aki

i listened to the people and turned my thoughts on finding side doors in career context into a full essay. read here: open.substack.com/pub/velvetnois…

i listened to the people and turned my thoughts on finding side doors in career context into a full essay. read here: open.substack.com/pub/velvetnois…

Leopold Aschenbrenner has quickly made a name for himself in the hedge fund world with his bold bets on AI. As the world waits for his 13F, we built a way to understand how other hedge funds are positioned in the AI trade. Our latest drop: funds.mts.now

DAILY SITUATION RECAP: > Anthropic is raising $30B at $900B. The investment will be co-led by Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia, and Altimeter, more than doubling Anthropic’s valuation from just three months ago. The round is set to close as soon as this month. >The US and China will hold bilateral talks on AI for the first time. Treasury Secretary @SecScottBessent, one of the more AGI-pilled members of the Trump administration, said that the two nations will discuss guardrails and best practices on AI, including keeping future frontier models out of the hands of non-state actors. >OpenAI reorgs, again. The company is working to streamline ChatGPT and Codex into a single “super-app”, and is combining the respective teams together. @gdb will lead the new strategy, @thsottiaux will lead “core product and platform teams”, and @nickaturley will move from leading ChatGPT product development to business strategy. @fidjissimo, CEO of AGI Deployment, is still on medical leave with no timeline to return. >OpenAI might raise again. Despite closing a $122 billion raise just six weeks ago, CFO @thefriley said that the company might need to raise more capital to buy enough compute to meet the world’s insatiable demand for tokens. >X open-sources its For You algorithm. It uses a transformer to predict what posts you want to see next based on positive interactions (liking, replying, reposting) and negative interactions (quickly scrolling past, muting, blocking). Posts are rewarded for originality, virality outside of a bubble, and quality replies, and punished for engagement bait, spam replies, and NSFW/gore/hate. >xAI launches a coding agent, Grok Build. Not to be outdone by Anthropic’s Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex, xAI is releasing an early beta of their own coding agent and CLI, currently available only to $300/month SuperGrok Heavy subscribers. >xAI cofounder @ibab is starting a neolab. Babuschkin led day-to-day operations at xAI between its founding in 2023 and his departure in July 2025. He’s currently in talks to raise up to $1B at a valuation of $5B for his new company River AI. >OpenAI launches personal finance in ChatGPT. While currently only for $200/month Pro users, it shows how the labs are increasingly building consumer software themselves rather than waiting for startups to use their models to do it for them.

.@VitalikButerin on why a 1,000-year lifespan wouldn't get boring: "Even if we lived to 1,000 years old, we're not gonna get bored. We're gonna keep creating new worlds for ourselves." "Everything around us, the people, the world, changes so much over 10 years that it almost might as well be a death and a rebirth." "15 years ago, it was normal for close friends to not talk to each other for days. Doesn't that sound crazy now?" "In the first 20 years of your life you're a learner, a consumer. You're someone playing games that other people set up for you. One of the big transitions as you grow up is getting into more of a role of actually being the one that has to create and define and contribute to the games yourself." @sodofi_ @binji_x