploded. In August, our AWS bill hit $10,000. By September, it had climbed to $15,000, and we were drowning in bugs and glitches. The breaking point came when our CTO became unresponsive, often disappearing during critical moments. Users were dropping off, frustrated by the issues, developers were confused and the team was also growing increasingly frustrated, I made the tough decision to let him go. A New Beginning Enter Horane, a long-time user of Chatter who had been with us since private beta. He was the first to discover some of the most innovative use cases for the platform and had a deep passion for its potential. After meeting him in person at a Chatter event, I knew he was the right person to step into the CTO role. When Horane took over, we discovered just how bad the situation was. Key areas of the codebase were locked, and there were no separate environments for development and production. Every fix seemed to break something else. But through sheer determination and countless 18-hour days, Horane stabilized the platform. Today, Chatter is far from perfect, but it’s stable. The bugs that plagued us have been reduced to moderate issues, and our core users—those who stuck with us through the chaos—are still engaged on the platform. Looking Ahead: Chatter V2 While the platform is stable now, we’ve shifted our focus to Chatter V2. This is where the magic really begins. V2 isn’t just an improvement; it’s a complete reimagining of the platform. It includes all the features we couldn’t release in V1 because we were too busy putting out fires. Imagine this: Chatter V1, with only one live feature, was incredibly sticky. Now think about what happens when we release a fully loaded platform with all the innovative features we’ve been working on behind the scenes. The possibilities are endless. V2 is slated to hit TestFlight by the end of December, with a public release in January 2025. And this time, we’re ready—not just with the product but with the lessons we’ve learned. The Hard Lessons This journey has taught me more than I ever thought possible: 1) Your Team is Everything: The right people can make or break your vision. Finding people who believe in your mission is just as important as finding people with the right skills. 2) Adaptability is Key: As a non-technical founder, I had to learn about development, DevOps, and product management on the fly. Challenges will push you to grow, whether you’re ready or not. 3) Trust the Process: Every setback, every delay, every bug—it all taught us something. Without those lessons, we wouldn’t be building the incredible V2 product we are today. 4) Resilience is Non-Negotiable: From technical disasters to predatory investors who tried to exploit my desperation, I’ve had to fight for this vision every step of the way. What’s Next December is shaping up to be an exciting month. We have some amazing events planned on the platform to close out the year, bringing our core community together as we prepare for the V2 launch. When V2 drops, it will mark a new era for Chatter. This isn’t just a social audio platform or a social audiovisual platform. Chatter is all about interactive experiences—making social media social again in ways that are truly unique. The public launch is slated for February 2025, and for the first time, we’ll have the marketing dollars to tell the world about Chatter. Our core community has been our biggest cheerleaders, and I can’t wait to see how the world reacts when they experience what we’ve built. Final Thoughts This has been the hardest year of my life, but also the most rewarding. To other founders, or anyone thinking about starting a company: know this—it will test you in ways you can’t imagine. You’ll face betrayal, doubt, and moments where you feel like giving up. But if you believe in your vision and refuse to quit, you’ll find a way forward. Thank you to everyone who has supported me, my team, and Chatter. We’re just getting started. Let’s talk about it. 🚀 If this story inspired you, please like and share it so others can learn from my experiences. The journey is far from over, but I’m more excited than ever for what’s to come.

Nelson Epega

43,485 views • 1 year ago

AppLovin CEO is trying to counter Anthropic’s CEO claims that SaaS is DEAD and never coming back. $APP is not an ad network. It is not a gaming company. It is an arbitrage engine with 400 engineers, $1.3 billion in cash flow per quarter, and a capital allocation track record that belongs in a business school curriculum. Start with the gaming studios. From 2018 to 2023, AppLovin acquired over 15 mobile gaming studios and 1,500 people. Nobody understood why. The answer was data. Third party advertisers would not share their conversion and ROAS data with AppLovin's model. So AppLovin became a first party advertiser — running its own games, generating its own behavioral data, feeding that data into Axon, its deep learning ad model. The studios were not a business. They were a training set. The moment Axon 2.0 launched in April 2023 and proved so effective that the entire gaming industry had to plug in and share their data to access the returns, the studios had served their purpose. AppLovin sold the entire portfolio to Tripledot and moved on. They used the asset to build the moat and immediately dumped the asset. That is not a pivot. That is a premeditated extraction. The 2022 buyback is the capital allocation move that defined the company's trajectory. The market had pushed AppLovin's market cap to $3.8 billion. The business was printing over $1 billion in EBITDA. Instead of open market repurchases, management identified that private equity backers and early insiders controlled nearly 50% of the float and needed liquidity. They bypassed the public market entirely, negotiated directly with those institutional holders, and executed a $6 billion leveraged buyback at the floor. Foroughi estimates that single decision generated $50 to $60 billion in retained value for remaining shareholders as the stock recovered. One negotiation. One decision. $50 billion created. The operating model is the part that should make every other tech CEO uncomfortable. AppLovin fired 40% of its workforce while growing revenue nearly 100% year over year. The C suite is four people—CEO, CFO, CTO, General Counsel. No CRO. No COO. No salesforce. Over 80% of the codebase is now written by AI, multiplying the output of their best engineers by up to 100x. The product does not need to be sold. Advertisers plug in, set a performance goal, and if the ROAS is positive they scale spend infinitely. The platform turns advertisers into blind arbitrageurs — they do not need to understand how it works, they just need to see the return. The TAM expansion is the next leg. Axon perfected gaming monetization. It is now being pointed at ecommerce and local SMBs — markets orders of magnitude larger than mobile gaming. The model does not need a sales team to penetrate them. It needs inventory and intent signals. It is acquiring both. The company has internal compensation triggers tied to a $1 trillion market cap. They went from $3.8 billion in 2022 to $154 billion today. The people running this business have done everything they said they would do, faster than anyone expected, with fewer people than anyone thought possible. That track record is the most important input in any forward model. Betting against a team that turned a $3.8 billion floor into $154 billion in three years, with 400 people, no salesforce, and an AI model that the entire industry has to use — requires a very specific and defensible thesis. Most of the people making that bet do not have one…stock is still being beaten to death…still not compelled. AI companies are just too good and getting better but interesting to see him come publicly to try to pump his stock

Nicholas Mugalli

100,854 views • 3 months ago

I remember, when I first saw $CREPE, when God's servant; Prophet Joel Ogebe posted it, and said It was the next $SHIB, It was at $200K, without any doubt 🤔, I aped in with only $32 dollars, cos I was not having lot of funds, when he called it, but because I believe the word of the Lord cannot return to Him void, without accomplishing that which it was sent for. Today my $32 $CREPE is worth over $2,500 as we speak 🙊, massive profit right??? I've been able to sell some, use the money to ape some low caps, made profit, and bought back my $CREPE bag 💰. This tweet is not about $CREPE Tho. This is about the Newest and bigger than $CREPE update. It's about $LCAKE LAYER CAKE 🎂. $LCAKE have been able to scale from $2.5K MC to above $850K MC, now currently around $200K MC; strong support point now, opportunity for everyone to top their bags 💰, eat the dip, and hop in, if you were never in. Great man are backing this project, Prophet Joel Ogebe saw the light of God on this project, and gave it to the world 🌎 🌍, when no one knows about it. Do you still doubt the word of The Lord on this project??? Well some of us prefer to learn the hard way. $SHIB, $WKC, $TKC and $CREPE should have taught you how bad it is to fade a project backed by the most high God himself 🙏 🙌. Whales 🐳 jeeted heavily on $LCAKE, but the floor is still being held strong, by faithful CTO CORE TEAM. Other greedy teams, would have left, once they see the kind of profit they saw, but the team still stand strong, and backing the project, till we achieve greatness together. I saw my money moved from barely $2K to over $20K, and I didn't just sell off, not because I'm already rich, or I don't need the Money 💰 🤑, but I became selfless myself, cos I see the Hand of the Lord upon $LCAKE, and there's a lot God wanna work with this project. Believe it or not, it won't take $LCAKE too long to hit millions of dollars market cap. Ape with confidence, the team will never rug you. THIS IS A WAKE UP CALL FOR Y'ALL. Trust the process. APE, HODL, PRAY and SHILL. $LCAKE WILL TAKE THE WORLD 🌎 BY SURPRISE 🫢. GOD WILL FINISH WHAT HE HAS STARTED ON $LCAKE, THE GOD OF WONDERS, THE GOD OF PERFECTION IS CURRENTLY WORKING FOR US BEHIND THE SCENE. YOU THAT SHALL PATIENTLY HOLD, SHALL BENEFIT FROM THE WORK OF THE LORD. SHALOM!!! Prophet Joel Ogebe Prophet Emmanuel Okeke 1000xgirl👑❤️👑 Crepe PrinceofGhana ◻️ @futuristkwame ePrincy 🔶 Sir Mapy C W E  #WKC #ocicat #DTG #crepe #LCake #layercake

$LORD CRYPTO 👑💎 🐂🥞🎂🧠🔶

30,182 views • 11 months ago

People are undoubtedly a little alarmed at having unwittingly helped build a 3D map of the world for Niantic by contributing 30 billion crowdsourced images. I interviewed Niantic's CTO Brian McClendon about exactly this in a TED interview last year -- he's also the guy who co-created Google Earth. But let's put it in perspective. Pokestop data isn't what you think it is. It's not a surveillance panopticon of your neighborhood. These are static captures of parks, statues, murals, landmarks -- the places people congregate. Brian described it as "building the map from the bottom up, from the locations where people spend time." Think of these 20 million waypoints as basically the inverse of what Google mapped with Street View. Google mapped the drivable streets. Niantic mapped where people actually hang out. Cool data, genuinely useful for visual positioning -- but very different from what the headlines imply. And lest we forget that Niantic is just one of many companies quietly building their own map of the world right now -- and they're all capturing different facets of reality: >🚶 person-level: Axon body cams on hundreds of thousands of officers. Meta Ray-Ban glasses capturing first-person POV at scale -- overseas operators reviewing images every time someone says "Hey Meta." > 🚗 vehicle-level: Tesla dashcams on every car in the fleet, massive onboard compute extracting and distilling data to the cloud. Waymo with cm-accurate 3D maps of every city they operate in. Fleet telematics cameras on delivery vehicles globally. > 🏠 street & home-level: Flock Safety deploying CCTV across neighborhoods and cities. Amazon with Ring cameras on every doorstep and mailroom (recently got dragged over that Super Bowl commercial about fusing all these cams together to find your dog) plus dashcams on every Prime delivery van. Roomba mapping your floor plan every time it vacuums -- Amazon wanted that data badly enough to try acquiring iRobot for $1.7B before regulators shut it down. > 🥽 headset-level: Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest build a 3D model of whatever room you're in every time you put them on. Between Ring, Roomba, and your headset, your entire home is being spatially understood by at least three different companies. >📍platform-level: Google with Street View cars, aerial planes, satellite imagery, and live location from every Android phone in your pocket. Apple doing the same with mapping cars AND every LiDAR iPhone is quietly a 3D scanner. And yeah, despite the "Apple is too privacy-conscious" narrative, they're collecting location data too. >🏃 trajectory-level: Strava mapped every running and cycling trail on Earth -- and accidentally exposed secret military bases in Afghanistan and Syria because soldiers logged their jogs. When you aggregate enough individual trajectories, patterns emerge that were never supposed to be visible. > 🛰️ space-level: Planet Labs imaging the entire Earth's landmass every single day from orbit. Vantor capturing it in higher detail. Iceye doing it in 3D using SAR. If something changes anywhere on the planet -- a building goes up, a forest burns down, a military convoy moves -- before-and-after imagery within 24 hours. Fused together -- we have everything from body cam to dashcam to doorbell to phone to satellite -- every layer of physical reality is being mapped by somebody right now. Different sensors, different angles, different purposes. Same pattern. The interesting part is how they incentivize it. Google spends billions. Mapillary tried altruism. Hivemapper grinds with crypto. Pokémon GO cracked something none of them could: a game mechanic that subsidizes the scanning behavior. You're not building a map. You're catching pokemon. The map is just a side effect. 3D scanning is still a niche hobby for reality capture nerds like me. The moment somebody gamifies dense 3D capture at scale -- not posed photos but actual geometry -- that's when this blows wide open. Niantic sold the games for $3.5B but kept the spatial platform, with a data-sharing agreement in place. One team makes the game great, the other builds the spatial infrastructure underneath. Incentives finally aligned. Gaming is becoming a way for humans to contribute real-world trajectories that help physical AI learn about the real world. Google does it with live traffic. Tesla does it with autopilot. The mechanic is different but the pattern is identical -- and most people are already part of at least one -- if not a majority -- of these datasets whether they realize it or not.

Bilawal Sidhu

203,795 views • 5 months ago

Just in $AMD Anush "Speed is the moat"|ROCm🎙️ In the race to define the future of AI, what's the one advantage that truly lasts? It's not proprietary tech, argues Anush Elangovan Elangovan, VP of AI Software at AMD , but the sustainable speed of innovation. He explains why AMD is rejecting the "walled garden" model for its open source ROCm stack, betting that an open community flywheel is the key to victory. Listen to understand how this open strategy is designed to out-innovate closed systems by empowering developers to solve everything from frontier-model challenges to the mundane, everyday problems that define the "last mile" of AI. AMD ROCm Software: Part 1 Transcript [00:00:00] Andrew Zigler: Joining me is Anush Elangovan, VP of AI software at AMD. And when people talk about AI compute, the conversation often stops at hardware specs, but it's more than just physical chips that win the game. It's also the software ecosystems supporting them. [00:00:18] Andrew Zigler: The prevailing strategy in the industry has been to build something like a walled garden. You know, something closed, proprietary locks, developers in. But AMD is betting on an entirely different play, open source acceleration, and with rock, their open source AI software stack. AMD is building not just hardware parity, but an innovation flywheel that's powered by the community with interoperability and the freedom to scale without all of that pesky lockin. [00:00:48] Andrew Zigler: And in this world, speed is your moat and how fast you can innovate while your platform remains open, flexible, and standardize across all of its applications. That's what we're gonna explore [00:01:00] today. So Anush, I'm really excited to have you here. Welcome to Dev Interrupted. [00:01:04] Anush Elangovan: Thanks for having me. Uh, super excited to chat about it. [00:01:07] Andrew Zigler: Amazing. Well, let's go ahead and dive right in with kind of what I laid it out with in the beginning, the idea of the moat and it being about speed. I wanna unpack that a bit because that came from you when you and I first spoke. And I, and I want to know, you know, how do you define speed inside of AMD beyond just things like hardware, benchmarks. [00:01:27] Anush Elangovan: Yeah, that's a very good question. So when we typically talk about speed, everyone's like, Hey, hardware benchmark specs, right? Like, uh, memory bandwidth or, or flops. And that is one important part of it, uh, AMD does very well. With that, we do have, a, a very good history of executing on that axis. [00:01:47] Anush Elangovan: But when I say speed is the moat, it is about, uh, how we prepare, how we build the muscle to run the race for a long time and run it fast. And it is [00:02:00] not about a single point in time that you've, you've beat some you know, benchmark and, and you declare victory. It's about building the ability to consistently develop and deliver. [00:02:13] Anush Elangovan: Both hardware and software innovation at scale and do it fast, right? Like, you know, we we're increasingly getting to a point where models come out and they're, uh, you know, a year or two ago it was like, Hey, they work on AMD on day zero, which is great, but now they are performing on AMD the day it releases, right? [00:02:32] Anush Elangovan: So, what does it take to Prefetch where the industry is going? Be prepared to intercept. At that point is what you know, I, I refer to as you know, the, the speed factor in, in creating this mode, right? And the mode is just shed all things that hold you back and run as fast as you can. [00:02:53] Anush Elangovan: Uh, because the pace of innovation that is, uh, being seen in, in AI [00:03:00] industries is just. Amazing. Right? And it's like, it's transformational at at how you generate electricity. It's transformational as at how you build data centers. It's transformational at how you deploy compute, networking. It's transformational at what kind of use cases you, you know, uh, use AI for. [00:03:17] Anush Elangovan: Uh, and for that, you need to be prepared to, see what comes tomorrow and be prepared to run the race tomorrow. [00:03:23] Andrew Zigler: Yeah, it's a really great perspective because it highlights that it's not just like a checkpoint that you run through. I like how you called out, like it's not just hitting that benchmark or being the best in class at that moment, in that snapshot, it's about having a. The throughput and about having that dedication to the idea and continuing to deliver on it. [00:03:43] Andrew Zigler: It's not just crossing the threshold, but it's also being the engine. And that's what, that's what protects a business. That is the moat, because the moat is that innovation layer, the faster and more, uh, future forward. That you can work and think, [00:04:00] you know, the better. Uh, we, we talk a lot about like future forward work styles. [00:04:04] Andrew Zigler: Like what are the things I could be doing right now today that are gonna be like, way more useful tomorrow? Let, let's abandon those, workflows that are older and that kind of like, that translates into. An advantage when you work that way. You know, what kind of things have you learned working with, uh, like across all spectrums of people who would use ROCm, right? [00:04:23] Andrew Zigler: You have like the developers, but then you also have the enterprises and you have this large span of adoptees, right? So what is the, what does that look like that you learn? [00:04:32] Anush Elangovan: Yeah, so, so the way I look at it is there are gonna be pockets of different, uh, you know, cadences, right? Like, so people who are deploying in enterprises, for example, right? The validation and how long it takes for them to deploy an LLM that's secure. It's, with guardrails, et cetera, maybe longer. [00:04:52] Anush Elangovan: but you still have to go through the process and you have to be prepared to like, walk that walk to deploy an enterprises. That doesn't mean it's [00:05:00] not fast, that's as fast as you can do for that industry, right? And if you are deploying AI in healthcare, right, it's, it's got its own, uh, cycle. [00:05:07] Anush Elangovan: but in each one of these, you want to see how, like, go down to the essence of what is it that you actually have to do. And, you know, I, I, I like how you framed it. It's like it's, you shed your prior assumptions of how things are done, right. And, and you kind of build up from a, uh, first principles, uh, approach to say, this is how I could use AI to unlock, whatever I'm doing. [00:05:33] Anush Elangovan: And, and, some of it, you know, it's good to really step back and look at. Just question every part of it, right? Like right now you're getting chat GPT and, Gemini competing for like, math, olympiads and, and, uh, college, uh, reasoning, uh, tests. Right? And, and those are like that, that is amazing and increasingly like complex tasks that they're trying to do. [00:05:58] Anush Elangovan: But there may also be like. [00:06:00] More mundane things that AI could, could get applied to. Right? And, and so when we think about shedding old ways, you wanna shed it not just in like the tip of the spear. It's like, you know, I'm gonna see what's the frontier model. It's also, it could be something as simple as. [00:06:18] Anush Elangovan: How do you choose a, a movie, uh, you know, like a recommendation system, right? Or, or, uh, an automated, uh, flight, uh, rebooking system. So the moment, you know, your flight is late, uh, right now it's a notification, right? It's like, oh, you got a text message saying your flight's late. And I got that like three times this week. [00:06:38] Anush Elangovan: But anyway, uh, and, and, and, and, I was just like, okay, so if I were to rethink this. All this MCPs that we have that should be hooked up into an MCP that says, your flight's delayed. Here are your options. If you want, you know, these are the paid options. Yeah. Here are the free options. This will get you back into your you know, Toronto airport [00:07:00] tonight. [00:07:00] Anush Elangovan: Or if you stay, here's a hotel plus this, plus this, plus. It's just like, go ahead is all I should say. Versus now I'm like, okay, can someone, you know, can I call a travel agent? Can I do this? Can I go online and log into And you know, so we gotta fundamentally rethink even those like small, nuances of, things that we do that can be automated out and AI is really, really good at doing something like this, right? Maybe I just explained an AI startup idea right now. Somebody should just start that. [00:07:29] Andrew Zigler: I think you did. Yeah, you definitely did. Someone, one of our listeners is definitely going to lift that off of you. I, I, I, you know, I hate being on the receiving end of those. You feel a little helpless and then you have to like, follow the whole flow. So I know what you mean. Like I, I like how you called out that the build and this like. [00:07:45] Andrew Zigler: Where speed is your moat and the innovation layer is protecting you, is what makes you better than your competitors. How you scale that and you bring that to market. So by understanding the problems that you're solving, uh, throwing away those older assumptions, but also [00:08:00] recognizing that like. We're building every single day, new things and new ways of using stuff that we're still figuring out the implications of. [00:08:08] Andrew Zigler: And so when you have a lot of velocity and you're introducing a lot of new ideas, and maybe you have that workflow now that automatically rebook your flight off of your late flight text message, and uh, I know I would certainly use it, but you know, what kind of philosophies guide the way that y'all think about building this ecosystem to manage that stability while letting folks. [00:08:29] Andrew Zigler: Play with the speed and the assumptions and the airplane re bookings. [00:08:34] Anush Elangovan: so, so I think, you know, we need to peel one layer down, right? and the philosophy is, Hey, we, we just discovered electricity, right? And you know what we're gonna do? We are gonna make motors, uh, or dynamos, right? Like engines. Uh, sure. We don't know if it's gonna be a Ferrari that you're gonna make, or it's a a a a dump truck. [00:08:57] Anush Elangovan: That's good for doing this. But let's [00:09:00] let, which is also required, right? You need a dump truck. You need a garbage truck. And, [00:09:04] Andrew Zigler: Yeah. You need the [00:09:04] Anush Elangovan: course you need, uh, a Ferrari for a midlife crisis, right? So, [00:09:09] Andrew Zigler: precisely. [00:09:10] Anush Elangovan: But, but my, uh, point is what do we build next? And, uh, and this is what I meant by like, okay, let's, let's take those baby steps to build the. [00:09:20] Anush Elangovan: Infrastructure that's required that we know we'll have to use, right? So, so if I just discovered electricity, okay, great. Now one, how do I save this electricity and how do I use it? So there's battery technology, so you need to do something like that, right? Like so. But then you also want to make it into an actionable thing. [00:09:37] Anush Elangovan: You want to make it for like automobiles, or you wanna use it for, you know, powering, uh, entire cities. So it is that transformational. So, uh, AI is that transformational. So, if you distill down, it'll, it'll come down to how do we think about, what we can do with this this fundamental technology that, We may not be aware of what it [00:10:00] is gonna unlock next, but at least you know the next step is clear, right? It's like a dense fog, you know, it's gonna be like, it, it's the right path. You see the light, but it's kind of like out there and, and the steps you're taking are concrete and you're like, okay, this is good. [00:10:16] Anush Elangovan: I, this is better than where I was or where we were. So we are moving forward. So you can build with the. Intuition from what you see in the short term and a tactical view, but towards what you think the future is gonna be. [00:10:28] Andrew Zigler: Right. You almost like we're all in this like fog of war, right? And like you said, you're reaching out and you're trying to step through it. You could think of it too, as like you're in the dark and your hands are up in front of you and you know that. You're, you're not gonna run your face into a wall because your hands are out in front of you, but you're not gonna maybe do much better than that. [00:10:45] Andrew Zigler: So that's kind of like, I think the eco, the, the industry, the world that we find ourselves in, uh, and we all have to, then this becomes the power of an ecosystem, of a group of people working together to create that layer of, [00:11:00] uh, of establishing the [00:11:01] Anush Elangovan: exactly. And I, I, I just, instead of, you know, saying fog of war I describe it as like, you're in this. Beautiful valley with like a morning, uh, fog that's in. You can smell the flowers. You, you hear the birds. You are like, okay, it's, we are in like, uh, utopian paradise and yes, I just need to like, continue the walk, right? [00:11:24] Anush Elangovan: and then move forward with that, conviction that you're in the right spot. [00:11:27] Andrew Zigler: Yeah. So let's talk about that ecosystem world. This nice, I love how you describe it, this grassy side of a hill in the morning that's covered in some mist and maybe we can't see 30 feet in one direction, but it sure is a beautiful hill and it smells nice. And so we're all here. And why is, in that world, why is. [00:11:44] Andrew Zigler: You know, open source, their strategic advantage that y'all are going for in the AI hardware market. And, and then how does like ROCm turn that into wins for people within that ecosystem? [00:11:56] Anush Elangovan: you know, the, the way we look at it is this, is kind of like how I view [00:12:00] AI and the ecosystem, right? But, but it is for everyone to enjoy. Uh, and so we do want to make sure that. You know, it is, uh, beneficial for everyone. [00:12:09] Anush Elangovan: The ecosystem can come in and, and innovate. It's an open innovation engine. and uh, it is very different from, you know, having a walled garden with, Hey, only I know how to do this and I'm gonna do it and throw it over the fence and you can use it or keep walking, right? So we'd like to be good citizens that way, but also. [00:12:30] Anush Elangovan: Uh, it is self-fulfilling in a way, right? Like it, the, the pace at which we innovate with open source is unmatched. Like, you know, our serving engines are like VLLM and, and sg l. Those things, uh, those frameworks are like super, super aggressive in terms of how fast they come out with features and how fast they can you know, get performant models out. [00:12:52] Anush Elangovan: And that compared with what, uh, you'd get from, you know, the likes of like T-R-T-L-L-M or something is always lagging, right? Because you [00:13:00] just can't keep up with you know, 200 commits a week just on one particular model to get that model really performant [00:13:06] Andrew Zigler: And, and, and in that world where, you know, everyone can enjoy the winds of this, what kind of customer stories or innovation stories have really stood out to you and excite you about building and creating this place for developers? [00:13:19] Anush Elangovan: Yeah. So I think the parts that are super exciting for me are when when we get to see a customer that is first skeptical. Then they start a little like, okay, fine, we'll give you a chance. Uh, we do a simple, uh, POC and then they're like, huh, this seems to work. Yeah, we told you it works. [00:13:42] Anush Elangovan: You don't have to change one line of code. Really? Yes, no need to change one line of code. Okay, let's try a production workload. So then they try it. Oh, you're more performant than the competition. Yes. We're more performant than, than the competition. So how much does it cost? And we're like, oh, it's your TCO is better with, uh, [00:14:00] AMD. [00:14:00] Anush Elangovan: So again, they're like, wow, okay, good. So now how do we deploy at scale? And then we go deploy it at scale. And when they give a thumbs up on that and they say, this is good, right? That's when you know, you, you see it go full circle from like, oh, we, we've never heard about AMD to like actually deploy to tens of thousands of GPUs In the order of a few months, right? It, it, it really is fascinating to see and very exciting and invigorating to [00:14:28] Andrew Zigler: Yeah. At like a great exposure to a lot of interesting problems. And, and then people using the infrastructure, the, the technology available to solve those problems. Really specific problems by the way, that's often why they're bringing their data and AI to it, uh, is because it is really specific and important for them. [00:14:45] Andrew Zigler: And there's a, a lot I think that other engineering orgs can learn and even emulate from AMD's success and, and having this open source ecosystem and it causing this acceleration within. You [00:15:00] know, uh, customers and enterprises that use and adopt the tools and, and, and that creates an advantage. And that goes back to why we're talking and like the real thesis of our conversation today. [00:15:10] Andrew Zigler: So how do you think engineering leaders that are listening to this and obviously tapping into this great success AMD has from an open source flywheel, how do you think other, other folks building in the same space can foster that open, first, that open source oriented culture in order to, you know, accelerate their innovation goals? [00:15:29] Anush Elangovan: Yeah, that's a very good question. So the startup that um, was acquired by AMD we, we built, I mean, we started off doing iot stuff and you know, smart ring and all that, right? But in the, the end of like, uh, and not the end, the last six years of the company was building ML compilers. [00:15:47] Anush Elangovan: And ml, ML compilers are like super, uh, complicated, sophisticated, advanced algorithms, dah, dah, dah. but it was all open source, right? So our VCs were like, wait, what do you mean your core [00:16:00] IP is open source? And um, the speed is the moat applied even then, right? It was just like, yes, if you have an idea that. [00:16:08] Anush Elangovan: Because someone saw this idea that you are, they're gonna be able to catch up, then you probably have the wrong idea anyway. But if they are, you know, you execute and they're gonna catch up, that you should assume they're gonna catch up. Right? So you gotta move forward. So keeping it open source is super important. [00:16:25] Anush Elangovan: But also to your question on like, you know, the learnings from an AMD standpoint, right? If there are, hard problems, I'd say dig in and work through it, right? Like there's no way but through it, right? That should be the simple mentality. And more, uh, frequently than not. you'll see that you'll just make it through in a, in, in good form. [00:16:52] Anush Elangovan: But if you doubt it and you're like, oh, I don't know if I should commit, if I'm, I, you know, what should just commit to do the right thing [00:17:00] every step, right? Every step, and just keep taking one step in front of the other. And in no time you'll see that you'll be running. Right. And, and yes, the first few steps will be like, yeah, everyone's complaining about your software quality. [00:17:15] Anush Elangovan: Everyone's complaining about this and that, and it doesn't work. And, and a few steps in, you know, you get, you get the hang of all the complaints that are coming in. You get the feedback loop. You're like, okay, what, what are you prioritizing again? One step in front of the other, right? You just keep knocking that out and then you get to a point where you're, it just becomes second nature, right? To do the, to do the right thing. And, and then yes, if someone gives you two options, you'll be like, fine. This is, uh, you know, there's always the resource trade off. There's always a human capital trade off, but what's the right thing to do? of course, I, I'm pragmatic about what we choose, but, but if the right thing for your long-term success is dig in, go first, principles, make it [00:18:00] happen. [00:18:00] Anush Elangovan: Well. Then just go for that. There's, there is no shortcut to [00:18:04] Andrew Zigler: acknowledging, you know, how it aligns with your mission, your core company goals, and what you're looking to achieve. And, and I, I love how you rightfully called out that in the open source world and you know, you have your technology that you've built, what you think is your moat upon, right? [00:18:22] Andrew Zigler: It's your code and, and to open source that, or to just make it where anyone could peer in is, you know. Scary in one regard, but two, it just kind of feels like you're handing away your throne room in some kind of sense, a very direct feeling sense. But the ultimately, you were really right to call out, and this is something I think about all the time, that the real power there is still the speed This the speed. [00:18:42] Andrew Zigler: That was the moat at the beginning of our conversation. It's the speed in combination with your. Very specific domain understanding of what you're building and what you're creating, and your new role as the steward of that world and how people plug into it, which [00:19:00] has frankly, a lot more influence and power than lording over a closed. [00:19:04] Andrew Zigler: You know, repository or an ecosystem, and like you said, like throwing things over the wall. Sure. There, there might be people always on the other side of that wall, but you're not gonna have a great connection with them. You're not gonna be able to really clearly understand them. I, I like your metaphor of the side of the field of the mountain a lot more. [00:19:23] Andrew Zigler: But, but in the, in this world, you know, where. That speed is, is the power and, and open source is just one way that you can harness that speed to get really far ahead and to innovate. , There's other parts of this equation that you can be experimenting with too, and I'd love to pick your brain about them as a software leader and, and, and one of them is about looking forward and kind of understanding that future that we're all building towards and beyond today's models and hardware. [00:19:48] Andrew Zigler: You know, what do you see as the next major bottleneck or opportunity in the AI compute space? As, as you know, enterprises and folks start to get a little more mature about what's available to [00:20:00] them. [00:20:00] Anush Elangovan: Yeah, I think, the bottleneck and opportunity is, uh, what I'd call, call walking the last mile of ai. Right. Uh, and like I I, I gave you an example, uh, previously, but, but it's similar to that. It's like there are cases where Humans have so many, uh, things to do in your day. You know, like the, if we sit down and actually had a customer focus like, okay, these customers lives, I'm gonna save four hours of this customer's life. And if you actually sit down and look at all of that, it'll be. Easily automatable, easily you know, uh, applicable, uh, for ai, right? [00:20:39] Anush Elangovan: Like, but then making it happen is gonna take a little bit, right? It's like maybe it's, uh, paying your utility bill, right? Or something like that, right? Or, or, your healthcare explanation of benefits. Uh, like, I'm sure you get an explanation of benefits, and I'm like, I, I don't even know what that thing is. [00:20:55] Anush Elangovan: It's just like EOB and like. [00:20:57] Andrew Zigler: it's a big, a big old PDF. Yeah, [00:21:00] exactly. [00:21:01] Anush Elangovan: Like, like, I'm like great straight to the, uh, shredder, right? And but that could be, you know, automated with the ai, right? It, it, it'd be like, Hey, the summary of this thing is you went and visited this day. Everything is okay. Everything is paid for, so don't worry, it's not a bill. [00:21:17] Anush Elangovan: That again, the same, uh, thing, but the sense of what that information overload is could be. Digested by ai, uh, accumulated over time and retrieved when you need it. Like, I don't, I actually don't even need to know this EOB right now, unless of course, whenever I need to know it, that maybe, you know, like for some benefits I need to figure out what do, what did I do over the past year and how do I apply it? Source:

Mike

14,195 views • 8 months ago

BEARISH ON OPENAI The investment case for OpenAI has never been more precarious than it is right now in late 2025. What was once a company that seemed destined to dominate the artificial intelligence revolution has revealed itself to be a structurally disadvantaged challenger fighting a defensive war on multiple fronts. The company anticipates burning through roughly $9 billion this year on $13 billion in sales, a cash burn rate of approximately 70% of revenue. This is not the profile of a company poised to capture monopolistic profits from a transformative technology; it is the profile of a utility company spending astronomical sums to deliver a commodity product that competitors are increasingly giving away for free. The financial trajectory only becomes more alarming when examined over a longer time horizon. The documents show OpenAI projects that by 2028, its operating losses will balloon to roughly three-quarters of that year’s revenue, driven primarily by ballooning spending on computing costs. The company has painted a rosy picture of eventual profitability by 2029 or 2030, but this projection requires believing that OpenAI can grow revenue from roughly $13 billion today to $125 billion or more while simultaneously maintaining pricing power in a market where every major technology company and numerous startups are racing to commoditize the very product OpenAI sells. The cash burn is expected to reach $115 billion cumulatively through 2029, according to The Information. These numbers represent a staggering bet that requires near-perfect execution across multiple dimensions over half a decade. The most damning evidence against OpenAI’s long-term viability is the evaporation of its technological moat. In 2023, GPT-4 felt like genuine magic, a capability that no other company could replicate. Today, that lead has effectively vanished. The sudden availability of frontier-level open-source models is expected to dramatically accelerate AI development globally, potentially reshaping entire industries and altering the balance of power in the tech world. Meta’s Llama series, Mistral’s increasingly capable models, and even Chinese competitors like DeepSeek have demonstrated that the core technology powering ChatGPT is replicable and, in many cases, distributable for free. When your product becomes commoditized, the economics become brutal, and OpenAI finds itself in the position of trying to sell bottled water in a world where tap water has become indistinguishable in quality. The competitive pressure from open-source alternatives is compounding rapidly. The open source movement in AI has grown exponentially over the past few years. Instead of relying solely on expensive, closed models from major tech companies, developers and researchers worldwide can now access, modify, and improve upon state-of-the-art LLMs. This democratization is existential for OpenAI’s business model. Enterprises that once paid premium prices for API access now have the option to run comparable models on their own infrastructure at a fraction of the cost, with the added benefits of data privacy and customization. The value proposition that justified OpenAI’s premium pricing has eroded faster than anyone anticipated, and there is no indication that this trend will reverse. Perhaps nothing illustrates OpenAI’s structural weakness more clearly than the behavior of its most important partner. Microsoft is dancing to its own tune in the artificial intelligence revolution, and Wall Street cannot stop watching. Despite pouring approximately $13 billion into OpenAI over several years, DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria estimates that just 17 percent of Microsoft’s total Azure revenue comes from artificial intelligence workloads. More critically, only 6 percent of that total ties directly to reselling OpenAI’s models, while approximately 75 percent is generated from Azure AI. Microsoft is building its own models, hedging with Anthropic, and quietly reducing its dependency on the very company it funded. When your largest investor is simultaneously your biggest competitor and is actively developing alternatives to your core product, the strategic implications are dire. Leaders at Microsoft believe Anthropic’s latest models — Claude Sonnet 4, specifically — perform better than OpenAI’s in certain functions, like creating aesthetically pleasing PowerPoint presentations. This is not a minor technical preference; it represents a fundamental shift in how Microsoft views its partnership with OpenAI. Microsoft is dramatically escalating its AI independence strategy. At an internal town hall Thursday, Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman revealed the company is making “significant investments” in compute capacity to build frontier models that can compete directly with OpenAI, Google, and Meta. The company that was supposed to be OpenAI’s path to distribution and scale is instead preparing for a future where OpenAI is just one vendor among many, if not an outright competitor. The leadership exodus at OpenAI over the past year has been nothing short of catastrophic. In September 2024, Murati announced that she was stepping down as CTO. This move came amid a wider executive exodus as OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew and a vice president of research, Barret Zoph, also announced their departures soon after. Mira Murati was not a minor figure; she was instrumental in the development of ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Sora. Her departure, along with co-founder Ilya Sutskever, safety leader Jan Leike, and co-founder John Schulman who joined rival Anthropic, has left CEO Sam Altman without much of the leadership team that helped him build OpenAI into an AI juggernaut. Hannah Wong, the executive who steered OpenAI through its most chaotic period, has announced she’s leaving the company just this month, continuing the pattern of senior departures that suggests something fundamentally broken in the organization’s culture or direction. The distribution problem facing OpenAI may be its most insurmountable challenge. Apple and Google control the smartphones that billions of people use every day. Microsoft controls the productivity software that enterprises depend upon. OpenAI, by contrast, must convince users to deliberately open a separate application and type their queries into a text box. In a world of agentic AI where assistants need access to your email, calendar, and files to be useful, an AI embedded directly into your operating system has an overwhelming structural advantage over a standalone chatbot. OpenAI is trying to be a consumer product company without owning any of the surfaces where consumers actually spend their time, competing against incumbents who can simply bundle AI capabilities directly into products that already have hundreds of millions of daily active users. The nuclear-to-solar analogy captures the fundamental economic transformation that is devastating OpenAI’s business model. Just as nuclear power required enormous upfront capital expenditure for centralized power plants, AI in its current form requires massive data center investments to train and serve models. But the direction of travel is unmistakably toward distributed intelligence that runs locally on devices. A major part of the pitch is practicality. Lample emphasizes that Ministral 3 can run on a single GPU, making it deployable on affordable hardware — from on-premise servers to laptops, robots, and other edge devices that may have limited connectivity. When powerful AI models can run on a smartphone or a laptop without any cloud connection, the entire economic rationale for paying premium prices to access centralized AI infrastructure disappears. OpenAI is building nuclear reactors in a world that is rapidly installing solar panels on every rooftop. The proposed $1 trillion IPO valuation is perhaps the clearest signal that something is deeply wrong with the OpenAI story. In the first half of the year, OpenAI lost $13.5 billion, on revenue of $4.3 billion. It is on track to lose $27 billion for the year. One estimate shows OpenAI will burn $115 billion by 2029. Asking public market investors to pay $1 trillion for a company that loses more than twice as much as it earns is not a growth story; it is an exit strategy. The sophisticated investors who funded OpenAI’s private rounds are looking for a way to transfer their risk to retail investors and pension funds who may not fully understand the unit economics of the business. A recent report by HSBC estimated that the company will remain in the unprofitable category until 2029 and that the company will need an additional $207 billion to fund its ambitions. Sam Altman’s leadership represents another structural liability for the company. His background is as a startup investor and evangelist, not as an operational executive who has scaled a capital-intensive industrial operation. The pivot from nonprofit research lab to for-profit corporation to public benefit corporation to anticipated public company has been accompanied by legal and governance structures designed primarily to protect Altman’s control rather than to create shareholder value. Going public means answering a lot more of those kinds of questions, every single quarter, forever. When asked about financial concerns in a friendly podcast interview, Altman’s dismissive response revealed a leader uncomfortable with the scrutiny that public markets will inevitably bring. The adults in the room have largely departed, leaving a company that desperately needs disciplined execution led by someone whose strengths lie elsewhere. The comparison to Netscape is instructive. Netscape proved that the internet was real and created genuine value, but it had no sustainable moat against an incumbent who could bundle the browser directly into the operating system. OpenAI has proven that large language models are real and valuable, but it faces the same structural disadvantage against incumbents who can bundle AI directly into operating systems, productivity suites, and cloud platforms. The value will accrue to the companies that own the distribution channels and the hardware, not to the company that demonstrated the technology was possible. OpenAI is destined to become a historical footnote, remembered as the company that ignited the AI revolution but failed to capture the economic value it created. The only bull case for OpenAI is the AGI lottery ticket: the possibility that the company achieves artificial general intelligence before anyone else and thereby transcends all normal economic analysis. But there is no evidence that OpenAI is any closer to AGI than Google, Anthropic, or DeepMind. The company’s advantage was never secret research breakthroughs; it was first-mover advantage in commercialization. That advantage has now been erased by competitors who can match or exceed OpenAI’s capabilities while benefiting from existing ecosystems, distribution channels, and the willingness to operate AI as a loss leader to drive engagement with more profitable products. The secret sauce was never secret, and there was never any sauce. The endgame for OpenAI is unlikely to be the triumphant dominance that early investors imagined. The most probable outcomes range from gradual irrelevance as a backend provider, to financial restructuring under pressure from creditors, to absorption by Microsoft or another well-capitalized technology company looking to acquire the remaining talent and intellectual property at a discount. Despite its current losses, OpenAI’s long-term prospects are bolstered by the explosive growth of the AI market. But growth in the overall AI market does not guarantee success for any individual company, particularly one with no moat, no ecosystem, and a cost structure that requires selling a commodity at premium prices. The AI revolution is real, but OpenAI’s role in capturing its economic value is far from assured. For anyone considering an investment in OpenAI at anything close to current valuations, the prudent course is to stay far away and watch from the sidelines as economic reality catches up with hype.

David Shapiro (L/0)

69,180 views • 8 months ago

The multi-leader blockchain endgame: competitive information inclusion as a self-reinforcing mechanism for global price discovery - how we got here, and why Aptos is leading the charge Onchain trading is the killer app In the nine years since the launch of programmable transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, onchain trading has revealed itself as the killer use case for blockchains: onchain listings, volume, and total value locked are all growing with no signs of slowing down, due to the censorship-resistant, permissionless, 24/7/365 qualities afforded by decentralized (DeFi) systems. Monolithic parallelism is key In 2020 Solana was first to market with monolithic, parallel execution (as opposed sharded execution which offers parallelism by partitioning global state into separate information silos), establishing a new design paradigm that raised the bar for throughput and latency: put all of the information in one replicated state machine and make it run as fast as possible. This design produces a single, global hub for activity, liquidity, and token launches, a kind of financial data whiteboard in the sky, where anyone can come and trade at any time with everybody else who has plugged into the system. DEXes are becoming more competitive Historically decentralized systems have been juxtaposed with centralized ones since the latter eliminates the overhead associated with distributed systems coordination. And yet despite this overhead, Solana as a decentralized exchange (DEX) is still pulling in billions of trading volume per day, exceeding that of all but the largest centralized crypto exchanges (CEXs), that simply can't compete with the giant DEX in the sky on token listings or fees. After all, CEXs have to pay for server space, salaries, and lawyers, while a DEX outsources everything. The colocation arms race The one place where CEXs have an advantage over DEXs is on end-to-end latency for colocation applications, or in other words: someone sets up a trading bot in the same data center as the exchange, and their trades get to the exchange faster than everyone else's. When there is only one data ingestion point the fastest trader wins, and after the arms race has played out everyone ends up huddling around the trading hub, effectively cutting off the rest of the world from playing the latency trading game. This is the model that traditional securities exchanges like the Nasdaq or the NYSE 🏛 employ, and because they own the server they can effectively charge whatever they want for access to it. The colocation arms race is also why L2s will probably never decentralize: running the sequencer is practically the same as running the NASDAQ, with the same monopoly on transaction fees collected from a nearby cluster of trading bots (I understand from conversations with Logan Jastremski that the Arbitrum arms race has already hit a Nash Equilibrium in Portland, Oregon). Colocation is a trap But once the colocation arms race has played out, trades become less about incorporating new information in the market and more about skimming off the top by spoofing all of the trades coming in from the other bots. High-frequency trading (HFT) bots located in the NYSE New Jersey data center, for example, are constantly placing buys and sell orders that they have no intention of executing, just to spoof the other colocated bots who are playing the same adversarial game. Information inclusion, on the other hand, the synthesis of real-time world events into prices, takes a back seat because anyone who tries to include new information first needs to batch up their order and send it through a series of middlemen before it ultimately ends up on the exchange: you, I, or practically any other individual can not actually "trade on the NASDAQ", no, we have to express our intent to someone like Robinhood, who then sells our order flow to @CitadelSecurities, who then sends it to the exchange, oh and by the way it doesn't actually even "clear" or "settle" once it "executes" because for whatever reason the whole systems splits these things up and prevents them from happening instantaneously even though it's 2024 and we have computers. Onchain trading cuts out middlemen This whole mess is why we have onchain trading, and why it's starting to win: if you want a mainline to the exchange, without setting up a server, and you want to trade on a news event without getting immediately frontrun by an HFT bot that is sniffing out the trades of every other HFT bot who is easing in batched up order flow on their own terms, then you submit your order to a node in the blockchain and the information gets included in the price upon ingestion. Oh, and by the way the trade is actually fully complete: settled, cleared, reconciled, done, whatever you want to call it, because the people who build decentralized finance (DeFi) build it how it should actually work, not in a way that creates a million incumbents and charges exorbitant rents for access to the system. Onchain trading better for price discovery And the beautiful part about this is that even if a distributed system has more latency than a centralized system, DeFi still ends up incorporating more information into the price faster than centralized finance, because with DeFi the information gets included in the system as soon as it is submitted, not after it has been batched up and sent through a series of middlemen. The consensus mechanism of the blockchain disseminates the information around the world in the form of a price update, while the centralized exchange model requires information about the event to first get propagate to the region of the trading hub, then to get submitted to the colocation server. This means that in terms of global price discovery, onchain trading is strictly a better system because the entire consensus model is based around accelerated information propagation. Because price discovery is a global phenomenon, blockchains, which are global, are actually better than the centralized status quo, on a performance basis, not just from an ideological or convenience-based view. And it has to be multi-leader In practice, effective global information synthesis of information has an additional key requirement: multi-leader architecture. That is, in a single-leader blockchain like Solana, where one validator at a time has a monopoly on ordering transactions into blocks, for their duration as a leader they effectively function as a colocation server. This means that if the current leader is in New York, someone in Singapore who wants to trade on local news as soon as it breaks will still need to get their order all the way around the world to the leader, who is effectively serving as the chain's data ingestion point, before the order can start propagating through the network. But this is issue solved by the introduction of multiple distributed leaders, because then anyone with access to new information can submit their order to the leader closest to them, yielding faster information inclusion in the form of price updates. Multi-leader is also required for fair markets A multi-leader architecture is also required for fair markets, because in a single-leader system the leader has the power to censor transactions, reorder them to their advantage, or even replace transactions with copycats that extract maximum value by replacing the sender's address with their own. For example if someone wants to capture an arbitrage opportunity between two onchain DEXes, they'll need to submit a transaction to the leader and trust that the leader won't simply copy the transaction and submit it themselves. But when there are two or more leaders, users whose transactions are censored by one leader will simply work with a different leader the next time around, eventually cutting off transaction fee flow to the extractive leader. Beyond just strict inclusion, in a multi-leader architecture validators are also forced to compete with each other on latency, because the leader who is fastest at disseminating users' transactions across the network will over time gobble up the largest share of the order flow. Transparent priority fees are a must, or a private mempool will emerge But in order to make this work, a multi-leader architecture must also offer users the ability to pay priority fees AKA "tips" or "bribes" to move their transaction to the front of the line: if there is a $5 arbitrage opportunity onchain, users need to have assurance that they if they pay a 4.99 priority fee to take that arb, they will get priority over a different user who is only willing to tip 4.98. If the native blockchain system does not offer this fair market priority fee mechanism, then it is only a matter of time before one spontaneously emerges in the form of a private mempool like Jito, which can create centralization pressures and undermine the integrity of the system as a whole. Competitive payment for order flow is the stable solution With the right architecture in place, the end result is a competitive environment where endpoints running maximum extractable value (MEV) bots compete with one to offer users the best price for their order flow. In other words, if a user wants to submit an order that can get sandwich attacked for as much as $2 of MEV, then the order should ultimately go to the endpoint bot that is willing to pay the user as much as $1.99 for the right to process their transaction. The price that the provider is willing to pay is ultimately a function of how much in priority fees they might need to pay to the current leader (0 they are the current one), but notably at each stage there is a competitive market for order flow, whether in the form of retail trader's orders, or priority fees among bots that might be forwarding orders to one of the leaders. AptosLabs is already building all this With a public mempool and transaction priority fees, Aptos additionally includes a pipelined architecture that already includes concurrent batching of transactions into blocks, with a single consensus leader who propagates the batched blocks out to the network. And the team is already researching running multiple instances of the consensus algorithm in parallel, yielding multiple consensus leaders who can compete with each other on latency and inclusion - just ask pranav | Shelby, Alexander Spiegelman, and Zekun Li. This means that block times can shrink as the number of consensus leaders grows, with each leader having its own geographical radius of inclusion beyond which it makes more sense to submit to a different leader. The starting point? Something like 60 ms blocks and 3 consensus leaders, partitioning the global information space into competitive and constantly-rotating regions of information inclusion. Messaging is important With concurrent pipelined transaction batching, a public mempool, priority fees, and a clear path to a multi-leader architecture, Aptos leads the industry in onchain trading infrastructure that can truly supplant the centralized colocation paradigm that has heretofore dominated global finance - by offering a truly superior product. And I am hopeful that this deep dive is the first step in communicating not how or that superior product is getting built, but what it means from a bigger picture perspective. If blockchains have found product market fit in anything, it is in trading, and the trading game can only be won by building the biggest, baddest, most high performance system that has as its north star a single, concrete goal: constantly reducing, ever lower toward zero, time time it takes to incorporate information from anywhere in the world into the global price discovery computer. Whoever does this, even 1 ms faster than the competitor, wins the price discovery game, as other blockchains are left in the dust, their DEXes arbed away to zero against the fastest chain on the block. And sure, the blockchain that can rise to this challenge can also handle useful things like payments, NFTs, or other solutions that benefit from permissionlessness and low gas costs, but I want to impress that at the core of this pursuit must be the urge to drive down information inclusion latency to the absolute minimum afforded by the laws of physics through a competitive, market-driven environment. I call on avery.apt 🇺🇸 , CTO of Aptos Labs, to lean in on this messaging, to make it clear that Aptos is here for this singular mission, to build the most performant price discovery engine in history, as a rallying call for alignment in development efforts across the ecosystem and broader industry. Where does this go? As the latencies drop, the spreads tighten, and the information inclusion increases with every incremental increase in network bandwidth, we can expect a new class of competing techno-financial hubs that aggregate around the world's largest information sources: New York, Washington DC, London, Tokyo, etc., commanding stake distribution commensurate with the density of information flow in these respective locales. With the right incentives in place, competing concurrent leaders will invest ever more in infrastructure to get their packets out to the network faster than the rest, yielding clusters of fiber optic cable around the world's financial hubs, neurons in the global financial brain connecting not just HFT firms to servers in their city, but connecting every city with every other city, to move pricing information across oceans and continents. And retail traders, who have been left out of the colocation game, will only benefit: this entire system gets faster, more inclusive, with tighter spreads and lower fees, and it is such an amazing opportunity to watch all of this unfold in real time. The future of blockchains is the future of trading, is the future of competitive information inclusion in real-time, is the future of truly unified global markets, because at the the core of this industry is a simple idea: connect the computers, and see where the incentives lead. They lead to this, and Aptos is leading the charge, because its tech is purpose-built for this exact purpose. So tell the world about it.

Alex Kahn

24,432 views • 1 year ago

Zionists Are Freaking Out About Losing Control Of The Narrative Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz made some very revealing remarks during an appearance at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly on Sunday, expressing frustration with the way younger Jews are dismissing pro-Israel arguments because of the carnage they’ve seen in Gaza. “We are now wrestling with a new I think generational divide here, and I think that’s particularly true in that social media is now our source of media,” Hurwitz said. “It used to be that the news you got in America was American media, and it was pretty mainstream; you know it generally didn’t express extreme anti-Israel views. You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media. But today we have social media, which is the global medium; its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don’t really love Jews. So while in the 1990s a young person probably wasn’t going to find Al Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them; they find them on their phones.” “It’s also this increasingly post-literate media; less and less text, more and more videos,” Hurwitz continued. “So you have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why so many of us cannot have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they are just seeing in their minds: carnage. And I sound obscene.” Hurwitz went on to say that Holocaust education has begun backfiring, because it has been giving young people the wrong impression that genocide is always bad. “And you know I think unfortunately, the very smart bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-semitism education in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit because, you know, Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism,” Hurwitz said. “Because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think oh, antisemitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people. So, when on TikTok all day long, they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.” Hoo boy. Lots to unpack here. It’s just so fascinating to see a former White House speechwriter making so many of the points that anti-Zionists have been making for years, but taking the exact opposite meaning from them: - The mainstream legacy media has always hidden anti-Israel views from the public — and that was a good thing. - Social media has now given Palestinians the ability to expose the truth about Israel’s abuses — and that’s a bad thing. - People aren’t falling for the Zionist spin and narrative-diddling anymore because they’ve seen the carnage in Gaza with their own eyes — and that’s a problem. - People who learned from Holocaust education that genocide is wrong have been applying those same lessons to the genocide in Gaza — and this means they’re “confused”. Hurwitz isn’t denying Israel’s abuses or framing its genocidal atrocities as the problem, she’s just coming right out and saying that people obtaining information and moral clarity about those abuses is the problem. The atrocities aren’t wrong, what’s wrong is people seeing those atrocities and calling them what they are. I love the way she complains that she looks “obscene” for trying to lay out arguments and narratives justifying the Gaza holocaust for people who’ve seen the “wall of carnage” from the genocide. I mean, yes. Yes obviously you’re going to look obscene if you try to tell someone why raw video footage of massacres, mutilated children and emaciated bodies is actually showing something that is justifiable and acceptable. You can’t stand in front of a pile of child corpses justifying their murder and then whine when people ignore your spinmeistering and keep staring at the tiny bodies. That’s like murdering an entire family and then telling the cops, “But you’re not listening to my reasons for killing them!” They’re doing the normal thing while you are being obscene. There’s a viral clip of this tirade going around Twitter and I was curious if Hurwitz had said anything after the video segment ended which might have made what she said sound less horrible, so I went to check out the original video on the Jewish Federations of North America’s Youtube channel, and nope. It didn’t get any better. Hurwitz went on to say that people are wrong to carry the lessons of Holocaust education into opposition to Israel’s genocidal atrocities because the Holocaust was Nazi Germany blaming Jews for all their problems in the same way people think Israel is the source of all the world’s problems today. She then mourned the way western Jews “re-imagined Judaism as a Protestant-style religion” in order to integrate into western society rather than retaining a strong identity that is loyal to the state of Israel. “The problem is, we’re not just a religion,” Hurwitz said. “We’re a nation. Civilization. Tribe. Peoplehood. But most of all we’re a family. And so if you are a young person raised in America who thinks Judaism is a Protestant-style religion, then the seven million Jews in Israel are merely your co-religionists. So my co-religionists, if I look at them and they’re not practicing my religion of social justice and certain prophetic values then what do I have to do with them?” “But that’s a category error,” says Hurwitz. “The seven million people in Israel, they are not my co-religionists, they are my siblings. But I think if you think of them as merely your co-religionists, it’s easy to slide into anti-Zionism. You don’t necessarily have that connection to them.” Hurwitz is saying here that Jews around the world should be loyal to Israel no matter what Israel does, not because that’s the moral or truthful position but because Israel is where their loyalties belong. I don’t know about you, but if my siblings were murdering civilians I would immediately become their enemy. I wouldn’t defend my brother if he was going around shooting children in the head like IDF snipers have been doing in Gaza, in fact I would feel a special responsibility to stop him exactly because he is my brother. Genocide doesn’t magically become acceptable if the perpetrators are your “siblings”, unless you are a sociopath. It’s just incredible how hard Zionists have been freaking out about the way Israel has lost control of the narrative these last two years. More and more often we’re seeing them say the quiet parts out loud as they frantically scramble to manage perceptions and manipulate minds around the world. Many things which used to be hidden are finding their way into the light. Reading by Tim Foley:

Caitlin Johnstone

43,108 views • 9 months ago