got the HRT gang back together!

We are terminating Chris Degnan for unethical conduct involving Cognition. The last few months have seen incredible progress in AI capabilities. San Francisco has flourished as new companies that solve new, more ambitious problems are finding great success. Generally, it is a wonderful time to be building. We at @FactoryAI have seen overwhelming interest in our model-agnostic coding agents and our software factory product. Our team has 10x’d in size, while our revenue has 100x’d year over year. This momentum has been unprecedented. A much larger competitor, Cognition (makers of Devin) has fallen behind us on the capabilities that matter most to customers: cost, quality, and security. Instead of competing in the market, Cognition engineers feigned interviews with us to pry information about our product. Not finding what they were looking for, Cognition has decided to throw their weight and money at people with direct knowledge of our most confidential plans. It feels as though ethics is being thrown out of the window in the AI era. People are willing to do anything, including exploiting privileged information and violating ethical boundaries. I think this is unique to our time, and I don’t think it’s right. Integrity still matters. Yesterday, I made the decision to immediately terminate Christopher Degnan’s roles as a Board Observer and Advisor to Factory, after over a year of service. Prior to this decision, Chris told me he had a casual conversation with an executive at Cognition AI. When I questioned his intentions, he reassured me that ethics aside, he had “made too much money” and was “too lazy to go work for Cognition,” which I trusted and believed. On Monday, Chris spent time advising the Factory team on a handful of confidential board-level matters. That evening, he called me to say that the conversation that was initially described as casual and one-off was actually formal and recurring. For weeks, while he sat in our board meetings and advised our leadership team, he was also confiding with executives of our largest competitor. Chris was subject to confidentiality obligations in connection with his work with Factory. We do not know the extent of the information he shared, but it puts his timely questions about our product roadmap and what the parity gap involves into a new light. It is sad to sever a relationship with someone who has been a trusted advisor - and even a close friend - for over a year. But Chris’s conduct is unacceptable to me. Trust in Board Membership is one of the sacred bonds in the Silicon Valley, one that helps the startup ecosystem thrive. With it comes an enormous responsibility. That trust was violated. Competition is good. I respect and in many cases admire our competitors. San Francisco is a beautiful, singular place where the bold and ambitious go to defy the norms and precedents of the past. But certain principles that must remain. Violating ethics to seek advantage turns what should be positive-sum into zero-sum. We all love technology. And we all love to compete. But we must hold ourselves to a higher standard. The future of software engineering comes with abundance that will impact every person on Earth. Building that future comes with immense responsibility. We must build and compete with integrity.

I’ve joined @cognition to lead marketing! Looking forward to sharing what we’re cooking up. We’re hiring across the board and we’re going to build a legendary marketing team…my DMs are open :)

Several months of work went into building Devin's Cloud Mac! We had to rebuild its disk, networking, provisioning, VNC, and computer use from scratch, in Rust. Read my first X article about how it all works 😊

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training. You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…

Introducing SWE-2, our closest model yet to the frontier. On leading evals, it scores on par with recent frontier models – at up to 70% lower cost. We scaled RL to multiple trillions of parameters, with a refined recipe that pushes the Pareto curve on both capabilities & cost.

The world needs far more software than it can build. Cognition exists to change that. We’ve just raised over $2B at a $48B valuation, led by a16z, Accel, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir. Since our round in May, run-rate revenue has grown from $492 M to almost $900 M.

Exciting day for NVIDIA and @huggingface. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. They allow every developer, startup, university, industry and country to build with, customize and benefit from AI. Thank you @ClementDelangue for coming to me. NVIDIA is going to be a great home for Hugging Face, its community and the future of open models. 🤗 blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia…

Scoop: SpaceX tried to acquire Cognition. On the heels of its $60B deal with Cursor. w @nmasc_ @EdLudlow bloomberg.com/news/articles/…