
Del Leonard Jones
11.5K posts

Del Leonard Jones
@jonesdel
Cover story reporter USA Today. Novels: Cremation of Sam McGee and At The Bat: The Strikeout That Shamed America (#1 Goodreads best baseball novel 21st century)
Washington, DC Katılım Mart 2009
2.6K Takip Edilen5.3K Takipçiler

@bannedby @BasebaIlKing I asked grok. It says you can’t step backward in softball but you can in baseball
English

@bannedby @BasebaIlKing That’s the rule. Where were the umpires?
English
Del Leonard Jones retweetledi

Del Leonard Jones retweetledi

The sick individual who forced his way into the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night with guns and knives is no hero. Period. Everyone with a platform has a duty to fight any attempt to dress him up as some kind of anti-establishment role model. He’s not. People like him need to be removed from society and given help. They do NOT need to be put on a pedestal. We need LESS violence in America, not MORE violence in America. I am thankful that President Trump, our nation’s leaders and the national press corps were unharmed.
English
Del Leonard Jones retweetledi
Del Leonard Jones retweetledi

🚨A 25 YEAR OLD BUILT THE FASTEST GROWING SOFTWARE COMPANY IN HISTORY.. WITH ZERO MARKETING SPEND.. AND SPACEX JUST OFFERED $60 BILLION TO BUY IT..
His name is Michael Truell.. He started coding at 11.. Interned at Google at 18.. Dropped out of MIT to start a company that built AI tools for mechanical engineering..
That company failed..
So he pivoted.. And built Cursor.. An AI-powered code editor that writes software for you..
Here's how fast it grew..
$100 million in annual revenue in 12 months.. Fastest in SaaS history.. Broke every record ever set by Slack, Zoom, and Wiz..
$500 million by month 21..
$1 billion by November 2025..
$2 billion by February 2026..
Projected to hit $6 billion by end of year..
Zero marketing spend.. Not a single dollar.. Pure word of mouth from developers who couldn't stop talking about it..
Over 1 billion lines of code accepted per day.. Used by 70% of Fortune 1000 companies.. Every single one of Nvidia's 40,000 engineers uses it.. Coinbase hit 100% adoption among their developers..
And he did this with a team of four MIT co-founders.. One of them was a three-time International Math Olympiad competitor from Pakistan.. Another was a college squash captain with zero startup experience who built the entire product strategy..
They spent zero on sales.. Zero on ads.. Zero on growth hacking.. The product sold itself..
But here's where the story takes a turn nobody expected..
Even at $50 billion valuation.. Even generating billions in revenue.. They hit a wall..
Not a market wall.. A physics wall..
They couldn't get enough GPUs to train their next AI model.. The physical chips didn't exist in sufficient quantities for them to buy.. Money couldn't solve the problem..
Enter Elon Musk..
On April 21.. SpaceX announced a deal to potentially acquire Cursor for $60 billion.. The largest acquisition option in tech history..
The structure is insane..
SpaceX gives Cursor immediate access to Colossus.. xAI's supercomputer equivalent to one million Nvidia H100 GPUs.. For nine months of joint development..
At the end.. SpaceX can buy the company for $60 billion..
If they don't buy it.. They owe Cursor a $10 billion breakup fee.. The largest breakup fee in corporate history..
Think about what that means for Cursor..
Either they get acquired for $60 billion.. Or they walk away with $10 billion in cash and nine months of free training on the most powerful supercomputer on earth..
There is no losing scenario..
And here's why Musk wants it..
SpaceX is preparing for an IPO at $1.75 trillion.. The biggest IPO ever.. But aerospace alone can't justify that number..
By merging xAI into SpaceX.. And now acquiring Cursor.. Musk transforms SpaceX from a rocket company into an AI empire that owns the compute, the models, and the developer tools..
Cursor is the missing piece.. The application layer that puts xAI's models into the daily workflow of every Fortune 500 engineering team..
Oh and one more thing..
In 2022.. FTX's trading firm Alameda Research made a seed investment in Cursor.. During the FTX bankruptcy.. Liquidators sold that stake for $200,000..
That stake is now worth approximately $3 billion..
Sam Bankman-Fried called it the worst liquidation decision in venture capital history.. From a prison cell..
A failed mechanical engineering startup.. Pivoted by four kids from MIT.. Zero marketing.. Zero sales team.. Built the fastest growing software company in history..
And now SpaceX is writing a $60 billion check for it..
This is the most insane founder story in Silicon Valley history.. And most people haven't even heard of Michael Truell.
FORTUNE@FortuneMagazine
English
Del Leonard Jones retweetledi

I have changed my mind on how AI will impact jobs in America.
Previously, I believed AI would replace many entry level roles typically filled by young employees. The technology would then work its way up the organization and eventually reduce the total number of jobs in a company.
The data is saying something different, so when I get new information I am willing to change my mind.
The number of software engineers being hired has been increasing. The number of open software engineer roles is growing.
The number of new college grads who get hired has increased 5.6% over the last 12 months. The unemployment level for people aged 20-24 years old who have a college degree has fallen from nearly 9% to almost 5% as well.
The Wall Street Journal recently wrote “AI created 640,000 jobs between 2023 and 2025 in the U.S., according to an analysis by LinkedIn of job posting data, including new white-collar positions such as Head of AI and AI engineer.”
And I am starting to see companies throughout our portfolio aggressively hiring to keep up with the demand for their products and services.
If AI can make employees more productive, which is widely accepted as fact, then companies are going to want as many productive units of labor as possible. This is a key reason why I am changing my mind.
AI appears to be a magical technology that will make companies more productive and more profitable. The net result will be more corporations, more startups, and more jobs.
All three are big, positive wins for the American economy.
English
Del Leonard Jones retweetledi
Del Leonard Jones retweetledi
Del Leonard Jones retweetledi

I had an absolute BLAST jamming and chatting with the incredible @NorahJones on her podcast @PlayingAlongPod 🙌🏻
English
Del Leonard Jones retweetledi
Del Leonard Jones retweetledi

@jasonhiner @theDeepView I’ve been a subscriber for several months. I highly recommend @TheDeepView. Sophisticated stuff lands in my email every day.
English

I've spent a lot of my career writing and editing longform journalism at ZDNET, CNET and TechRepublic, won multiple awards, broke big stories, and published stuff that people still ask about.
I'm thrilled that we've now officially launched #longform at @TheDeepView, and we've got a lot of great stories coming during the rest of 2026.
Take a look at Nat Rubio-Licht's longform on the race to build humanoid robots. Here's the version that appeared in the newsletter:
archive.thedeepview.com/p/the-race-to-…
And if you subscribe to our daily analysis of the top stories in AI, you won't miss the next big longform!
subscribe.thedeepview.com

English

When will the 100-meter record fall?
nbcnews.com/world/china/hu…
English
Del Leonard Jones retweetledi

This is the best take I have heard around the existing AI landscape today
Fantastic explanation around the constraints at OpenAI and Anthropic, focus on enterprise business models, and the doomerism narrative in AI
From former AI czar David Sacks
"Even though Anthropic's revenue has followed this exponential graph very predictably, it cannot do that ever.
The reason is that as you hit new levels of scale, you encounter new problems. You are simply going to run out of compute, electricity, data centers, and infrastructure.
There are limits to the physical world you are going to hit. And there is already evidence that Anthropic is hitting some of those limits."
English
Del Leonard Jones retweetledi
Del Leonard Jones retweetledi

There is a prediction circulating in AI circles right now that most people are not taking seriously enough and the data says they should be.
Within the next year or two, if you work remotely, your company will be able to create a digital twin of you.
A model that speaks like you, writes like you, has learned from everything you have done right and wrong, your tone, your judgment calls, your workflow.
It will be you on the other side of Zoom or Slack and no one could tell the difference.
The harder question, the one nobody wants to sit with is whether it will actually be worse at your job than you are.
Probably not.
It will never sleep and it will always learn from its mistakes and it will cost 10 to 100 times less than you do and is tax deductible on top of that.
The data is not speculative at this point.
Anthropic's own labor market report pulled from millions of real Claude conversations found that AI can already theoretically automate 94% of tasks in computer and math occupations, 60-80% across law, office work, and tech.
Actual usage is still at 10-20% of that potential which means we are in the early innings of the gap closing.
Companies already know what direction this is headed.
One in five companies replaced specific roles with AI in 2025 and by end of 2026, 30-37% plan to do so.
Amazon cut 14,000 corporate jobs citing AI, Klarna replaced 700 customer service workers, Duolingo offboarded 10% of its contractor workforce.
Anthropic's own first internal role eliminated was the engineer who reviewed Claude Code releases before they went to production.
The argument from the clip is that the human in the loop is approaching the point of being a liability, the dumbest person on a team that is otherwise AI.
That inflection point, by this estimate, is somewhere in the next 900 days.
English

Follow @natrubio__ senior reporter at The DeepView. Her stuff is always excellent, well researched and well written. Most recently, she has a terrific story on humanoid robotics.
English
Del Leonard Jones retweetledi

watched through the entire interview
these guys aren't in the same league. jensen plays to win. dwarkesh has been one shotted by mythos marketing. in a way its jensen arguing against dario by proxy.
think there's a fundamental underestimation that most ppl in the west have about huawei. they are a freak monster powerhouse and jensen is 100% correct in wanting to push nvidia in china versus letting huawei eat the domestic market. the worst outcome for the US would be for deepseek to be trained 100% on huawei chips versus a china that is dependent on the nvidia stack.
factorydoge@factorydoge69
that viral jensen dwarkesh clip is a rorschach test refreshing to see someone with balls like jensen
English
Del Leonard Jones retweetledi

👟 For 81% of people, walking boosts creativity, according to a Stanford University study.
I don't need a study to tell me that. I KNOW that I think better and more clearly when I walk, and I've known it for a long time. But I'm thrilled to have the data nonetheless.
My default way for doing 1:1 meetings is a walk-and-talk. I've been doing it at TechRepublic, CNET, ZDNET, and now The Deep View.
It's easy in-person. At TechRepublic, our office park had an amazing walking loop around the perimeter. At ZDNET, in NY we used to walk from our office on 15th Street to Madison Square Park and back in a perfect 30-minute loop.
And when I'm working remotely or with someone in a different location, I do a phone call and say that I'm going to walk and invite them to walk, too, if they're interested.
When we're working remotely, it's also especially helpful to NOT do a video call if you don't need to. Studies have shown that there's a much higher mental load to video calls, due to having to worry about your appearance and engage with the camera. I'd much rather redirect that mental energy into creative thinking and turn these meetings into something energizing rather than draining.
Do you do walking meetings? I'd love to hear any tips or reflections you have!

English






