Alex Dhillon

@arizvi0 Being an unapologetic stereotype will set you free

They got me. They finally got me. They found out I work in that sugar factory building in Williamsburg and they dragged me in here and swiped my card. I had no choice

@johnonmain Hotel California

The lack of seasons in SF is actually evil. Months slide past and nothing changes— perhaps different trees bloom, some new flowers pop up in the park, and the sun sets earlier— but nothing really seems to change. It's fun at first... you can go for a jog outside every day without worry, you can wear the same types of outfits week after week (pants, with a nice shirt and light jacket). But as time goes by it's eerie. Your life just races bay, with no visual or physical punctuation. There's no leaves on the ground, no crisp fall days, no scorching summer nights where you can wear shorts and a t shirt until midnight, no thunderstorms. It's spring. It's purgatory. Forever and ever.

@jukan05 @finkd just had to use X & the community has decided Meta's research vibes are restored

I heard a pretty interesting rumor on the ground at ICML. Meta has supposedly already developed an internal model at roughly the Mythos 5 level, and all that remains is deployment within the next few months. Honestly, I was skeptical at first. From my perspective, Meta had not really shown the capability to operate at that level yet. But looking at the situation today, I think I may have been wrong. Meta is not out of the race.

I’m in the top 3.8% of the world. Not through any effort of my own, but because of hard decisions my parents made in their 20s & even more consequentially because of hard decisions a group of rebels made in their 20s exactly 250 years ago. James Monore was 18, Alexander Hamilton was 21, and James Madison was 25. The system of government that the American founders constructed grew into the world’s most stable democracy, successful economy, and an engine of social + technological progress. Being an American citizen means you are one of the 317 million people on earth who experience this reality while another 8 billion strive to either be here or emulate the outcome. Odds are, if you’re reading this — you too are among that 3.8%. I was a boy born in Amritsar, India — a beautiful border town that has experienced colonial & religious conflicts for nearly 3 centuries. Life had no guarantees for me, but fortunately I come from a family that expects no guarantees. Through the incredible determination of my parents to build a better life & the promise the American Founders created that such a life was possible — we had what everyone deserves - hope. Today I’m an American building a growth stage cybersecurity company to defend the Federal Government, our most valuable AI Labs (OpenAI & Anthropic), and on track to do so alongside with nearly 100 of the most intelligent people I have ever met with a kaleidoscope of backgrounds, most of whom call New York City home. Outtake. When I see American politicians stoke division or drag the greatness of this county through the mud — it breaks my heart. Those who have never built feel no guilt in casting stones because they do not understand the value of what they tear down. I don’t take my 3.8% privilege lightly & neither should you. America isn’t a guarantee of perfect outcomes, but as the quintessential American Ted Lasso said it - “I believe in believing.” This country strives, builds, and believes. Here is to another 250 years. 🇺🇸 Picture: Apparently at a 5th grade picnic I took unreasonable pride in inventing "drink shoes" -- the insight that putting your drink in a shoe means it won't fall over on the uneven grass. The smug silly spirt of American invention bites early.

@asha_shar "And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history." a humble proposition - build the decentralized compute market with the existing sold hardware. x.com/adylon7/status…

This is an important email I sent today to all employees at XBOX: Team, We are beginning the most significant restructure in XBOX history. After careful consideration, I've made the difficult decision to reduce our team by approximately 3,200 throughout FY27. This will include approximately 1,600 role eliminations today, and in addition, four studios will leave XBOX to new management. I recognize that a year-long restructuring creates additional challenges. Unfortunately, it is not possible to make all the necessary changes in a single day, and I wanted to be direct about the scale. I know this is painful. These changes will directly affect people who have poured their creativity into building XBOX. Many joined us through acquisitions, while others were recruited here, or sought us out because they loved this industry and loved XBOX. Today's decisions do not reflect their talent or dedication. Our business today is not healthy. We are operating at margins that are 3–10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses. We entered Gen 9 with a smaller install base and a higher cost structure. To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content. While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected. As that happened, our core business weakened, and we added more teams, more investment, and more time, hoping for a better outcome. And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history. We must reset XBOX. First, we will reset our content portfolio. Since 2018, we have aggressively expanded our studio portfolio while the number of games created each month across the industry now outpaces the last ten years combined. We now find ourselves competing not only with the largest publishers, but also with smaller independent studios. It is neither possible nor desirable to own every great independent studio. We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio; in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested. As we reset XBOX, we will help independent creators succeed by providing open development tools and audiences to realize their vision. Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions will return to management and transition to independent studios with their IP, catalog, and runway for their next games. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs have entered terms to join new ownership with funding to complete and grow Senua and State of Decay 3. In France, Arkane’s management is beginning required consultation with its Works Council to review potential strategic options. We are also making reductions across other units, and in some cases, shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects. These changes vary in size across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and XBOX Game Studios. None of our first party publicly announced games or projects are being cancelled as part of these reductions. In addition, Mojang and King will now report directly to me. These two studios have increasingly become platforms and are our largest by monthly active players. They bring critical geographic, demographic, and differentiation to XBOX. Second, we will reset our platform. We know that great technology gets better when it gets simpler, not bigger. Today, in some parts of the company, work passes through as many as 14 layers of management. Our platform teams are 40% larger than they were at the start of this generation, even as our player base and playtime have declined. That complexity has slowed decisions, blurred accountability, and made it harder to deliver for players. As we reset XBOX, we will simplify. We will reduce management layers to no more than 5, and where possible, 3. We will deliver success through a flatter organization that is built around makers (individual contributors focused on building), player-coaches (leaders who remain deeply involved in the work while developing their teams), and directly responsible individuals (DRIs) who own key decisions and outcomes. And we will streamline how we work across our tools, with a cleaner code base, shared services, and 50% reduced vendor spend. Third, we are resetting how we operate. As XBOX grew our headcount, we became more fragmented. Teams, studios, and functions often operate independently, and it became harder to work towards a shared goal, make the right tradeoffs, and get things done. For the first time, we are establishing a Chief Operating Officer with end-to-end P&L responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services. Helen Chiang has been promoted to this role and will report directly to me. Over nearly two decades at XBOX, Helen has helped build some of our most important businesses, from XBOX Live to leading Mojang and the Minecraft franchise. She will bring our businesses together under one operating model, making sure we make clear investment decisions, learn from our successes and failures, and hold ourselves accountable for results. Thank you, Dave McCarthy, who is retiring after 17 years with XBOX. Dave has played a defining role in building the platform that millions of players rely on every day and has been a trusted partner through many of the biggest moments in XBOX's history. We wish him all the best. These changes are about a bigger future for XBOX, not a smaller one. The next decade of gaming will be larger, more global, and more creative than anything we've seen before. This year, we'll invest as much in XBOX as we ever have, but we'll invest with greater focus, greater discipline, and greater clarity, all in service of making XBOX where the world plays and creates. I want XBOX to be one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day and gives everyone the opportunity to create and connect. I know we can achieve this goal. XBOX has many of the most beloved franchises in entertainment history, talented studios around the world, and we will return to growth in 2027. History is full of companies that mistake longevity for inevitability. We will not be one of them. Asha

just pay the NYC taxes babe

One day in nyc.

@YuraForrat Williamsburg strikes again

One of the most beautiful sunsets of my life… New York tonight. 🎞️

Russian media decides beautiful sunset is “bad omen” Propaganda used to be clever 🤦‍♂️😆

@spikebrehm @martyrdison @jgebbia So much respect for this work & the tenacity of folks like @yatshitcray

they did it. the mad lads actually did it. i never talked about my time at DOGE last year because it was so controversial and contentious (remember that?) early last year, @jgebbia recruited a handful of his most trusted early Airbnb engineers to embed at the Office of Personnel Management to solve the "retirement paper" problem. processing a federal retirement took months, and in the extreme retirees could wait up to 6 months for their full pension to arrive. what was the holdup? paper. remember hearing Elon talk about "the mine" in Pennsylvania? we got to visit it. in deep underground caverns blasted out of limestone, there were literally acres of file cabinets, as far as the eye could see, storing files detailing federal employees' employment and paystub history. a simple "case" might be only a quarter or half inch thick, but really complex cases filled up whole filing cabinets. one famously took up a whole pallet. each case was hand processed by case workers in cubicles deep underground. they checked calculations, made sure forms were filled out properly (many weren't), and handled a long tail of complex issues. we'd watch as they keyed data into a black and white terminal, transmitting to the COBOL mainframe built many decades ago. since cases were processed by hand, there were multiple rounds of human review, and additional rounds for complex cases. case files were walked around between one worker's outbox and another's inbox. sometimes it would sit in one place for days, waiting to be picked up. to OPM's credit, they'd done multiple rounds of "digital transformation" spanning decades, so some systems were newer than others. there was a big effort in the mid-90s. but the systems were disparate, and it was a total maze getting them to talk to each other. there was a big effort to build a web app where employees applying for retirement could digitally fill out the necessary forms — just to be mailed to the mine and stuffed into the paper file. and few federal agencies were even using it. when we arrived, OPM was midway through a fresh attempt at digital transformation, delivered by a software contractor. the blackpill was seeing the terrible quality of the software and interacting with the contractors. coming from silicon valley, i couldn't believe how low the talent and quality bar was for selling software to the government. it's clear, as the OG USDS people explained to me a decade ago, the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. it's a huge moat. delivery of quality product be damned. we fired the vendor and took over the project. they'd been working on it for more than a year, and there was another year before they were going to deliver it. at first we tried to bend it to our will, to actually connect all the various data sources and get to a decent UX for case workers in the mine to use, but we soon realized we were going to have to rebuild the whole stack from scratch. it was around this time I had to go back to new york — i had a new job waiting for me, a four month old, and a wife whose patience was running out. but i got to watch from afar as the team cranked day and night, hitting early milestones. and now they've fully done it. huge congrats to Joe and the team. @yatshitcray was the hero in the trenches. indefatigable, unrelentingly optimistic, and determined to see this project through. when i recruited him for "ok i can do two, maybe three months", he stuck it out over a year making this project a reality. while the retirement project was under the DOGE banner, it operated different from what you heard from the breathless, negative media — we came in with the attitude of partnering with career OPM employees. we were team members determined to bring our software talents to bear on the problem they've been trying to fix for years, which they hadn't had the resources to solve before. they were wary at first, not sure about us, but they quickly saw how authentic and determined we were to work together toward the same goal. props to Joe for developing those relationships, setting the example of how to collaborate together. what's the end result? lifelong federal employees, veterans, postal carriers get their full pension installments almost immediately. days instead of months. peace of mind for these people to devoted their careers to serving our country. massively streamlined operations inside of OPM. and NO MORE PAPER 🫡🇺🇸

@nikitabier x.com/adylon7/status…

In a 3% experiment, removing the Top-30 highest paid revenue share accounts from the For You timeline increased both time spent and daily active users on X.

Woke up in London to all the conversation of Chinese Cybersecurity models getting to Mythos like ability with agent swarms. Swarms that can explore vulnerabilites, determine attack paths and potential fixes in addition to persistent red teaming. Happened just under 3 months, faster than my optimistic estimate. Expect that in a few weeks there will be more widespread capability. Highly likely that we will get US models released from bans faster with a promise of better hygiene. What does it mean for the rest. 1. Test your own code! 2. Validate your vendors, ensure they are doing the same. 3. Start evaluating direct and virtual patching approaches to ensure open source is protected. From a longer term perspective, we will need to ensure better security posture, no, no misconfigurations, robust platform products which can react swiftly, and a culture of constantly testing the enterprise with the most recent tools out there.

"Has a developer you love lost their peace"? NYC Willamsburg is speed-running becoming SF 🙃

From day 1 of founding @outtake_ai, I've been adamant about one office rule: We're an in-person company. The most important reason: momentum. Especially when the problem we’re solving moves faster than a caffeinated squirrel. Momentum is about more than getting people in the same room. We designed the office in a way that helps people think, build, unblock, and move faster together. We've got whiteboards in nearly every room so we can map out problems the moment they surface. Open areas where teams can cluster around a screen when something needs everyone's attention. Quiet corners for deep focus. Big windows showing off the view of the Manhattan skyline to create inspiration. When someone's stuck, they can spin around & grab a teammate to map out the problem together. Culture is a competitive advantage & thus we take it seriously.

To make distributed AI inference monetizable for anyone ... start with gaming consoles. There are ~35 million Playstation 5 & ~15 million XBOX in America That's 50 million boxes of excellent GPU driven hardware just sitting idle in living rooms ~23 hours/day A PS5 can easily run an 8B parameter model, meaning Qwen 3 8B or DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B. @vijaypande did this for protein folding in 2007 with "Folding@Home" in 2007 on the Playstation 3. One of the early things that got me obsessed Computer Science x Biology. Bring it back Vijay 🙏

I am pretty convinced that there will be a path for distributed AI inference and this will create a novel way for folks who may not otherwise be in the AI economy to make money from it.

"no matter how many pitches argue that AI will make it easier to build an institution, it will not make it easy to build a new institution. It will not make it easy to create a shape that concentrates the right people, gives them the right authority, puts them close to the right problems, and compounds their judgment over time." banger.

@rauchg Anything Possible != Do Everything Important life rule

Human judgement in engineering is ironically even more crucial now. Deciding what to build. Deciding on the right architectures. Deciding whether you regenerate from scratch $$$ or reuse existing legos. Managing tech debt. You can do anything now, but you can't do everything.

@rauchg Predicting next word -> auto complete code -> auto complete good code -> write good code -> write secure code -> write good code to break insecure code -> OOPS cyberweapon 🙃 Crazy timeline, but so glad to be alive for it

Mythos / Sol cybersecurity capabilities are equally useful in an offensive as well a defensive capacity. If adversaries get ahold of an equivalent offensive capability, it poses a serious threat to US companies that remain unaware of latent vulnerabilities. In the meantime, I strongly recommend running deepsec[1] or similar harnesses with the available frontier models. [1] github.com/vercel-labs/de…