Faisal Masud

I don’t think people have fully absorbed just how big the declines in student enrollment are going to be. Eight states are projected to experience DOUBLE DIGIT declines by 2031.

@JackKuhr Have used @ride_empower for over a year.. app isn’t designer but the pricing is ~50% lower almost all the time.

So ridiculous, yall must know. For the last month I’ve been using Empower ride hailing app in NYC. (They charge drivers a monthly fee instead of taking 20%, I believe). Cars always available. And always much, much cheaper than Uber. Tonight was particularly insane. LaGuardia airport to home: - Uber: $125 (criminal) - Empower: $30 IDK guys it feels like $5 Via days. Don’t know which good soldier built this app, or why. But it feels like they’ve punched a hole in the absurd NYC ride hailing pricing schemes that we all had come to just accept.

Google DeepMind researcher argues that LLMs can never be conscious, not in 10 years or 100 years. "Expecting an algorithmic description to instantiate the quality it maps is like expecting the mathematical formula of gravity to physically exert weight."

Insane datapoint from new Goldman report on AI and software

US private equity firms have massive exposure to software: A near-record 49% of all private equity deals now target software and technology services companies. The percentage has DOUBLED over the last 15 years. This comes as private market managers poured hundreds of billions of dollars into software firms over this period, betting that software-as-a-service (SaaS) business models would produce strong growth and consistent cash generation. By comparison, healthcare represents 14% of PE deals, less than a third of the size of software exposure. The private equity industry has never been this exposed to a single sector.

Top 5% of seed rounds now routinely topping $175M in valuation. Up 3x effectively over the last 12 months. Just a whiff of 2021-era ridiculousness about (even as an AI believer).

I had no idea Islamabad was so green

It’s crazy that some are just straight up in denial about mythos having the capabilities anthropic says it does. Usually the in-denial-about-AI community is able to cloak their views in at least *some* intellectual garb, but this time it’s just, “it’s not real.” Wild. Also sad.

The irony lol VCs in 2010: We need to do better than cable TV. VCs in 2026: Spending 15 years + billions just to reinvent the cable bill.

Cristiano Ronaldo: "Bismillah."

IT services are first on the chopping block as companies adopt AI More charts: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…

Allbirds just sold for $39 million. The company was once worth over $4 billion. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

So Sam Altman blew up the memory market with non-binding DRAM orders of 40% of global supply and then changed his mind because Stargate can't get off the ground? $MU

Hell of a graphic from Morgan Stanley

An Amazon data center in Oregon went online in 2011. It has since poisoned “the deepest reaches of the local aquifer,” & is causing cancer/rare diseases. “He noticed a rise in bizarre medical conditions among the county’s 45,000 residents, linked to toxins in the local water.”

Private equity got involved in youth sports and soaked parents for everything it was worth

عيد مبارك!

Eid Mubarak! 🌙

@mattturck @benedictevans Yep

My latest conversation with the always incredible @benedictevans: OpenAI’s moat problem, the rise of ephemeral and improvised sofware, OpenClaw & agents. 00:00 Intro 01:06 OpenAI's Focus Shift 03:12 ChatGPT usage: a "mile wide, inch deep" 09:03 Why better models do not solve the real problem 13:58 Why AI product teams are strategy takers, not strategy setters 15:38 Do agents help create defensibility? 20:06 OpenClaw and the "Desktop Linux" moment for AI 25:52 Why "everyone will build their own software" is completely wrong 28:09 Improvised software vs. institutionalized software 29:23 Why there will be more software, not less 36:15 Are we heading toward value destruction before value creation? 38:03 Circular revenue, leverage, and AI bubble dynamics 38:53 Big Tech's Trillion-Dollar CapEx Crisis & Financial Gravity 45:23 Why AI job exposure charts can be misleading 52:15 How Fortune 500 Execs are actually deploying AI today 56:45 The White Space: What this means for founders and investors

Eid Mubarak brothers and sisters around the World 🌍🤲