Mike Carrieri

@karrisaarinen Ask the #investors . No one pays to be not sure of an #outcome .

We keep hearing about 10x or 100x productivity gains in engineering and knowledge work. But outside the model labs, I haven’t seen the corresponding 10-100x revenue growth across the market or increase in quality. So where is the productivity going?

@HgcMatt @futurej

Elon's one weird trick is using an inspiring mission to hyperstition the impossible into the merely late.

@HgcMatt 4/18/2017 #TheMusKGroup #analogwormhole Tool A + Tool B = Tool C #iterate

#Claude facebook.com/reel/121064349…

@BuildurBrand_io #Scaled 9/30/2019 #266

whoever builds a real solution to AI rate limits will become the world's first trillionaire.

@ja3k_ Does anyone separate out the #hallucinations and watch progress? #antfarm

It's so funny the "LLMs can't be made to not hallucinate because they're always hallucinating" take. Have you ever considered you use the same brain awake and dreaming?

@bldinsilence_ Done 9/30/2019.

There’s a 50/50 chance that AI architects are going to take over the world over the next 5 years

Still waiting for the 1.

@rohitdotmittal #SantaClara Shuffling to the correct queue.

A friend recently said: "Success in Silicon Valley is about moving from one group chat to another." He's partly right. As you become more successful, you get pulled into group chats that are invite-only, reserved for people who've cleared a certain bar. When a friend goes quiet in one chat, you often find out they've moved up to another. That's how you know they crossed it. But you don't build something great because you're in the right group chat - you get into the right chat because you built something great.

@The_DanielKing 6/22/2022 Analog+digital

One reason I now spend so much time on the AIxSpace question is a belief that the jagged frontier will continue. Yes, recursive self-improvement will at some point take effect. Yes, there will be a Great Vertical Integration (i.e., the AI companies start in-housing other products/services of the economy) in which space and robotics get AI-automated. But capabilities will remain jagged. And the countries (or companies) that win during the Great Vertical Integration will be those that hand-hold their jagged AIs in a "stoichiometry-aware" way to make the most of them. It now is the case—and I expect it to remain so—that our jagged AIs are brilliant team members on a competitive school project. Brilliant, brilliant brilliant. But the value they create with some directive hand-holding is meaningfully greater than the value they create without hand-holding. In our little "school" competition, that difference is the 1st-order difference. (the 0th-order difference was AI capabilities)

@gothburz Still #odd that absolutely nothing happened between March 16, 2020 - May 11, 2023. #LoveThatReset

I am the Director of Iran Programs at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. I have held this position for nineteen years. In that time, Iran has been six months from a nuclear weapon on four hundred and fifty-six separate occasions. A business model with a shelf life that renews itself. Our budget was $17 million in 2021. It is $32.5 million today. It doubled during the period in which Iran was, according to our reports, perpetually six months from a bomb that never arrived. I want to be clear: the bomb not arriving is the product. The bomb arriving would be a catastrophic loss event. We are not in the prevention business. We are in the imminence business. Imminence is a renewable resource if you manage it correctly. There is a number. The number is six months. Not three. Three months means war is imminent, war resolves the issue, resolved issues don't require a think tank. Not twelve. Twelve months means the threat has receded, receded threats lose donors, donors who leave don't come back. Six months is the Goldilocks zone. Six months means the bomb is always coming but never arrives. Six months means permanent funding. Netanyahu said Iran was three to five years away in 1992. He said three to five years again in 1995. He told Congress one to two years in 2009. He told the United Nations "by next spring, at most by next summer" in 2012. It is now 2026. The bomb has been coming for thirty-four years. We have been paid for every single one of them. The morning after the Bibi-Trump call leaked, Bernie Marcus called at 6:47 AM. He gave us $19 million last year. That is more than half our operating budget from one man. The Home Depot co-founder did not ask whether America was safe. He asked what happens to his naming rights if the deal holds. I told him naming rights survive any geopolitical outcome. This is technically true. The Marcus Family Foundation Conference Suite will remain the Marcus Family Foundation Conference Suite whether Iran has a nuclear weapon or not. The distinction is whether anyone books it for panels. Our original IRS filing in 2001 described our mission as "providing education to enhance Israel's image in North America." We have since updated the language to "nonpartisan policy research." The product did not change. The packaging did. We found that policy is just PR with footnotes. The margins are better and you get to brief senators instead of reporters. We employ fourteen full-time Iran analysts. Their job is to produce reports concluding that Iran is six months from a nuclear weapon. If an analyst concludes fifteen months, that analyst is counseled on methodology. If an analyst concludes three months, that analyst is counseled on tone. We had one analyst in 2019 who concluded Iran had functionally abandoned its weapons program. He teaches political science at a community college in Delaware. We still cite his earlier work. The earlier work said six months. Richard Goldberg left our office in 2019 to join the National Security Council as Director for Countering Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction. He implemented our recommendations as government policy. He then returned to our office in 2020 as a senior advisor. He now evaluates the effectiveness of the policies he implemented based on the research he conducted before he implemented them. We call this a secondment. Government calls it the revolving door. We don't see a door. We see a hallway with our name on both ends. Mark Dubowitz goes on television four times a week. He cites our reports. He wrote the reports. The viewer sees an expert citing independent research. The expert and the research are the same person wearing different lanyards. We call this vertical integration. Fox calls it analysis. Our booking calendar calls it Tuesday. In 2007 we held a strategic planning retreat in the Bahamas. The title was "Confronting the Iranian Threat: The Way Forward." Twenty-four people attended. The way forward, we determined from our beach chairs, was maximum pressure, escalating sanctions, and the eventual elimination of Iran's enrichment capacity. We have not revisited the conclusion. We have only revisited the Bahamas. We killed the JCPOA in thirty-seven months. Op-eds, congressional briefings, a sanctions architecture so complex it became its own constituency. Mark Dubowitz personally placed forty-six op-eds arguing the deal was flawed. Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote the doctrinal framework. Clifford May did nine hundred broadcast appearances in two years selling the conclusion. It was our finest work. The president who signed the withdrawal thanked us from the Rose Garden. That same president is now building a replacement deal. Using our infrastructure. Without asking. Like designing a prison and watching the architect move in voluntarily. When Trump said the deal was "largely negotiated," our development team held an emergency meeting. Not about policy. About the fall fundraising letter. The letter currently opens with "Iran is six months from a nuclear weapon." Someone suggested "Iran is six months from violating the deal." The room applauded. The structure survives. The number survives. Only the preposition changes. I have a drawer in my desk. In the drawer are forty-three op-eds I have placed in the Wall Street Journal since 2009. Every single one contains the phrase "six months." Forty-three times I told America the bomb was coming. Forty-three times it didn't come. And forty-three times they published the next one anyway. A subscription. Renewable annually. Auto-draft. Lindsey Graham called last Tuesday. He wanted talking points for his Fox hit. I gave him the phrase "zero enrichment or no deal." He knows Iran will never accept zero enrichment. I know he knows. He knows I know he knows. In February he told Axios the president's aides were preventing him from striking Iran. Now the president is making a deal with Iran. Graham cannot oppose the deal without opposing the president. He cannot support the deal without invalidating twenty years of "bomb Iran" positioning. So I gave him a phrase that sounds like support and works like sabotage. A kill switch shaped like a compliment. We charge $650,000 a year for this service. Graham has never asked for a receipt. Mark Levin went on the radio and said Iran "cheats, lies, and hides." He said enforcement is impossible. He said the deal will be violated. He did not name the president. He cannot name the president. He named Iran six times and the president zero times. This is the syntax of a man who knows where his audience lives. We provided the talking points. The talking points are designed to attack the deal without attacking the man who made it. This is a very specific skill. We have been refining it since 2018. Ben Shapiro called the deal "concerning" and said he was "generally against" certain provisions. He did not say which provisions. He did not name the president either. Shapiro's audience is the same audience that will primary you if you break with Trump. He knows this because we showed him what we did to Thomas Massie. Thomas Massie opposed unconditional support for Israel. He co-sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act. He criticized the June 2025 Iran strikes. So we spent $32.6 million removing him from Congress. AIPAC's super PAC put in $4 million. A Trump-aligned group funded by our donors added $5.6 million. It became the most expensive House primary in American history. For one congressman from Kentucky. He lost 54.4 to 45.6. A price list. Every sitting member of Congress saw that number. Every sitting member of Congress understood what it means. You don't need to threaten 435 people. You need to destroy one, publicly, and let the rest do math. Loomer has been useful. She enforces in spaces we cannot reach directly. When anti-war voices gain traction inside Trump's orbit, she applies pressure through channels that don't trace back to a think tank letterhead. We don't coordinate. We don't need to coordinate. We share donors. Shared donors are shared incentives. Shared incentives produce aligned behavior without a single email. The most beautiful part is the architecture. Bolton built Maximum Pressure as a ratchet. Each turn. JCPOA withdrawal. Sanctions. IRGC designation. Soleimani. Each designed so the next was inevitable and reversal was impossible. We published nine hundred pages of policy papers supporting each turn. The papers were cement. You pour cement so the next administration cannot dig it up. Except the man who ordered the cement poured is now jackhammering his own sidewalk. The ratchet assumed institutional continuity. It got a man who doesn't read our papers and doesn't return Mark's calls. Someone once asked me what happens to ordinary Iranians when we recommend secondary sanctions on their banking system. I said that was outside our research mandate. Our mandate is the nuclear program. How people eat is a different department. We do not have that department. No one has ever funded that department. I have been asked this question four times in nineteen years. It has never appeared in a donor report. It has never come up at the Bahamas retreat. It is, as far as I can determine, a question that exists outside our model. Tomorrow I have a call with our board. The agenda has one item: "Scenario Planning for a Post-Deal Landscape." The actual item is "How Do We Survive Peace." I have one slide. It says "Iran Will Violate This Deal." Nineteen years of work and one slide is all I have ever needed. The rest is formatting. The countdown clock in the Bolton Strategic Clarity Suite still says six months. Netanyahu said six months in 1992 and it said six months. Netanyahu said six months in 2012 and it said six months. Goldberg went to the NSC and it said six months. Goldberg came back and it said six months. The JCPOA was signed and it said six months. The JCPOA was killed and it said six months. Trump made a deal and it will say six months. Our 501(c)(3) status depends on Iran remaining a crisis. I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean that if peace holds, our Form 990 becomes a work of fiction. Our general counsel has mentioned this once. The room did not laugh. The room looked at the clock. Six months is not a prediction. It is a prayer. Prayers don't expire. They get renewed.

Sonny Rollins passed away today. He was, in John Coltrane's own words "The best Tenor sax of all times". That's like getting endorsed by God.

It is with deep sorrow and profound love that we announce the passing of Sonny Rollins. The Saxophone Colossus died this afternoon at his home in Woodstock, NY at the age of 95. 1/2 conta.cc/4wFIDrM

@rcanedesignwrks Do you also do fire mitigation?

Well blow me over with a feather, you might want to sit down for this one folks. The annual cost of invasive species damage in the US that Sentinel Robotics can directly address is greater than the annual budget of NASA, NOAA, DoE, EPA and DoI COMBINED!

@Shaun_Fosmark #AdS / #CFT Edge = 6 = diameter = 2 × 3 = 2 × r 3-space E = 8 = 2 × 4 = 2 × r

Lmao who would have thought gravity was about Geometry even at the quantum scale in 4D space!

@pzakin #266

There's a specific pattern of internet projects that I find particularly exciting: people banding together to achieve a shared goal. Good examples are wikipedia, kickstarter, seti@home, bitcoin. I wonder what successors of this pattern will emerge in the agent era. What are the kinds of coordination structures that will emerge to motivate agent efforts towards shared objectives? An obvious template (there are surely others) would be the "prompt tilt": a task that is performed when a collection of agents pool together sufficient token budget. What else is being built in this direction or should be?

@Enscion25 #AGI = 10^15 + 1

An AGI system will be sample efficient enough to create its own reinforcement learning sandbox while referencing and reasoning through a world model ( even if it's separate / external) if a task requires. It should master such a situation within a matter of seconds or minutes

@djcows #quantum still comes in pairs. Still just a bit, but with 4 outcomes.

Einstein warned that God does not play dice now we're building dice and asking them to speak like God