Jesse Anglen

Subtext: how Zuck’s obsession with VR lost him AI leadership and “the greatest deal Google ever made.” “if Facebook didn’t buy DeepMind, they would end up in the arms of Google. Hassabis came out to the West Coast to have lunch with Larry Page, still the strongest suitor. Zuckerberg got wind of his visit and invited him to dinner. Arriving at Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto home, Hassabis administered a subtle test on him. The two men discussed the potential of AI, and Zuckerberg expressed appropriate excitement. But then, as the dinner continued, Hassabis brought up other hot technologies: virtual reality, augmented reality, 3-D printing. Zuckerberg sounded equally excited about all of them. ‘That told me what I needed to know,’ Hassabis said. ‘Facebook offered more money, but I wanted somebody who really understood why AI would be bigger than all these other things.’ After the dinner, Hassabis got back to Larry Page. ‘Let’s go further,’ he told him.” — book excerpt from today’s WSJ: wsj.com/tech/ai/deepmi… Zuck’s misplaced devotion to VR and the metaverse hurt the company much more than the $80 billion of wasted spend. It’s the reputational hit. @DemisHassabis divined it in his final test, and Zuck didn’t even know that he blew the opportunity. Eight years later, he renamed the company Meta, doubling down on what anyone with tech savvy knew was DOA. Then, in a 2025 attempt to play catchup, Zuck spent $14 billion on a data labelling company with a salesy leader and upended his AI team. Once again, anyone with tech savvy rolled their eyes on the acquisition and management changes, further evidence that the tech leadership at Meta was seriously lacking. TLDR; beware the metaverse. It is a dystopian vision at best, and luckily for humanity, headsets are still nowhere near readiness for mass adoption.

@GaryMarcus @tsarnick > These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights. "Alignment Whack-a-Mole : Finetuning Activates Verbatim Recall of Copyrighted Books in Large Language Models" x.com/heynavtoor/sta…

Okay, @gdb is team CLI all the way. @garrytan thinks MCPs suck. So we hit the streets of SF to see if the city agreed. We posed a simple question: MCP or CLI? - Basically everyone under the age of 35 said CLI - One person said MCP was as bloated as Java - & unsurprisingly, numerous people told us to touch grass Final score- MCP: 3 vs CLI: 17 SF has spoken, and @composio listened. Our universal CLI is now live! Drop your best CLI vs MCP hot take in the comments and we'll send the best ones some very sick gear 👀 Link to try our CLI in the next thread ⬇️

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Billions of $$ raised to generate images, and none of them let you actually edit what you get. You type a prompt, get something close, try to fix one thing, and the whole image regenerates. Now 50% of what was working is gone. So you prompt again. And again. Stuck in prompt doom loops, burning tokens every single time. The output is always a flat PNG, limiting what you can do with it. @world_lica actually reads your image and breaks it into structured, editable layers. You go in, change what you need to change, and everything else stays exactly where it was. Route each layer to the right model or a capable human. You don't need to regenerate from scratch or pay the token tax to fix a font color. Enterprises publishing creatives across site, social, and email are already using Lica to own their model and own their output. We're grateful to be supported by @Accel, @amasad, @snsf, @southpkcommons, @villageglobal, and @pirroh to build the editing layer that AI image gen has been missing. Want early access? Check the next thread below.

When @karpathy built MenuGen (karpathy.bearblog.dev/vibe-coding-me…), he said: "Vibe coding menugen was exhilarating and fun escapade as a local demo, but a bit of a painful slog as a deployed, real app. Building a modern app is a bit like assembling IKEA future. There are all these services, docs, API keys, configurations, dev/prod deployments, team and security features, rate limits, pricing tiers." We've all run into this issue when building with agents: you have to scurry off to establish accounts, clicking things in the browser as though it's the antediluvian days of 2023, in order to unblock its superintelligent progress. So we decided to build Stripe Projects to help agents instantly provision services from the CLI. For example, simply run: $ stripe projects add posthog/analytics And it'll create a PostHog account, get an API key, and (as needed) set up billing. Projects is launching today as a developer preview. You can register for access (we'll make it available to everyone soon) at projects.dev. We're also rolling out support for many new providers over the coming weeks. (Get in touch if you'd like to make your service available.) projects.dev