Believer of bottom-up. Doing rather than designing. Gemba. Copy-pasting before refactoring. Curiosity is a local optima search strategy.
Paris, France
Joined April 2009
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Jiliac retweeted
Il y a un marché énorme pour vendre des solutions d'IA local pour les PME en France
Exemple : assembler des racks de serveurs dans les locaux des entreprises, installer des LLM locaux, et les rendre accessible sur le réseau interne à l'entreprise
Y'a déjà des acteurs comme ça en FR?
Citez les moi en commentaires svp
Jiliac retweeted
Let me tell you a story about how unethical Anthropic is.
In April, the Anthropic team began heavily courting our engineering team to tell them corporate secrets, technical details, and future plans for @cfosilvia.
They pretended their interest was due to our exploding popularity and accelerating compute usage, but it quickly became apparent that Anthropic was fishing for details on how we built our product and why it was so popular.
This included the Anthropic team trying to wine-and-dine our engineers, including a infamous steak dinner where someone told our team "don't worry about it, this is on Dario."
Our team was not born yesterday, so we quickly realized what was happening and refused to share sensitive information and technical details with the Anthropic team.
As we suspected, Anthropic was trying to get information from us, so they could build a competing product. Some people on their team must have a guilty conscious because they messaged us a few days ago to give us "a heads-up" that they were launching a competing product.
Thankfully, the Silvia engineering team has been aggressively working to get off the frontier models for the last ~ 6 months. That effort has been highly successful, because our compute costs are ~ 97% lower when we use our own model & hardware, the latency is lower, and the accuracy of answers materially increases as well.
The sad thing for Anthropic is they have now released an inferior product and they had to sell their soul to do it.
The only thing worse than being a trillion-dollar company that can't beat a 10-person team is being a trillion-dollar company that no one trusts and everyone knows is unethical.
Serious investors continue to choose @cfosilvia over ChatGPT, Claude, and other frontier companies because these products are not optimized to solve the actual user problem.
Today, Anthropic launched a Claude wrapper that is masquerading as a personal finance product. Best of luck to them.
But I will take the Silvia misfits vs the Anthropic losers any day of the week.
if you want to support people trying to do things the right way, and help investors be more informed, then consider signing up for Silvia today: silvia.com
Attacks grows much faster than defense.
Just because it's simpler.
We aren't in medieval times where you had logistic to figure out.
I do not think AI agents will break the whole internet.
Defense tech will grow just as fast to stop them.
What really worries me is something else.
If every business has to run defense agents 24/7 just to stay safe, token prices will go through the roof.
We already have a global compute shortage, and costs are going to get completely out of hand.
Jiliac retweeted
Last night, @higgsfield sent @ComfyUI a cease and desist (attached)
They want the Open Source Higgsfield challenge taken down within 48 hours.
Their argument is that our use of the Higgsfield name and that using their CEO's likeness is an infringement violation (man, the irony). Claiming that it makes the event look like Higgsfield is associated with it.
This couldn't be farther from the truth, which is that Higgsfield made a promise to open source its product and never did.
For the past two weeks, builders have been recreating popular closed apps as open workflows anyone can run.
So we asked our community to deliver where Higgsfield failed: apps in the open, built by the community, for the community. We've made it clear that the challenge is organized by ComfyUI and not affiliated with or endorsed by Higgsfield.
When we started Comfy, we made the community a promise. Our product stays open, free, and yours. We’ve kept it every day since, and one letter isn’t going to change that.
The challenge stays up. Comfy and open source will win!
Jiliac retweeted
Anthropic is expected to get a high junk credit rating, which is right below investment grade.
They clearly have the most advanced tech among all AI companies right now.
Still, we cannot ignore the growing concerns about their massive spending and financial risks.
And honestly, the situation at OpenAI is probably much worse.
BREAKING: Anthropic is now expected to receive a "high junk" rating from major credit rating agencies after its IPO, which could come as soon as November, per FT.
Details include:
1. Blackstone has told investors that Anthropic likely will not receive an investment-grade rating immediately after its IPO
2. Blackstone is working with banks that stumped up financing on selling the debt on to other investors
3. An investment-grade rating is "central" to Anthropic's ability to continue its AI buildout
4. The company says it expects to spend over $800 billion on computing infrastructure between now and 2045
Debt markets are increasingly in the spotlight as AI funding becomes less abundant.
Jiliac retweeted
The anti-open-weights panic looks VERY FUCKING CONVENIENT ahead of Anthropic’s IPO.
Anthropic is preparing to sell shares while pushing rules that would also cover its open-weight competitors. Big accounts are spreading fear about those models. Some have direct business ties to Anthropic.
October 15: reports put Anthropic’s public IPO filing on
October 26 and its roadshow on November 9. Billions depend on convincing investors this business can keep growing.
October 16: Anthropic’s own AI bill is circulating in Congress. Its frontier threshold is 10^25 FLOPs, low enough to include large open models.
October 21: PHP2Shell becomes public. Researchers found the vulnerabilities using CLOSED models, with disclosure and fixes coordinated through OpenAI’s Patch the Planet.
October 22: abliterated open models become a major target of the panic. Anthropic’s CISO posts "never let a crisis go to waste" urging security leaders to ask their boards for help with basic security. 4.3M views.
By October 25, Gates’s proposal is circulating too: powerful open models should run only on certified platforms that preserve safeguards.
I went through 400+ posts from October 16 to 26. This discussion includes Noahpinion, Suhail, yacine, beffjezos, Deedy, sporadica, AISafetyMemes, Matthew Green and Andrew Curran. Every account above 100K followers. Their positions differ, but the fear is reaching huge audiences.
And Deedy, who linked critical vulnerabilities to abliterated models, helped launch Menlo’s $100M fund WITH ANTHROPIC.
There is a business relationship here. There is an IPO coming. There is a company writing proposed rules for the market it competes in.
My conclusion: this wave serves the commercial interests of closed labs. Restrict the models people can run independently and you make those people more dependent on paid providers. Investors benefit from that dependence.
I run open models on my own 4x 3090. I will not quietly accept losing that freedom while people with money in the alternative explain how much safer I’ll be.
Fuck your valuation. Fuck your IPO.
Jiliac retweeted
The ugly truth about France and some of the other European countries currently in turmoil - and which none of the politicians want to admit because it'd be political suicide - is that you can't solve the problem by going after immigrants (as the right asserts) or the rich (as the left asserts), but you could solve it by going after the old.
One extraordinary statistic for you: people over 60 in France, a quarter of the population, own 60% of France's wealth, non-financial and financial (ofce.fr/pdf/revue/2025/3-192…).
And here is another crazy statistic:
that same quarter of the population, those above 60, receive nearly two-thirds of all social spending by the French government (previssima.fr/actualite/prot…) - which is famously among the highest in the world (France's government spending is an insane 57.3% of GDP).
Last statistic: they make up about 40% of voters because they're a third of registered voters (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/266…), and they turn out far more than anyone else (franceinfo.fr/elections/sond…).
Put our 3 statistics together and there's almost a bit of an apartheid situation here: the old own most of the country's wealth, collect most of the social spending and have the political power to keep it that way.
Which makes them a de-facto rentier class, living off assets and transfers paid for by younger generations.
And, of course, at the risk of stating a truism, the future is built by the young. Yet France keeps effectively taking money away from them to give it to those whose working lives are already behind them - and need the money far less since they already own the country's wealth.
What about inheritance, I hear you ask? That's the funniest/saddest aspect: given that life expectancy has kept rising, the French now inherit a home at 54 on average. The most common case is someone in their 80s leaving it to heirs in their 50s, in effect the very old transferring wealth to the about-to-be old (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fic…).
You can add this to our earlier apartheid statement: on top of all the rest, even when the old finally let go of their wealth, it stays within their own "camp".
That's my personal situation, incidentally: I'm 42, my father is 71 and he is starting to look at ways to pass things on to me and my siblings, when our professional lives are already well settled, so it'll arrive when it changes things the least, which is pretty much the French system in a nutshell.
Now, I get that there'd be some unfairness in going after them: they paid into the system their entire working lives, playing by the rules of a social contract that told them if they paid up they'd collect at the end. Changing the rules now means breaking that promise, which is admittedly unfair.
But there's no magic wealth tree in any society: you can only take it where it is. That's the way most major societal transformations end up happening. They're often triggered by a catastrophic event (the so-called "four horsemen": mass-mobilisation war, revolution, state collapse, plague) BUT what really drives change is a transfer: wealth gets pried from the privileged class who've been sitting on it and handed to those who'll build what comes next.
So, in theory and in an ideal world, you can do without the catastrophic event and directly proceed with the transfer...
The fact that in France, and elsewhere in Europe, it's the youth protesting is probably no coincidence - even though they don't frame it as a generational fight. And even though, cruel irony, the left politicians many of them march behind promise to bring the retirement age back to 60 (lcp.fr/actualites/legislativ…), which would make the situation even worse.
Let's say they understand intuitively that the system is stacked against them, even if they haven't yet figured out how. And politicians are obviously doing what politicians do, meaning pandering to the people who actually vote, while pointing the young towards easier - and politically convenient - scapegoats.
To be clear I'm not saying it's the only problem in France, VERY far from it. I'm also not saying that all old people in France live a lavish lifestyle at the expense of younger generations: there are also plenty of very poor retirees who, if anything, would deserve more.
What I am saying is that it's probably the biggest elephant in the room: everyone can see it, nobody dares mention it - no politician, from any side, wants to run on cutting grandma's pension - and it makes every other problem harder to fix.
Jiliac retweeted
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is such a massive leap forward that it honestly deserves to be called V4.5.
Yet they just slapped a date tag onto 4.1 like it is some minor bug fix.
At this point, you can run almost anything you need a frontier model for right at home on your own hardware.
Jiliac retweeted
GC Rota wrote that "Sitzfleisch" - the ability to do grueling work for long hours at a desk - is a better predictor of mathematical success than most other metrics of talent. The same applies to code auditing.
If the invention is "artificial thought with as much endurance...
Jiliac retweeted
How to actually win product of the day on Product Hunt, although you probably shouldn't:
people ask me this constantly since we launched @creem_io in product hunt several times, and got product of the day twice and fintech product of the month, how'd you do it, what's the trick.
i'll give you everything i know, it's all below and it's real. but first the annoying part: you probably shouldn't be pouring your energy into this at all
product hunt isn't what it was 3 or 4 years ago. the traffic that used to come with a top spot has thinned out a lot. realistically you win a badge, some backlinks, a spike of signups that mostly churn, and a good day for team morale. that's it. if you're a small team spending weeks building your whole launch around winning product hunt, i think you're aiming at the wrong target. But specially, if your target audience for your product is not builders, or if you are not building a VC backable startup, I don't see many reasons to actually do it.
if you actually want launch traffic, look at @UneedLists too. it's a genuinely good channel now and still a bit of a hidden secret because product hunt is just the default everyone defaults to. do both, or do UNeed and skip product hunt, depends where your users are.
ok. if you still really want product of the day, here's how it really works.
Get a good hunter
this is the part nobody explains. for the first few hours of each product hunt day, launches don't show upvote counts and the order is basically random. the only things at the top in that window are the featured products, and featured is picked by the product hunt team, not by votes. a good hunter hugely raises your odds of getting into that featured set (around 20 a day). without one, getting up there is close to impossible.
Those first few hours decide everything
if you're not featured, you're basically done. nobody scrolls through 100+ products a day. people read the names of maybe the first 5 and leave. if you're not near the top early, you're invisible, and invisible doesn't win. that's why the opening hours matter more than the entire rest of the day.
Treat the comment section like the actual game
product hunt doesn't just count upvotes, it looks at how much real conversation is happening on your page and how meaningful it is. so don't treat comments as a formality. reply to every single one, get actual back and forth going, pull people back to keep talking. the engagement itself moves you up.
Have someone glued to it all day
a comment lands, you want to be replying almost immediately. answer too late and that person's gone and won't come back. you need the conversation to never go cold, which means someone is always watching, the entire launch.
Be loud, but don't ask for the vote
you can't ask people to upvote, that's against the rules and it can burn you. but you can and absolutely should be shouting everywhere all day that you're live and people should come check you out. there's a real line between those two. stay on the right side of it and use it fully.
Never buy upvotes. ever.
launch day you'll get flooded with people selling them. doesn't matter your position, doesn't matter if you think you already lost. buy and you get your product and account banned. not worth it, not once, not even a little.
The real hack: run a hackathon
here's the thing none of the tactics above fix on their own. a product hunt day needs a team that can stay switched on, in the comments, loud, for 24+ hours straight. most teams can't, because they're tired and scattered and treating the launch as one more thing on top of a normal week.
the way we solved that also happens to be the best team alignment trick i know, and it has nothing to do with product hunt.
we took the whole team to a house in tuscany for a week and ran it as a hackathon. and that word is the whole hack. "hackathon" gives the week one job. we set one goal (ship creem 2.0) and put literally nothing else on the calendar.
it became the most productive week in creem's history, we beat our record for PRs shipped, design changes, nearly every metric we track. because the thing that kills a team's focus was never the work, it's the fragmentation, the meetings, the context switching, the ten little things pulling at everyone all day. put the whole team in one house with one goal and all of it disappears at once.
and don't skip the fun, it's not separate from the work, it's what powers it. we had a pool, did a pasta workshop, wandered into the town nearby one night and caught a street orchestra outside a church, then went back and threw our own rave with a projector on the wall. that's the stuff that makes people actually want to be at the table at 2am.
that's what carried the launch. we set up shifts so at least 3 people were awake the whole day after going live, everyone had the same goal and was loud about the launch, we all chimed in with our own social media, it was insane.
if you think i'm wrong about product hunt being past its prime, tell me
Jiliac retweeted
I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.
My observations:
1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.
2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.
3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.
4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.
5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.
6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.
They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.
7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.
8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.
Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.
9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.
10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!
11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.
12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.
13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.
14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.
15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.
16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.
17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?
18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.
19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.
20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.
21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.
Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.
Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.
Happy to be home and locked in.
Until next time!
Jiliac retweeted
Some mistakes you might be making:
Your effort level is too high
Your skills are too long
You're not aligning before you start work
You're aligning too often, and too hard
Your automated checks are too lax
Your custom tooling is too token-inefficient
You aren't doing enough automated review
You aren't reviewing previous coding sessions (with an agent)
You're doing too much human review
You aren't vibe coding enough prototypes
Your agent can't verify its own work
You're babysitting the agent too much
You've overloaded your global steering files
Your codebase is hard to navigate
You aren't building a shared language
Your codebase architecture allows bad tests to be written
You aren't thinking strategically enough
You aren't thinking enough
Jiliac retweeted
🤩🤩 The guys are giving him the props he deserves: a Top 8 Spotlight finish and an RC final in just one year . not to mention the Pro Tour. He’s the new boss of the scene this year, and he’s French.
Bien jouer mon frère tu le mérite et c'est pas fini Aubergine for ever 🍆🍆🍆
I haven't been this excited about hardware in years. Two DGX Spark boxes. Look at them.
The rational explanation: I burn ~1B tokens a day. Even at the best intelligence per euro I can find, that's ~100 EUR a day. Going cheaper means giving up quality I need.
And the setup never stays put. Providers change models and prices. Quality moves too. What worked last week behaves differently this week. Even hosted open-weight isn't immune.
The gap between those two curves is the whole opportunity. Nobody needs a smarter model, they need their Tuesday back.
Jiliac retweeted
.@OpenRouter co-founder Alex Atallah on the "everyone is building the same thing" take:
"This reminds me of this tweet I saw... Everybody's building an agent loop with notifications, third-party connectors, context management, memory, sandboxes, agentic web search, an always-on agent on top."
"This product is showing up everywhere. It is showing up everywhere, but these are just the new table-stakes primitives."
"A 2005 version of that tweet would be: 'Oh, everybody's building the same thing. A database, a users table, a sign-in page, a sign-up page, a profile page, a logout page. Everything's the same.'"
"There's like a lot of differentiation really. There's table-stakes needs for AI just like there's table-stakes needs for the web."
@alexatallah @amasad
.@OpenRouter co-founder Alex Atallah, in his first podcast since Stripe acquired the company, joins @Replit co-founder Amjad Masad and a16z's Erik Torenberg on why the future of AI is independence and specialization.
In this conversation, Alex walks through how the Stripe deal unfolded, why he wasn't originally looking to sell, and why "payments and inference are going to blend together."
Pre-OpenRouter, the typical AI workflow had one model provider to choose from, and little pressure on that provider to lower prices. Now enterprises are diversifying across labs and open-weight models, and every board is asking about AI costs and benchmarks.
Amjad argues if your company depends on one AI lab, it can turn into your competitor. So Replit is building the layer that lets enterprises use any model and any cloud, without being locked into either.
Alex and Amjad are split on personal agents – Amjad runs one agent across his whole company and loves the cross-domain joins, while Alex says general agents cause you to sacrifice understanding, and argues 10 specialized chiefs of staff beats one superagent.
0:45 How the Stripe deal unfolded
5:05 Why mixing models beats one model
7:25 Forcing the labs to compete on price
8:50 Enterprises want open-weight models
10:30 Every board asks about AI every month
12:25 Why companies must own their intelligence
14:15 Replit as the independence layer
15:10 Everyone is building the same agent
16:35 Why Amjad built bring-your-own-cloud
18:10 Amjad's agent that runs his whole company
19:55 Why 10 specialized agents beat one
23:35 Machines, not humans, should specialize
27:30 Guardrails for agents talking to agents
31:10 Models training their own replacements
33:45 Most tasks don't need a frontier model
40:50 Training small models on Qwen 8B
43:25 The Rust cycle is coming for AI
45:10 Fusion models: frontier quality at half the cost
YouTube: youtu.be/ekK8urKHPMQ
@alexatallah @OpenRouter @amasad @eriktorenberg