Ethan Shaotran

One Team 🚀 x.ai/news/xai-joins…

Weather Radio Update! @NWS has just crossed 1,000 transmission sites modernized (97% of the network) across the nation. Total savings in FY25 are $6.5M. The remaining ~30 will be upgraded in the weeks to come.

@arjunsaidthat @fdotinc @bxtsubsea @xesswaffle Sick

Two months ago, we quit our jobs to build the Starlink of the Sea. Since then: -We moved to SF -We got backed by @fdotinc -We built our first prototype for high-bandwidth, wireless subsea comms With the stars in reach, humanity’s final frontier awaits subsea.

@AntonioGracias It was honor to work with you. Thank you Antonio.

I am deeply grateful to my colleagues at DOGE and across the Federal Government for the honor of serving our country during this critical time. When I volunteered as a Special Government Employee, alongside two Valor colleagues, we set an end date of July 4, 2025 — exactly 130 days from our start, in accordance with the federal code governing SGE service limits. This post is a response to claims that I abrogated my responsibilities to Valor and then “abandoned” our work at DOGE. These claims are false. I do not abandon commitments, either to the American people or Valor. The duration of my part-time service at DOGE, as well as that of my two Valor colleagues, was clearly communicated to the White House, DOGE, and our Valor community, with the end date firmly established. As White House spokesperson Mr. Fields noted, my role was always intended to sunset. I am grateful for the White House’s acknowledgment of the quality of our work and efforts to ensure a smooth transition to a new team, which I am confident will continue the work with dedication and excellence. Using Valor’s standard operating playbook, we applied our lean expertise to address challenging situations at the SSA. Our process began with mapping complex systems, which unfortunately revealed serious issues that we worked collaboratively with exceptional public servants across government departments to resolve. From the beginning, our objective was to enhance the long-term financial stability of the SSA. Among our initiatives, we restored collection of billions of dollars of overpayments and worked to improve antiquated systems.  While much work remains to be done, we made a positive and meaningful difference through these and other efforts. I am strongly committed to supporting institutions and initiatives that provide Americans with financial security in retirement, including the SSA. Among our many clients are public and private pension systems that have supported their beneficiaries over many years. These systems are managed by exceptionally talented professionals dedicated to the retirement of millions of Americans. We are honored to be part of their communities and very grateful for their support. It is a privilege to work for them as we seek to deliver excellent returns and support their commitment to hard-working Americans, including the many teachers who rely on these systems for their retirement. I am a product of Michigan public schools. While I disagree with the statements of the AFT, I also want to thank them. I appreciate their efforts to safeguard the pensions of teachers and other public servants across America. As a nation, we are united in service to our country, as well as in gratitude to the many who sacrifice and serve for the benefit of all of us, including our teachers. We know that by understanding each other, we are best positioned to achieve our common goals. Like the AFT, I am committed to fairness, democracy, economic opportunity, and high-quality education, healthcare, and public services for our students. Should the AFT ever want to have a conversation with me, I promise to approach the discussion with an open heart and mind. My request is that the AFT also do the same and promise to open their hearts and minds to me. Perhaps, if we listen to each other with compassion and our mutual love of America, we can understand each other better. I also believe that understanding each other is the first critical step to finding solutions to the important problems that face our country today. I hope this is a moment where our compassion can be stronger than our anger. Finally, I am deeply grateful for the support we received from teams across the government. Their dedication and patriotism will always inspire us. It was a great privilege to serve alongside them as we worked to strengthen our nation for all Americans. As I have under both Republican and Democratic administrations, serving my country when called upon will always be an honor.

@bakkermichiel @Li_Haiwen_ @CommunityNotes Very nice

🚨🚨 Excited to share a new paper led by @Li_Haiwen_ with the @CommunityNotes team! LLMs will reshape the information ecosystem. Community Notes offers a promising model for keeping human judgment central but it's an open question how to best integrate LLMs. Thread👇

Weather Radio Update! Since the last update, @NWS has upgraded 33 more sites to wireless, saving $118k/mo in copper contracts. See below transmission from Conway Summit, CA. The team has ramped up production of the wireless kits from 9 to 50/wk. ~340 sites to go!

The National Weather Service @NWS is collaborating with DOGE to modernize its nationwide Weather Radio system. Of their 1033 transmitter sites, ~380 still rely on copper lines from the 1960s. These lines are expensive ($17M/yr) and faulty. For example, Los Angeles’ T1 line goes down twice each year for 2-14 days. Last week, the team flew out to upgrade from copper to wireless.

Besides the Census itself, the @USCensusBureau performs 102 additional surveys costing $2.2 billion, many of them obsolete with the results not being used to drive any action nor even looked at. The Census Bureau and DOGE are reviewing them one-by-one. So far, 5 wasteful surveys, totaling 493 pages of questions and $16.5M in costs, have been terminated, with questions like: - “In your entire life, have you had at least 12 drinks of any kind of alcohol, not counting small tastes or sips?” - “Was this MOSTLY regular wine, wine coolers, or fortified wine?” - “How frequently do you use the internet in your home?”

Great work by @USPS on their contract review. 8,639 contracts were reviewed, resulting in the cancellation or modification of 1,076 contracts with $188.5M in savings. This included a $791k contract for “Negotiation Skills Training” and $100k for "CIO All Hands Meeting - Overflow Hotel Rooms".

EXCLUSIVE: The @DOGE boys expose more wasteful spending: your taxpayer dollars going to alpaca farming in Peru and improving the marketability of peas in Guatemala. @elonmusk says most of that money NEVER even made it out of DC.

DOGE is looking for help from the general public! Please DM insight for reducing waste, fraud, and abuse, along with any helpful insights or awesome ideas, to the relevant DOGE affiliates (found on the Affiliates tab). For example, @DOGE_USDA, @DOGE_SSA, etc. We will add more affiliates over time.

@karpathy The Foundation series!

Of ~200 books I've read, the few that stayed with me over time and I find myself often thinking back to or referring to, in ~random order: All short stories by Ted Chiang, especially Exhalation, Division By Zero, Understand, The Story of Your Life, Liking What You See, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, What's Expected of us, just excellent themes ideas and reading all around. The Selfish Gene (nonfiction) - a classic for understanding evolution and natural selection, especially the realization that the gene is closer to the real unit of selection more than an individual, explaining altruism and colonies and a lot more. The Lord of the Rings (fantasy) - I return to LoTR all the time for comfort. I don't think anyone else has created a high fantasy Universe this complex, with so much mythology, symbolism, new languages, mysterious system of magic, ancient and powerful beings and artifacts, beautiful writing and dialog, themes of courage, friendship and heroism, the list goes on and on... You're thrown into a world with characters and references to so many things that are part of this ancient world and never really introduced. There's always more to find on each reading. The Martian (~scifi) - top tier science porn, competence porn, fast paced and fun. The Vital Question (nonfiction) - First time I intuitively grokked the bridge from geology to biology, the origin of life, and likelihood of life in the Universe at large at various stages of complexity and development. Also all other Nick Lane books. How To Live by Derek Sivers (nonfiction) - 27 conflicting answers to how to live life. Emphasizing the diversity of consistent and possible answers to the meaning and goals of life. 1984 (nonfiction) - Classic. Newspeak, Ministry of Truth, Doublethink, Thoughtcrime, Facecrime, Unperson, the list just keeps on going. Chilling world-building and the realization that weaker equivalents of everything exist. In Defense of Food by Pollan (nonfiction/food) - Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. The book that first taught me to avoid the entire center of every grocery store and only shop on the outer ring. The realization that the food industry is out of control and the things they do with your food, what they put into it, what they are allowed to do, and how they are allowed to market it to you is quite a lot worse than I thought. The Accidental Superpower by Zeihan (nonfiction/geopolitcs) - I've found Zeihan to be a bit of a mixed bag over time but I still remember his books (esp this one) to be elucidating on geopolitics. Countdown to Zero Day (nonfiction/cyberwarfare) - Goes into detail on Stuxnet, imo very important and highly elucidating reading on cybersecurity, the future of warfare, and AGI. A Fire Upon the Deep (scifi) - Chapter one only, incredible portrayal of what superintelligence will be like that has stayed with me since. Guns Germs and Steel (nonfiction/history) - I'd probably recommend a summary of this book more than the book itself. I remember it being very dry, but it was very interesting because it is a comprehensive analysis of the resources grid (food, animals, freshwater, climate, ...) in our real-world game of Civilization, and the implications there of. Flowers of Algernon (scifi) - Just a totally crushing masterpiece on intelligence. Atlas Shrugged (scifi) - No one finishes this I think but the first few chapters and its worldbuilding are enough and, once seen in an exaggerated form in fiction, elements of it cannot be fully unseen in reality. An Immense World (nonfiction/bio, by Yong, among others of his) - Nice book on so many different sensors used by various animals, you repeatedly realize human senses are super inadequate and that we only measure such a tiny sliver of reality. The Master Switch (nonfiction/tech history, by Wu) - history of information technologies telegraph, telephony, radio, television, film, cable television, internet and the pattern of "The Cycle", where each medium starts decentralized, open and idealistic and then progresses towards centralization, control and oligopoly, for the very similar reasons, by very similar means, and usually at the expense of diversity, innovation and technological progress. Quite a few connections to draw on for LLMs, which are after all an information technology too. (I take recommendations for more that are likely to make this list!)

Team eXpect was the runner-up at our hackathon, earning $5,000 in API credits. Congratulations! @raydelvecc @rag_pil @EShaotran @GiovanniMDanto2

@bakkermichiel @ScienceMagazine @mhtessler @summerfieldlab @GoogleDeepMind Congrats!

🚨🚨🚨 VERY excited to share our new paper on how AI can facilitate democratic deliberation, published today in @ScienceMagazine! Together with @mhtessler, @summerfieldlab, and other amazing collaborators at @GoogleDeepMind we've been building the "Habermas Machine"

@hovinthenorth X just stopped their api for us today… :( @X

@DaveWarnedYou @xai @raydelvecc @rag_pil @GiovanniMDanto2 To use the grok api!

@xai @raydelvecc @rag_pil @EShaotran @GiovanniMDanto2 Wow, that’s interesting… What was the main objective of this hackathon? 🤔

@elonmusk can we get this feature on X? 😙

@arshdeep @xai @X @Replit Thanks for hosting!

It was incredibly fun hosting our first @xai hackathon along with @X and @Replit in SF! Great turnout, amazing projects, and it was awesome to see so many unique usecases of our models and APIs. Now back to understanding the universe :)

@Jeff_Burke14 @Replit @xai @XDevelopers Lovely time!

Judged +20 demos today. All of them built with @replit @xai and @XDevelopers. Nothing better than seeing someone passionately give a demo on something they poured their time into. Super energizing.

@belce_dogru @xai @Replit Thanks for hosting us!

Today was so incredibly fun at the @xai & @Replit hackathon. Developers got exclusive access to new models through the xAI API and hit the ground running using Replit. The night is still young! 👩‍💻