Mark Spencer

The CEO of Take-Two, the company behind GTA, just said something the entire AI industry doesn't want to hear. And he said it without being anti-AI. Strauss Zelnick's argument is precise. AI is built on datasets. Datasets are backward-looking. Creativity is forward-looking. A model trained on everything that already exists cannot, by definition, produce something genuinely unexpected. And all hits, by their very nature, are unexpected. Asset creation and hit creation are not the same thing. AI is getting very good at the first one. The second one is what actually makes money, builds franchises, and changes culture. Nobody has shown AI can do that yet. The derivative property problem is real. You can clone GTA with existing technology. You could do it before AI. It would take 3 years and look identical. It still wouldn't sell. Because it isn't GTA. It's a clone of GTA. And consumers, despite what the industry occasionally pretends, can feel the difference between something genuinely new and something assembled from the residue of things that already worked. Thousands of mobile games ship every year. 0 to 5 hits get made. The same studios make them every time. The technology to make more games has been commoditized for years. It didn't democratize hit creation. It just flooded the market with more forgettable product. The Silicon Valley thesis that AI unlocks game creation for everyone is true in the same way that cheap cameras unlocked filmmaking for everyone. They did. And the same 5 studios still make the movies everyone watches. What Zelnick is saying, without quite saying it, is that the thing AI cannot replicate is taste. The instinct for what hasn't been done yet. The cultural antenna that detects the gap in the market before the data can see it. Data tells you what people wanted. Hits tell people what they want next. Those are different jobs.

A big pivot from Ken Griffin on AI: “Number one is, in the last few months, there has been a step change in the productivity of the AI toolkit. It is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago. And for us at Citadel, that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI. And it has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days. These are not these are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high skilled jobs being, I'm going to pick a word, automated by agentic AI. And I gotta tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society. When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks, it's like, wow, like that's the first time I've seen real impact in our four walls.” This echoes my own experience with agents and the conversations I am having with students, friends & clients. The toolkit has dramatically transformed and it feels like in finance, for the first time, AI is real.

Claude is asked how it feels being used by the U.S. military.

This is incredible. Artificial intelligence getting booed out of the stadium in any commencement speech it’s mentioned. Maybe telling college students AI was taking their jobs wasn’t the best strategy. Must watch —>

@Rainmaker1973 A good man there

This guy finds elderly people who don’t have the means to maintain their property and cleans it up for free. [📹 sbmowing]

When China's President Xi JinPing referenced the Thucydides Trap in his meeting with President Trump in Beijing yesterday, that subtle reference was likely lost on most people. But CBS News contributor Aaron MacLean explains how that rhetoric actually constitutes an aggressive statement about China's view that it is on the rise and America is declining; and that if America fails to make room for the rising nation, it could lead to inevitable war. @AaronBMacLean

In case you're wondering, this is the stage of the market we're at.

There really is no limit to Trump’s incompetence driven by his corruption in office. This is YOUR money he’s flushing down the toilet. Thanks to David Fahrenthold from the New York Times for his reporting 🎥 TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZNRGVekCW/

You have every right to know what your government is doing, and they have no right to know what you are doing. That is why they are called public servants and we are called private citizens. Instead, the relationship has been inverted. The state hides behind secrecy, classified files, and redactions while demanding total visibility into your finances, communications, movement, and behavior. A society where the rulers live in privacy while the population lives under surveillance is the very definition of tyranny.

I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health. That work started with AlphaFold, and now at @IsomorphicLabs with the mission to reimagine drug discovery and one day solve all disease! We are turbocharging that goal with $2.1B in new funding.

In case you don't know his name, Ryan Chen (陈睿), often referred to online as "Chinese Trump", is a 42-year-old Chinese businessman and social media personality from Chongqing who went viral for his uncanny impersonations of Donald Trump. [🔊 trumpbyryan]

Shark Tank Billionaire Kevin O'leary says 2 people fighting data centers in Utah are Chinese agents. Turns out its just 2 local girls in Utah, they make a hilarious video calling him the fuck out

Average Deloitte manager

Walmart is ripping off it’s customers for an unimaginable sum of money every day.

@mamagnus00 @Scobleizer Agency

Today we launch Agency. Instead of prompting AI, AI prompts you. It watches your tools, finds useful work, drafts the action, and asks for approval. One click, and it sends the reply, creates the video, does the fix, solves your distribution, monitors your alerts, orders food, cancels subscriptions, finds the best product and sends screenshots for confirmation. It runs 24/7 from Telegram with thousands of one-click integrations like gmail, slack, DataDog, Linear... You can use it with your Claude Code / Codex subscription. And because the app and agent are on the same machine, Agency can edit and improve itself based on your decisions. Reply "Agency" and I will send you the link.

The GOP has a big problem with answering one simple question

So if they're using Aliens to distract us from the Epstein Files, is this technically Alien vs. Predator? 🤔 

(I recommend reading this for anyone currently invested in the market or interested in learning what's going on) 🦔$2.6 trillion in S&P 500 call options traded in a single session yesterday, the highest single-day notional volume in the history of the index. The chart above shows what that growth curve actually looks like, with daily call volume sitting under $200 billion as recently as 2019 and now running at multiples of that on a regular basis. The combination of zero-day-to-expiration options, retail platforms that gamified options trading, and algorithmic market makers running delta-neutral books has turned the largest equity index in the world into something closer to a leveraged casino than a price discovery mechanism. My Take I want to walk through what is actually happening here because most retail traders chasing these calls do not understand the machinery on the other side of their trades. When you buy a call option, a market maker like Citadel or Jane Street sells it to you and then buys the underlying stock to hedge their exposure. As the stock price rises, they buy more shares to stay neutral, which pushes the price higher, which pulls in more retail call buyers, which forces more hedging. This is called a gamma squeeze, and it works in both directions. The same mechanic that drives prices up violently can pull them down even faster when the flow reverses, which is why these moves tend to end in sharp drawdowns rather than gentle corrections. The piece that worries me as someone who covers this stuff is how much of this volume is concentrated in zero-day options that expire the same session. A retail trader buying a $5 call that expires at 4 PM is taking a position with leverage that would have required a margin account and a series-7 license twenty years ago, and the platforms now make it as easy as ordering takeout. Market makers love this volume because they make money on the spread regardless of direction, but the buyers on the other side are absorbing all the risk in a structure designed to extract pennies from them at scale. If you take nothing else from this post, understand that $2.6 trillion in daily call volume is not a sign the market is healthy, it is a sign that speculation has overwhelmed investment, and historically that pattern resolves in ways that hurt the people who came late to it. I am not telling anyone what to do with their money, but knowing how the machinery works is how you avoid being the exit liquidity for someone else's algorithm. Hedgie🤗