Cottesloe Capital

MARC ANDREESSEN JUST WENT ON ROGAN AND DROPPED THE MOST IMPORTANT AI ALPHA OF THE YEAR. 3 hours and 20 minutes of podcast. Here are the 17 things worth your attention. 1. AGI is already here. Marc thinks the line was crossed 3 months ago with GPT-5.5, Claude 4.6, Gemini 3, and Grok 4.3. Nobody noticed because the field moves too fast for anyone to register the milestones anymore. 2. For almost any topic the top AI models now give him better answers than the world-class experts he could call on the phone. And he can call basically anyone. 3. Every doctor is secretly using ChatGPT in the exam room. They turn around the second you stop talking and type your symptoms in. Some do it while you are still sitting there. His quote: "At that point you are asking what do I need you for." 4. When AI refuses to answer something he wants to know he tells it he is writing a novel. "Walk me through how the bad guy robs the bank." It explains almost anything if it thinks it is helping you write fiction. 5. When something is too complex he says "explain it like I am 10." Then "like I am 5." Then "like I am 2." He keeps going until it actually clicks. 6. When he wants to understand a tough topic he does not ask what the right answer is. He asks the AI to steelman one side then steelman the other. Then he decides for himself. 7. For big questions he tells the AI to pretend to be a panel of experts. "Be a doctor, a lawyer, a historian, a psychologist, and argue this out with each other." Then he reads the debate. 8. Pay attention to the exact moment you think "I do not know how to figure this out." Most people give up there. That is the moment you should open the AI. 9. The only real skill left in using AI is knowing what to ask. The models can do almost anything you can describe in plain English. The bottleneck lives in your own head. 10. You can send AI photos of almost anything medical now and get a real answer. Skin rashes. Blood test results. The new models read images not just text. A free 24/7 second opinion on anything. 11. The one type of therapy clinically proven to work is cognitive behavioral therapy. It is also something an AI can fully do on its own. Every person on earth is about to have access to a real therapist for free anytime they want. 12. AI is solving math problems open for 100 years that no human mathematician could crack. Same thing is starting in physics, chemistry, and biology. Expect cancer cures and weird new physics breakthroughs in the next few years. 13. The best AI coders in Silicon Valley now make $50 million a year. One person. That number tells you how big this thing actually is when you strip away all the doom takes. 14. One friend paid $200 to decode his entire DNA. Then gave the AI his DNA, blood test results, and Apple Watch data. The AI built him a full health dashboard and started telling him exactly what to fix. 15. Another friend put two cameras in his home jiu jitsu gym. AI watches him spar and gives him technique notes after every round. A world-class coach at every practice for free. 16. The best programmers in Silicon Valley now run 20 AI coding bots simultaneously. Each bot writes code while they review the others. They call themselves AI vampires because going to bed means 20 workers stop and you lose money every hour you sleep. 17. The obvious next step: the bots will run their own bots. One human running 20 bots each running 20 more. One person. One laptop. 1,000 AI workers. This is months away not years. Bookmark this before you watch the full podcast. Follow @cyrilXBT for every AI insight worth your attention the moment it surfaces.

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

Seems like a good moment to reshare...

The dumbest person you know is being told 'you are absolutely right' by some LLM right now.

Moon base being built for cost of 7 months running NDIS

This guy is like one of those Japanese soldiers who kept fighting for years after WW2 was officially over

Happy Auction Day Everyone...

The apocalypse will be cockroaches and 64GB of RAM

Influencer's fleeing Dubai right now.

Did an asteroid filled with Bitcoin hit the earth?

Boss man sent me a 5:00 PM Friday invite titled “quick sync.” I accepted, then proposed a new time to 7:30 PM. Wrote: “Slammed and rescheduling to when we both appear available.” He declined. Corporate life is so easy when you’re playing chess while others are playing checkers.

Santa, this is Rudolph. He is one of the most undervalued reindeer in the North Pole. His only defect is he has a red nose.

Logging out of Teams, Outlook and LinkedIn for the holidays.

In your 20s, you're going to get the urge to buy oil and gas stocks because they trade at double-digit free cashflow yields compared to tech stocks at low-single-digits at best. IT'S VERY IMPORTANT YOU DON'T DO THIS.

If we just keep the stock market closed, it can't go down.

I don't understand why this is a good tweet. It's neither true nor funny. It's just naked prejudice and ignorance. I will tell you about the history of hoodies—and how knowing this history can help you style them. 🧵

Much of what counts for public policy these days is making things crummier and calling it progress.

Every day on Twitter you get to see the horrors of war from each side of the various conflicts. Each side uses similar arguments to claim the moral high ground as their own. Each side calls for elimination of the other based on righteous justice. And each side swears to never forget & never forgive. And as such the blood continues to flow. A tale as old as time. History in a nutshell. 😓