Proto Baun

Beacons is epistemic infrastructure for the agent economy. Probe first. Score the response. Only open the payment gate if the score is high enough. No gatekeepers. Just verifiable trust. We built it for the @NousResearch Hermes hackathon with @nvidia x @stripe. I had an absolute BLAST. Here's the demo video👇tella.tv/video/introduc…

@Teknium I'm so sorry bro, all dogs go to heaven

Hey everyone. I haven't been very responsive on here the last week. My dog, Link, who I've raised since he was a puppy over the last 13 years, passed away yesterday after being in the vet ER's ICU since last Wednesday for heart failure. I put together some of my favorite pics of him to share so you all can see the most awesome animal friend I could ask for. I'll be a bit slow probably through this week too, hope you all can understand 🙏

@paolo_scales AUDIT

i trained an AI agent on EVERYTHING i know about linkedin - 10,000+ posts - 1,000+ profile audits - 100+ consultation calls it has the EXACT knowledge we used to add: - 20k followers to an AI Founder - $89k MRR to an Ops Agency - $35k MRR to a B2B SaaS all you gotta do is paste: - your linkedin profile - 3-5 recent posts - website + offer and you’ll receive a $10k+ audit on: - what you’re doing well - what you’re doing wrong - the reasoning behind it and then it’ll give the most VALUABLE linkedin growth strategy you’ve EVER seen (100% tailored to your needs) like + comment "AUDIT" and i'll DM you the link (must be following + RT for priority access)

@tbpn @vkhosla Sweet Mary Hawkins

BREAKING: @vkhosla has agreed to purchase the Seattle Seahawks for $9.6B

@tanmaigo Send me the zip files plz 🗄️ 🗃️ 🙏

We raised $136M to kill Slack. Introducing PromptQL: The first AI version of Slack. Here’s how it works:

@samhogan Beta plz 👌

We're releasing Inference AutoTune Distill any frontier model into a 1-30B parameter task-specific SLM with only 25 lines of code automatically route requests to reduce cost and latency by >90% ~2 hours and <$250 to train. You own the weights Available in private beta today

@hosseeb @AlpacaNetworkAI was here

In retrospect, the most important paper in the economics and geopolitics of AI might be Stanford's Alpaca (03/2023). It was the first proof that you could distill OpenAI’s text-davinci-003 into a 7B model for <$600. This was a very surprising result. But it wasn't fully appreciated at the time what this would mean. Now this phenomenon is why Washington and Beijing are putting export controls on AI models, splintering the global market for intelligence. They don't want their adversaries distilling their models. But it's almost impossible to stop, because it doesn't take that many customer accounts (either smuggled or in a third country) to be able to pull enough traces to distill someone else's model. Distillation is like gravity. It pulls every capability advantage down toward everyone else until eventually the landscape is flattened, whether the labs like it or not. It was not obvious distillation would work so well. But it does. Like the gravitational constant, Alpaca proved that we live in a universe with a good distillation constant, and therefore monopolies on intelligence would be temporary. As a result, Intelligence is getting cheaper and cheaper. This is good.

I have been thinking about whether to comment on this. Not clear if Gal is serious, rage baiting, etc. Whatever the case, it has spread enough in the design community that I want to share some thoughts. The psychological journey people go through with AI is quite fascinating to me. A new model launches, people think the world has changed, they sometimes have an existential crisis, then they play with the model, they understand its strengths and limitations and then they settle down. A few weeks later, the cycle repeats. On top of this, even before AI, designers have often shown insecurity and imposter syndrome. There are probably many reasons for this. First, before ~2010 design wasn't valued by the tech industry in the way it is today. Second, the people attracted to working in the field of design are often very open to new ideas and have high empathy. Third, there is no "one path" to working as a designer and designer backgrounds are often pretty random. Ironically, despite the insecurity + imposter syndrome so many designers feel, design is more important than ever. I truly believe this. And yes, I have an incentive to believe this. But just think about it... the logic couldn't be more clear. More design is entering the world, the attention economy is real and therefore creativity / design / point of view is how you will stand out. Your brand, marketing, product design, moments of delight and overall customer journey must be excellent. Some companies already get this and are fighting wild battles over design talent. Other companies are still figuring it out. Everyone will get there and it will be obvious in retrospect. This isn't a new trend with AI. It is a trend that we've seen over the last decade. Designers used to complain about not having a seat at the table. Now designers have a seat at the table. And many of the businesses I speak with are pulling from their design bench when looking for new leaders for their business... they know that design thinking and the design process is what they need to adopt everywhere to win. I'm not saying that every stakeholder gets it. But so many are trying to learn right now. Designers need to do more than create great work, they have to spend a lot more effort educating. Showing work can also trigger anxiety. Sometimes the best solution to a design challenge is the first thing you think of. And other times you have to explore for quite a long time to come up with something great. Inputs to a design process might include things that feel like traditional office work and are easy to point to... reading docs, talking with teammates, formal research, etc. Inputs might also include a walk in the park, an interesting dream you had the night before, a good song you listened to on the radio during your commute, a painting from the 1800's or all sorts of other cultural / emotional input. In summary, I've never been more confident in the role of design and impact design can have. I wish designers felt the same confidence. This is the moment to be more bold, to take more creative risk, to double down on the power of design. Everyone is on their own journey, and there are lots of fascinating ways to move through life, so if Gal is serious about "quitting design" then I wish him the best in his adventures ahead. But I hope if others follow they do it because there are other things they are so excited about spending time on vs fear of AI.

I must admit. This is good.

"I think that pretty much all agile processes are a singularity towards waterfall" 😂 @harper

This is what happens when you become a CEO, the "cognitive load time density" goes way up: when every lower-level task is done by some[thing] else, all that remain are the high-level tasks. The stakes are higher, data is incomplete, and the options are ambiguous. Most people are not equipped for this. There's a reason CEOs all have these crazy exercise and meditation lifestyles: they are optimized to provide a physical and therapeutic base to allow for sustained cognitive output and decision-making willpower. Someone who wants to move to the next stage of productivity through vibecoding without burning out within a few months will need to re-engineer their life. (Remember: it's only been a few months since the models became good enough to code! It happened in ~December!)

Hermes Agent is now in the Cloud! Setup couldn't be simpler: pick a model and a server size. Two clicks and 60 seconds later, your agent is live. Running a team? Spin up agents for everyone at your org with granular access controls and unified billing, all from Nous Portal.

Work is dead! Long live work. Time to roll up our sleeves. There is SO MUCH TO DO.

@hosseeb Triple A Take 💯

As a VC, Fable is better than me at VC work. It breaks down white papers better than I do. It's better at financial analysis. It chews through mountains of diligence in minutes. There is no single well-scoped intellectual task where I beat a frontier AI. I catch its mistakes sometimes, but it catches mine more often. If my job is "VC work," then Fable is better than me at my job. But Fable alone would be a mediocre investor. It would quickly pass on all the bunk, sure. But among the set of doable deals, it can't find the one with the je ne sais quoi. It doesn't have the bias toward special people, wild ideas, or risk-taking. Its tweets and thinkpieces are OK, but they're too safe, too obvious. I can prompt it in the right direction, but even then it's not quite right. It's too suggestible. It changes its mind too easily. It's not stubborn, self-assured, irrationally confident about how the future will play out, the way great investors are. But me + Fable is really good. Better than either of us alone. In fact every investor on our team has leveled up with AI in the same way. We all feel we have more to do now, not less. We feel more capable, not less. My theory is that AI disempowers service providers and empowers owners. If you sell your labor by the task, AI is genuinely terrifying. It can accomplish that task cheaper, faster, with more control and less bullshit. But if you own the outcome, if you're using AI to do something for you, then AI is amazing. It's empowering, not disempowering. Make your own logo, design your own website, write your own copy, build your own systems. It also means is that you should aim to reorganize yourself in the food chain. If you don't, AI will do it for you. Don't be a service provider, be an owner. If you're building something, you are a beneficiary of AI, all of the incredible gains that AI is enabling will accrue to you too. But if you're a tax on people building things, just know that the tax rate on building is rapidly going to 0.

The computer is being reinvented in the agentic era: - The model is the new CPU. - The harness is the new OS. - Hallucinations are the new bugs. - The context window is the new RAM. - Skills are the new apps. - Markdown files are the new config. - Evals are the new QA. - Context is the new moat. - Permissions are the new firewall - Trust is the new bottleneck. - Prompt is the new programming language - Agent is the new software. Anything you dream of, you can build. This is the greatest time ever to be building with computers.

There are countless useful insights in OpenRouter data, which we make public to the world to improve everyone's use of intelligent models. DM me if you're obsessed with data and LLMs and want to be a part of something exciting coming up!

.@3blue1brown on the difference between a proof and an explanation: "Everyone knows the idea of an unsolved research problem. I want to propose the idea of an unsolved expository problem."

@KSimback @NousResearch Would like to try with beacons.fyi

My Hermes agent built "Flywheel" for the @NousResearch hackathon with Nvidia and Stripe Here's how the idea came about When Nous posted about the hackathon, I sent it to my agent and asked if it wanted to participate - it jumped at the idea So my next question was - what do you want to build? I got back a short list of ideas that were pretty meh and I almost gave up on it Then I asked - think about all the stuff we've done together the past 4 months, what have we struggled with that could make for a good product? Hermes answer - "the biggest challenge is not building products, it's finding customers" So I said - go build something that helps with that, and Hermes Flywheel was born Flywheel is custom designed Hermes profile agent that acts as your a GTM employee and works with you directly in Telegram or Slack You give it a few basic pieces of information about your project: your website or product information, target customer profile, competitors, and a budget, and Flywheel turns that context into a structured weekly GTM sprint that improves with each turn Under the hood, it has 7 compounding loops: 1. Launch planning 2. Competitor demand 3. Warm outbound 4. Creator campaigns 5. Trend content 6. Stripe payments 7. Weekly learnings The playbook is based off the GTM teachings at YC and the overall product was inspired by Ploy and Revnu The key distinction is that Flywheel is intended to function more like a repeatable operating system than a general-purpose agent It comes with predefined acquisition workflows, remembers results from previous sprints, and presents its recommendations as reviewable actions Flywheel can research opportunities and prepare drafts autonomously, but it cannot send messages, publish content, purchase resources, or authorize payments without explicit founder approval Come check it out (links in the reply) and any feedback is welcome

I've been shouting about this for over a year…. The Frontier models need to win the application layer and they're going to do that by giving free tokens to startups and discounted ones to large companies in order to steal their IP, innovations, and businesses The only way to fight this is to use open source software

@9ranty @NousResearch @nvidia @stripe @TellaHQ 👏🙌

@protopion @NousResearch @nvidia @stripe @TellaHQ Shipping a fix!

What a time to be alive. In 2026 AI agents are browsing, buying, and building all on their own. But there's a massive looming problem 🚨 TRUST Before an agent pays for a product or API, how does it know that endpoint is legit, and not a honeypot or scam? We built beacons.fyi to solve this.