Bryan Kim

I know Joseph and I couldn't agree more! He's the Hunter S. thompson of internet marketing 😎

@yishan TY for this. I had inklings of the same contrarian take yesterday, which i spewed to my friends totally raw. Today i forwarded them this fully baked post and claimed it as my own! 😂. Love your writing voice. You write like a rapper would, that horowitz attempts but fails at.

I think the Deepseek moment is not really the Sputnik moment, but more like the Google moment. If anyone was around in ~2004, you'll know what I mean, but more on that later. I think everyone is over-rotated on this because Deepseek came out of China. Let me try to un-rotate you. Deepseek could have come out of some lab in the US Midwest. Like say some CS lab couldn't afford the latest nVidia chips and had to use older hardware, but they had a great algo and systems department, and they found a bunch of optimizations and trained a model for a few million dollars and lo, the model is roughly on par with o1. Look everyone, we found a new training method and we optimized a bunch of algorithms! Everyone is like OH WOW and starts trying the same thing. Great week for AI advancement! No need for US markets to lose a trillion in market cap. The tech world (and apparently Wall Street) is massively over-rotated on this because it came out of CHINA. I get it. After everyone has been sensitized over the H1BLM uproar, we are conditioned to think of OMG Immigrants China as some kind of Alien Other. As though the Alien-Other Chinese Researchers are doing something special that's out of reach and now China The Empire is somehow uniquely in possession of Super Efficient AI Power and the US companies can't compete. The subtext of "A New Fearsome Power Now Under The Command of the CCP" is what's driving the current sentiment, and it's not really valid. Like, no. These are guys basically working on the same problems we are in the US, and not only that, they wrote a paper about it and open-sourced their model! It is not actually some sort of tectonic geopolitical shift, it is just Some Nerds Over There saying "Hey we figured out some cool shit, here's how we did it, maybe you would like to check it out?" Sputnik showed that the Soviets could do something the US couldn't ("a new fearsome power"). They didn't subsequently publish all the technical details and half the blueprints. They only showed that it could be done. With Deepseek, if I recall correctly, a lab in Berkeley read their paper and duplicated the claimed results on a small scale within a day. That's why I say it's like the Google moment in 2004. Google filed its S-1 in 2004, and revealed to the world that they had built the largest supercomputer cluster by using distributed algorithms to network together commodity computers at the best performance-per-dollar point on the cost curve. This was in contrast to every other tech company, who at that time just bought what were essentially larger and larger mainframes, always at the most expensive leading edge of the cost curve. (To the young people reading this, this will sound incredible to you) I worked at PayPal at the time, and in order to keep pace with the rising transaction volume, the company was forced to buy bigger and bigger database servers from Oracle. We were totally Oracle's bitch. At one point when we ran into scalability issues, the Oracle reps told us we were their biggest installation so they had no other reference point on how to help us overcome our scalability issues. We literally resorted to flipping random config switches and rebooting it. (This heavily influenced me when I was a young manager later at Facebook. I deliberately torpedoed an Oracle salesman's pitch to try and get us to switch from open source MySQL databases to an Oracle contract: of course we had scalability problems, but at least when we had them, we could open up the hood and figure out how to fix it ... assuming we had good enough engineers, and we did. When it's closed-source infra, you're at the mercy of the vendor's support engineers) Back to Google - in their S-1, they described how they were able to leapfrog the scalability limits of mainframes and had been (for years!) running a far more massive networked supercomputer comprised of thousands of commodity machines at the optimal performance-per-dollar price point - i.e. not the more expensive leading edge - all knit together by fault-tolerant distributed algorithms written in-house. Some time later, Google published their MapReduce and BigTable papers, describing the algorithms they'd used to manage and control this massively more cost-effective and powerful supercomputer. Deepseek is MUCH more like the Google moment, because Google essentially described what it did and told everyone else how they could do it too. In Google's case, a fair bit of time elapsed between when they revealed to the world what they were doing and when they published a papers showing everyone how to do it. Deepseek, in contrast, published their paper alongside the model release. Now, I've also written about how I think this is also a demonstration of Deepseek's trajectory, but that's also no different from Google in ~2004 revealing what it was capable of. Competitors will still need to gear up and DO the thing, but they've moved the field forward. But it's not like Sputnik where the Soviets have developed technology unreachable to the US, it's more like Google saying, "Hey, we did this cool thing, here's how we did it." There is no reason to think nVidia and OAI and Meta and Microsoft and Google et al are dead. Sure, Deepseek is a new and formidable upstart, but doesn't that happen every week in the world of AI? I am sure that Sam and Zuck, backed by the power of Satya, can figure something out. Everyone is going to duplicate this feat in a few months and everything just got cheaper. The only real consequence is that AI utopia/doom is now closer than ever. ==== Bonus: This is also a little similar the Ethereum PoS moment, when AI finally has a counterpoint to the environmentalists who say AI uses so much electricity. We just brought down the cost of inference by 97%!

Unequivocal has 5 syllables. For a real word you might casually drop in convo, thats impressivelyely

Appreciate your vote for my continued employment!

Beacons 2.0 Video Out Now! youtu.be/V7yWaXQmz5E?si…

today we’re putting the AI into Beacons AI this is Beacons 2.0 🧵

🎉Beacons 2.0 is TODAY 🎉 Read the full announcement from our CEO Below 👇 beacons.ai/i/blog/announc…

Beacons 2.0 Official Announcement youtu.be/V7yWaXQmz5E?si… via @YouTube

We got series A! Yay for continued employment! Love working for this company. Plz help a brother out and work them algos so that they can pay me with a series B!

🚀 Huge announcement today: We just published our Top Creator Agencies List: the definitive list of leaders in creator management globally. Check it out! beacons.ai/top-creator-ag… #creatoragencies #creatormanagement

@ericosiu @peterahn first few posts in this thread applies to u

I've built my network 1 person at a time over the years and I frequently get asked how I did it. Here’s how to build a billion-dollar network:

@water_and_music @ChrissyGreco @RaulAGuerrero @brodieconley @levidowney @kristinjuel @sydmusic @Yung_Spielburg @cheriehu42 @thatsac_ @__aston__ oh i see now why you thought I contributed to this lol! I actually wasn't involved in the actual research, this gives me too much credit, and yet... I'll take it!

@pmarca MMA training is probably healthy for most people. The Elon Zuck saber rattling is cringe and since most young people do not see as worthy of emulation. Both can be true.

FIGHTING At a private conference this week, I was asked what I think of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) training, Elon Musk’s challenge to a cage fight, and public reports that a Zuckerberg/Musk MMA fight may well happen later this year, perhaps in the actual Roman Colosseum. I said, “I think that’s all great.” And in this post I explain why. First, while the extraordinary Dana White and his Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) have elevated MMA into a highly popular public sport over the last 20 years, it’s important to understand how important – how primal – MMA is in the story of our civilization. MMA is the original combat sport – it was introduced to the actual Greek Olympic Games in 648 BC (!). The Greeks called it “pankration” (παγκράτιον), but it is the same thing – a combination of boxing and wrestling. To quote Wikipedia: “In Greek mythology, the heroes Heracles and Theseus invented pankration as a result of using both wrestling and boxing in their confrontations with opponents. Theseus was said to have used pankration to defeat Cercyon of Eleusis in a wrestling match, as well as the minotaur in the labyrinth. Heracles was depicted in ancient artworks subduing the Nemean lion using pankration.” “Pankration, as practiced in historical antiquity, was an athletic event that combined techniques of both boxing and wrestling, as well as additional elements, such as the use of strikes with the legs, to create a fighting sport similar to [MMA]. Although knockouts were common, most pankration competitions were decided on the basis of submission – yielding to a submission or joint lock. Pankratiasts were highly skilled grapplers and were extremely effective in applying a variety of takedowns, chokes and joint locks.” “However, pankration was more than just an event in the athletic competitions of the ancient Greek world; it was also part of the arsenal of Greek soldiers – including the famous Spartan hoplites and Alexander the Great's Macedonian phalanx.” If the hair on the back of your neck isn’t going up as you read this… MMA isn’t just a sport, it’s the sport. And today, like then, it has not only sporting elements but also real world utility. I’ll come back to that. I was also asked whether I consider Mark and Elon to be role models to children in their embrace of fighting, and I said, enthusiastically, yes. And I further recommended to the audience that they have their children trained in MMA, as my wife and I are. Kids as young as 8 and maybe even younger are totally capable of learning both the striking and grappling dimensions of the sport. MMA teaches not just combat skills – and it does teach those – but also discipline, emotional control, respect, and a deep sense of responsibility. The message to kids is not, this is how you beat people up. The message is, this is how you protect yourself – and as important, this is how you protect your family, your friends, your community. You use these combat skills in the service of others – you never start a fight, but when someone is threatening someone you love, or even an innocent bystander, this is how you end a fight. To a lot of people, this sounds like a message out of time. Surely in the modern world, one would never need to protect oneself or one’s family with actual interpersonal physical violence? I would love for that to be the case, but unfortunately, the world is evolving in such a way where that is becoming less true every day. Many of the biggest and most important cities in the United States have decided they don’t need law enforcement, and street level violence is on the rise, as anyone in those cities with functional eyes can see. People get attacked in the street, or in carjackings and home invasions, daily, in plain sight, and little to nothing happens. It’s terrible, but it’s true. And so, yes, if there aren’t going to be police to protect you and your loved ones from real world violent assault, there is a practical need to know applied self defense. And hand-to-hand fighting – MMA – is the core self defense skill. Another benefit of MMA training, for both children and adults, is physical fitness. We all know our culture is in the grip of an obesity crisis – according to the CDC, “Obesity in the United States now affects 100.1 million (41.9%) adults and 14.7 million (19.7%) children.” This is a terrible situation that curses people to shorter and unhappier lives. President John F Kennedy saw this coming in his time (!): “We are underexercised as a nation. The remedy, in my judgment, lies in one direction. That is in developing programs for broad participation in exercise by all of our young men and women, all of our boys and girls. The sad fact is that our national sport is not playing at all, but watching. We have become more and more, not a nation of athletes but a nation of spectators. There are more important goals than winning contests — and that is to improve on a broad level the health and vitality of all our people.” We did not listen to him in the decades that followed, but we can now. MMA training is likely the best path for widespread gains in physical fitness, particularly for children. MMA training itself is both effective exercise and motivates one to improve one’s strength and endurance. And not just in the abstract, as a pointless hamster wheel process, but for a purpose – to win fights. Finally, consider the combination of physical fitness and the ability to defend one’s loves. The result is self-respect – not the self-respect of armchair therapy and wishful thinking, but real self-respect, the earned realization that one is strong and useful and of merit, and of value. Skilled fighters carry themselves differently, and this is why. In our present time, where many young people are suffering from anxiety, depression, and what can only be described as anomie – again, from the Greek, ἀνομία, “lawlessness”, a collapse in the code of expected adult behavior – what could be better than a return to earned self-respect? One more thing: Lest this be taken for some kind of gendered argument, let me say clearly that I think MMA is just as useful and relevant for young girls as it is for young boys. So yes – I think it’s great that MMA is the rising American national sport, that Mark is training so hard in it (and getting jacked), that Elon, a past martial arts aficionado in his own right, is challenging Mark to a fight, and that both Mark and Elon are top-end role models for children in our society, including my own – whether they end up fighting in the Colosseum or not! If it was good enough for Heracles and Theseus, it’s good enough for us. Fight!

I guess they heard about our lower fees 🤷🏻‍♂️ #sellwithbeacons @gumroad

Everything this man @healy puts out is instant repeat status for me. So slept on. open.spotify.com/track/2EifArXf…

@thebrianlee let's talk bro! @beaconsai is also running a creator accelerator, I really think it can be complementary with @flavorthing

Authenticity builds trust and community. True fluency provides scale and a platform.

With creators what I look for is fearless authenticity and global fluency. The criteria might seem disparate but they are very much correlated. There’s nothing more than appealing or enthralling than self-actualization.

Saw a commercial extolling the virtues of Vuori's Sunday joggers as I was wearing the exact same thing. That's when I knew that my existence is indeed the purpose of this universe just as I had always suspected.

I'm going to keep ranting about how great @beaconsai is, until artists start using it 🤣 It has the capability to sell your music right in the app, Host all your links + more. For me, the media kit was exactly what I needed for a basic EPK. Get it #beaconsai #jewelzufo

@TheHallieG Hey just tapping in real quick to say, I was reading your Bijon piece and had to look up the byline. I'm not used to your level of writerly writing in sports, what a pleasant surprise. Keep it up!

As a Koreanam I really want to give Blackpink the benefit of the doubt. But this chella set is painful to my ears. And yes, I've fully become my parents.