David Williams

@gregisenberg Neither MCP (see NSA below) nor voice authentication are secure. Fior.group solved those (and other AI identity security and governance problems). linkedin.com/posts/davidwil…

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED. I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires. My takeaways: 1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices. 2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha. 3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda) 4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general. 5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million 6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works. 7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead. 8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one. 9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders. 10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time. 11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now. 12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly. 13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS. 14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here.... 15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all. 16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol. 17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet. It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED. But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building. We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real. What an incredible time to be building.

Ferrari had a Jaguar moment. Suicidal empathy in car form. Thank god Porsche are not idiots.

@MailSport @DannyWelbeck the top striker in the Prem is dropped in favour of a prosecuted cheat now playing in a Saudi league where goals are easy ? Maybe Tuchel just wants zee Germans to win

It's fair to say the England fans have not taken to the news of who is allegedly going and who isn't 😬 #Tuchel #England #ThreeLions #WorldCup

@HedgieMarkets @miggypthinks So isn’t that your answer right there ? Using a general purpose LLM for every task is like hiring a JCB digger to put a sugar cube in your tea. Smaller, specialist models working at the edge will have more appropriate costs for specific corporate purposes.

@miggypthinks 🦔If the price gap widens further, enterprise procurement will start running internal benchmarks and discovering they can get 80% of the value at 10% of the cost. That conversation is happening at every CFO meeting right now.

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products. My Take The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested. This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown. Hedgie🤗

@CfcDan_01 Bought

Chelsea fans, One word for Referee Darren England?

@TodayUpdates0 Commies and Islamists lie always about everything. It is baked into their doctrine.

🚨 NYC just got played by their own "tax the rich" socialist Mayor. Zohran Mamdani promised it would ONLY hit the ultra-wealthy. Now he's pushing a massive 9.5% property tax hike that slams millions of homeowners, landlords, small businesses, and working families across the city. Classic communist scam: Lie to voters, then make everyone else pay for your failed policies. This is exactly why Trump keeps winning — America First means cutting waste and growing the economy, not punishing success until the middle class flees. New Yorkers, you voted for this. Enjoy the results. The rest of us warned you. What's your response to this......??👀 Drop your thoughts below👇!

@RoworthJack @guardian But it does not really matter. Champagne socialists like this drive more votes to Reform with every breath they take

@RoworthJack I would like Liew of @guardian to answer this. John Terry thinks immigrants should not receive benefits so is labelled far right. In Portugal the centrist Democratic Alliance government does not offer welfare access to newly arrived immigrants. Is Portugal Far Right ?

John Terry is “far right”, according to Jonathan Liew from The Guardian. Agree with John or not, he is certainly not far anything. It’s like no one can have an opinion anymore without being labelled far right. John only goes far into the box when a corner is won.

@afneil How many times have we seen rumours of the ludicrously self styled King of the North preparing a challenge in the shadows only to bottle it. All smoke no bang.

Sensible points. But too late. It’s over. You’re an even bigger busted flush than the Tories. Two-thirds of your MPs and over half the cabinet on course to lose their seats. Bye. The problem is that what comes next unlikely to be any better. We really are in trouble.

@Suffragent_ @ukhomeoffice When young poor white British men see their homes and money taken & violent crimes done repeatedly by immigrants who hate their culture it seems there might be a reaction at the polls. Only 30 years of government complacency can be blamed. Why is Whitehall not grasping this ?

FYI @ukhomeoffice The Nice Attack = Muslim The Paris Attacks = Muslims The Shoe Bomber = Muslim The Orlando attack = Muslim The Beltway Snipers = Muslims The Fort Hood Shooter = Muslim The Underwear Bomber = Muslim The Westminster Attack = Muslim The Pulse nightclub shooters = Muslims The 2005 Bali Bombings = Muslims The murder of Lee Rigby = Muslims The U.S.S. Cole Bombers = Muslims The London Bridge Attack = Muslims The Madrid Train Bombers = Muslims The Charlie Hebdo Attacks = Muslims The San Bernardino Attacks = Muslims The Surabaya bombings = Muslims The Minnesota Mall stabbings = Muslim The 7/7 bombers = Muslims The Moscow Theatre Attackers = Muslims The Boston Marathon Bombers = Muslims The Ankara Airport Attack = Muslims The Manchester Arena bombing = Muslim The Pan-Am #103 Bombers = Muslims The Iranian Embassy Takeover = Muslims The Air France Hijackers = Muslims The 2002 Bali Nightclub = Muslims The Batta Meena Attacks = Muslims The Beirut Embassy bombers = Muslims The Libyan U.S. Embassy Attack = Muslims The Yazidi Massacre of 2014 = Muslims The Beheading of French priest = Muslims The Buenos Aires bombers = Muslims The Israeli Olympic Team = Muslims The Kenyan U.S Embassy = Muslims The Khobar Towers Bombers = Muslims The Beirut Marine bombers = Muslims The Besian School Attackers = Muslims The First WTC bombers = Muslims The Beheading of Daniel Pearl = Muslims The Achille Lauro Hijackers = Muslims The Bombay Attackers = Muslims The 9/11 hijackers = Muslims

@afneil Economic vandalism from an idiot child who knows nothing of the World. Better pre-book a meeting with the IMF

The politics of a country in decline. Not a single word about wealth creation, without which none of this nonsense can be financed. It’s deeply pathetic. If people fall for this left-wing populist drivel we’ve ceased to be a serious country.

@SamanthaTaghoy Option 1. Don’t stab anyone = don’t get kicked by unarmed cops Option 2. Stab someone but drop the knife = don’t get kick by unarmed cops Option 3. None of the above, get kicked by cop brave enough to take you on without a pistol Give that cop a medal

“This is police brutality” “Why are they being so rough?” “Totally overkill.” This man is a TERRORIST. A literal terrorist who was trying to stab up a street full of people in broad daylight. Get a grip.

@BrianWoodMC There is a special place in Hell reserved for a political leader who ideologically attacks the heroes of the armed forces that his own party sent into battle.

This is my hearing bundle from the Al Sweady inquiry. It brought an end to my military career after 17 years of exemplary service. The stress, pain, and heartache were overwhelming—driven in large part by Shiner & Hermer. A medal glitters but it also casts a shadow - Churchill

@TheAA_UK Idiot. He called you dozens of times, mainly unanswered. Had to abandon the car at 11pm and walk miles home down a dark lane. You have become a scam and we will be cancelling after 38 years

@DavidJWil Please ask your Son to get in touch so we can take a look at the breakdown job.

@TheAA_UK my son has been waiting with broken car on a dark country lane 10 miles from Gatwick for almost four hours and you won’t even answer the phone. You used to be “the fourth emergency service” but now you are just a private equity scam. Total bloody disgrace

@TheAA_UK 18 hours and still not fixed. It’s a burst tyre, not a nuclear reactor. AA is a disgrace

@DavidJWil Hi, we're sorry to hear about the delay your Son experienced and hope everything is ok now and he got home safely. Please ask him to get in touch directly if there's anything he would like us to look into.

@AmericanExpress have you been hacked? You lost a large amount of my money a month ago. Your chat system does not work. Three times holding on the phone for more than 15 minutes. Today 31. Are you a failing bank? Should the Fed worry? Will a human ever reply to a complaint ?

@bbctms These talented blokes are simply not being coached. McCullum said so. They are encouraged to be aggressive, when they should be learning how to apply good technique to bat time. Brook is a generational talent. I just wish someone like @MichaelVaughan could coach him

''He's just got to learn to bat for six hours.'' ⏰ Former Australia batter and coach Darren Lehmann believes Harry Brook's mentality in the middle is what is holding him back. #BBCCricket #Ashes

@ECB_cricket have produced a product that does not resemble Test cricket. Wise for @SkyCricket not to buy it. If McCullum’s aim was to kill off Test cricket he did a good job. Sad and bad.

@cricketontnt The woman is @benstokes38 . The nail is BazBall. The man is @MichaelVaughan , @BeefyBotham @GeoffreyBoycott and every other cricket fan

@cricketontnt When everyone is saying “tell batters not to drive at wide balls on a length and tell bowlers to bowl top of off maybe he might a) listen and b) not be so confused about what is going wrong ? Blaming the players for McCullums awful coaching theory is not on. Sympathy lost.

🗣 "They say Australia isn't a place for weak men. We need to find something." Ben Stokes speaks after losing the first two tests at #TheAshes ⚱