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tae kim

@firstadopter

"Key Context" Substack covering Nvidia/AI. Reached #1 new bestseller in first 24 hrs Subscribe https://t.co/3N2fHOXQfL "Be so good they can't ignore you"

Katılım Ekim 2008
10.1K Takip Edilen97.1K Takipçiler
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tae kim
tae kim@firstadopter·
My Substack's stock ideas since inception have been like Shohei Ohtani going 13-for-14 with 3 grand slam homeruns. It won't last, but it's been fun so far! Ken Griffin says the best stock pickers are right just 54% of the time. $NVDA
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tae kim
tae kim@firstadopter·
Xi is trying to subsidize and diffuse China's technology again by pushing the country's AI model makers toward open weights/open source. The U.S. frontier leaders are going to step-function up and dramatically increase their lead in the next few quarters with what they have in the pipeline. It's going to be fun to watch. I trust in the ingenuity and innovation of American AI model makers and AI chip makers.
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tae kim
tae kim@firstadopter·
Our dumb government overregulated America's frontier models and is driving the world to use less over guard railed Chinese ones. A disaster. Just as I predicted. Clueless, nontechnical government bureaucrats like Susie Wiles and Scott Bessent, who panicked because Jamie Dimon whispered in their ears, should stay out of it and stay in their lane.
David Sacks@DavidSacks

Kimi K3 just fixed 15 critical security bugs that Codex and Fable refused because of “cyber guardrails.” There’s no reason to limit American models on tasks that Chinese models handle without issue. We’re only making ourselves less competitive.

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tae kim
tae kim@firstadopter·
The USA at a bare minimum needs to do everything it can to staple green cards to degrees from top 10 STEM PhD programs in AI / computer science. Failing to do so is self-defeating, handing our adversaries world leading talent.
Josh Wolfe@wolfejosh

America Is About to Hand Its Best Founders to Its Rivals - by Josh Wolfe (cofounder + partner, Lux Capital) + Deepak Hegde (Professor NYU Stern) On June 17, the White House cleared the final regulatory checkpoint for a Department of Homeland Security rule that would cap F-1 student visas at four years, shorten the post-graduation grace period from 60 days to 30, and replace 30 years of “duration of status” admission with discretionary federal review. Federal Register publication is imminent. The effective date will follow 60 days later — putting the rule on track for early fall. The press has framed it as a question about students. It is not. It is a question about whether the federal government should override one of the most productive talent markets the world has ever known — and hand a competitive edge it took 50 years to build to Beijing, Ottawa, and Brussels. Consider Jan Koum, a Ukrainian immigrant who arrived in the United States at 16 and worked as a janitor while attending San Jose State. He applied for jobs at Twitter and Facebook; both rejected him. A résumé without a degree did not impress recruiters. So he started his own company. Five years later, Facebook bought it — WhatsApp — for $19 billion. The labor market made a $19 billion mistake. The entrepreneurship market corrected it. That correction — quietly, across decades, without subsidy or industrial policy — has been America’s quiet competitive advantage. It is what the new rule would unwind. Consider who the F-1 cohort actually is. Roughly three-quarters of foreign nationals who earn STEM PhDs at American universities stay; for Chinese and Indian graduates, the rate exceeds 80 percent. They are the population from which one in four U.S. unicorns draws a founder; counting all immigrant pathways, more than half of America’s billion-dollar startups have at least one. Without immigrants, that herd would be cut in half. The cap does not fit the work. The median U.S. STEM PhD takes 5.7 years; physics PhDs average six. The rule is not long enough to finish the degree it regulates. Every foreign physicist, computer scientist, and materials engineer in serious graduate work will need an immigration officer’s permission to keep going. Sometimes she will not get it. Andrew Ng arrived on an F-1 at Carnegie Mellon in 1993, spent five more years on his Berkeley PhD, and co-founded Coursera, Google Brain, and DeepLearning AI. Jensen Huang, founder of Nvidia, spread his Stanford master’s over eight years while working at LSI Logic. Fei-Fei Li, the “godmother of AI” now running World Labs, took six years to finish her Caltech PhD. Charles Zuker, grandson of Eastern European Jews who fled to Chile during the Holocaust, came to MIT at 20 and co-founded the biotech Kallyope. None of them moved at the four-year pace. Each one’s continuation past year four would have been an officer’s coin flip. There is a name for this pattern in economics. Labor markets cannot observe ability directly; they read signals — degrees, schools, prior employers, accents. When the signal underrates the worker, she rejects the wage and becomes the residual claimant of her own talent. She starts a company. Entrepreneurs, the data show, score higher on cognitive tests than equally credentialed employees, and lower on credentials than equally able ones. America’s edge has never been about polishing the resumes the world’s HR systems approve. It is about absorbing the people those systems miss. This is happening now, in artificial intelligence. A March 2026 NBER paper linking Census records to 42,000 AI researchers finds the share working in industry rose from 48 to 68 percent between 2001 and 2019 — and the decline in the U.S.-born share is “almost entirely accounted for” by Chinese- and Indian-born researchers stepping in. The American AI revolution is being built, in significant part, by exactly the foreign STEM PhDs the rule would turn away. The rule converts what was an arbitrageable labor-market mistake — talent the market underrated, corrected by entrepreneurship — into an irreversible immigration decision. An officer reviewing an extension at year four cannot see a future founder. He sees a delay, a discretionary file, one of hundreds on his desk, and optimizes against the application that becomes tomorrow’s headline. The talent is already moving. A March 2025 Nature survey found 75 percent of U.S.-based scientists who responded considering leaving. Fall 2025 brought a 17 percent drop in new international student enrollments. The European Research Council saw a 31 percent jump in applications for its flagship grants, with “particular growth” from U.S.-based researchers, and doubled its relocation top-up to €2 million. Canada committed $1.2 billion to attracting foreign talent. China launched a visa for international STEM graduates. And the F-1 rule does not stand alone. The wage-weighted H-1B lottery just ran for the first time, the $100,000 H-1B fee comes up for renewal in September, and a new USCIS policy now pushes green-card applicants to leave the country and apply abroad — so even a founder who beats the four-year cap may have to leave the United States to secure the right to stay. The reform that would actually serve American workers — a startup visa, a stapled green card for STEM PhDs, an exemption from country caps that trap Indian and Chinese graduates in decade-long queues — is the one Congress keeps refusing to pass. At a minimum, the administration should not be using regulatory authority to make the problem worse. America has spent 50 years operating one of the most efficient talent markets on earth: a system that quietly absorbed the people the world’s labor markets underrated and let them reprice themselves through entrepreneurship. No subsidy built it. No industrial policy created it. The F-1 rule replaces that market with the discretion of an immigration officer. Let it take effect, and the United States loses not just the founders it never identified, but the mechanism that found them — and the rest of the world picks up the difference.

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tae kim
tae kim@firstadopter·
GPUs GPUs GPUs. I was right again $NVDA "Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected, and our GPUs are feeling it. Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity. To protect the experience of existing subscribers, we're temporarily pausing new subscriptions and prioritizing compute for current members"
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tae kim@firstadopter

Did someone say MORE COMPUTE NEEDED? $NVDA Moonshot: "Since inference efficiency likewise benefits from larger high-bandwidth communication domains, we recommend deploying Kimi K3 on supernode configurations with 64 or more accelerators."

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tae kim
tae kim@firstadopter·
AI stocks fundamentals are getting much better, not worse. The primary reason stocks aren't doing well is the Iran war is getting worse. An open Strait of Hormuz is critical for AI chip makers in Asia. Once we get visibility on the war ending (who knows the timing with Trump), AI stocks will ramp. What the SK Hynix/SK chair said recently: Chairman Choi met with reporters at the KCCI Jeju Forum on the 15th and said, “Demand for AI semiconductors is expected to increase by at least 60 to 100 percent next year compared to this year.” He explained, “Even looking at overall memory semiconductors, we must expect an increase of at least 50 to 60 percent.” “Since no company is increasing its supply by almost nothing next year, the gap between supply and demand is bound to widen even further” "We are trying to maximize supply, but the pace of demand growth is much faster," Chairman Choi said. "I am worried that prices might rise rather than fall."
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tae kim
tae kim@firstadopter·
Good points from David. Regarding "grounded in facts, logic, and evidence, not the deliberate exploitation of fear and uncertainty," the exact same point could be made about large swaths of the media and certain financial writers. Y'all know who I'm talking about. -- "Regulatory decisions should always be well justified and grounded in facts, logic, and evidence, not the deliberate exploitation of fear and uncertainty."
David Sacks@DavidSacks

I’m not sure whether Dean Ball is confessing to a regulatory capture strategy or simply predicting this will happen (he now says the latter). Either way, the weaponization of regulatory uncertainty as a competitive tool should be completely unacceptable. He argues there’s no need to ban Chinese open-source models — just direct agencies to issue soft-law warnings that create enough FUD so regulated enterprises back off. “It needn’t be that well justified.” Wrong. Regulatory decisions should always be well justified and grounded in facts, logic, and evidence, not the deliberate exploitation of fear and uncertainty. Implementing a surreptitious policy through manufactured doubt — rather than strong and explicit justification — corrodes the rule of law and invites future abuse against anyone. We are at a critical inflection point in AI policy. The leading closed labs, already a duopoly in terms of AI model revenue, want the government to eliminate their open source competition. They have laid their cards on the table. It is time for the rest of Silicon Valley — the vast majority that still values open competition — to do the same.

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tae kim
tae kim@firstadopter·
@pbelesiotis Nope. Market broke after Trump escalated. Yes, there was an unwind afterwards.
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Peter Belesiotis
Peter Belesiotis@pbelesiotis·
@firstadopter It was leverage and retail overcrowding that broke the momentum trade, not the war.
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tae kim
tae kim@firstadopter·
To argue that Yang Zhilin went back to China because it was easier to start an AI company and raise funds there is ludicrous. You think American VCs wouldn’t fund a superstar AI researcher with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon and a degree from Tsinghua? Look at his rockstar background below. Let’s take away all immigration friction pretense. Why not do everything we can to make it easier and retain superstar talent? Staple green cards to the top 10 AI computer science PhD degrees NOW. Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc. It would be a massive success. The USA can run the table on global AI talent. We just need to use our brains.
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Max For AI@MaxForAI

K3发布后,很多美国科技圈的人都在问,为什么 @Kimi_Moonshot 创始人杨植麟在美国完成学业后却没有留在美国? 答案可能有些反常识:不是他不想在美国,而是美国留不住他。 以杨植麟当时的履历,如果留在美国,他大概率会进入苹果、Google、Meta这样的公司,成为一名顶级科学家。 拿高薪、发论文、训练模型,在一个成熟的研究体系里不断向上走。 但他很难做出Kimi这样的模型。 他自己也在早期的访谈里表示过,在大厂里,科学家可以决定一项技术怎么做,却很难决定公司把多少算力、资金和人才押在这项技术上。 研究、产品和商业被切割在不同部门,个人能力再强,也只是庞大机器中的一个环节。 另一个重要的原因是如果当时留在美国创业,他同样未必能融到后来月之暗面获得的资金。 一个刚毕业、没有美国本土创业网络的中国研究者,很难让资本迅速把巨额资金和算力资源押在自己身上。 美国的钱更多,但有资格拿到这些钱的人,并没有想象中那么多。 回到中国后,情况反而不同。 杨植麟既有CMU和顶级AI研究的背景,又熟悉中国的人才、资本和市场。 他在这里不是大厂体系里的一名科学家,而是少数能够同时连接技术、融资、算力、团队和产品的人。 所以他不是因为H-1B、移民政策或者找不到工作才离开美国。 他完全可以留下,只是不愿意把自己最好的十年,变成一家大厂履历中的几行字。 如果杨植麟留在美国,世界上可能会多一位在硅谷大厂的AI科学家。 他选择回到中国,才有了月之暗面和Kimi。 当然,如果他留在美国很大可能会成为ICE(现在叫NICE)的目标,或者受到一些不该有的歧视。

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tae kim
tae kim@firstadopter·
All soccer games should be this open ended fun
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tae kim@firstadopter·
Ok. This sensational World Cup did it. I’m going to watch more soccer. I need a team to root for in the Premier League and one in MLS (tristate/NYC area). Give me some options. Teams I root for usually win, fwiw.
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tae kim
tae kim@firstadopter·
I’m beginning to think England should have played more offensively minded after they went up 1-0 against Argentina.
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