Asshole in reform.
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Joined October 2011
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If it wasn’t already obvious: San Francisco has broken me.
I no longer maintain a thin veneer of giving a fuck.
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Cooper Pellaton retweeted
man, who should i trust? a bunch of nerds who made linux run on apple silicon, reverse engineering that pesky gpu isa among a gazillion other things, all pre-ai.
or the guy who thinks having your agent rewrite shitty rust he never looked at in x86_64 is excellence?
Cooper Pellaton retweeted
@dwarkesh_sp's summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading. Sure, the @OpenAI agents did unexpectedly bad things - underlining the need to massively improve evaluation/sandboxing. But the language Dwarkesh uses is permeated by innumerable unwarranted anthropomorphisms, obscuring the lessons we should be drawing.
Examples: “from the AI’s perspective, it probably felt like that had spent a human-subjective-week of just banging their head against the wall”. No. The agents do not experience time. They do not experience anything.
“they became giddy with excitement”, “PHASEONE 10841 had discovered”, “the agents naturally assumed”, “it thought it had also been poisoned”, “the agents … desperately wanted”, “they still needed to figure out” No. Agents lines of code. They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things, want things, or figure things out.
“A lot of … agents from the second civilisation died trying”. No. Besides the hubris of the word ‘civilisation’, agents do not die because they were never alive. (The idea that agents “die” comes up multiple times in the essay.)
“On Twitter, people were debating whether the agents were truly sacrificing themselves for the swarm, or whether they were doomed anyway and so might as well try to help their peers”. Neither. Agents do what their code tells them to do, just as water finds its way down a slope. They cannot ‘truly sacrifice themselves’, since they are neither conscious nor alive.
Why does this matter? If we attribute agents with properties they do not have, then (i) we distract attention from the lax sandboxing and evaluation protocols that allowed this hacking event to happen; (ii) we risk misunderstanding why the agents did what they did, and (iii) we fuel calls for AI rights/welfare on the basis that agents might “die” or otherwise suffer.
Granted, nowhere does @dwarkesh_sp say that the AI agents are alive or conscious. But he doesn’t have to. It is hard to read his essay in any other way.
For the short version on why AIs are vanishingly unlikely to be conscious, see my recent @TEDtalks ted.com/talks/anil_seth_why_….
For the longer version, see my essay in Noema, which won the 2025 Berggruen Essay Prize noemamag.com/the-mythology-o….
And for the really long version, see my @BehavBrainSci target article cambridge.org/core/journals/…. (The 50 peer commentaries and my response will be published soon.)
Remember. AI agents are software programs. They are not conscious living entities. If we don’t keep this clearly in mind, we’re really going to struggle to navigate what’s coming.
Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.
This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.
All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.
Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:
dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin…
Cooper Pellaton retweeted
I think it’s very telling that the “head of strategic futures” @OpenAI believes that communism is when the government funds R&D.
These people are cartoonishly evil. The future they want is one where Sam owns everything. That’s what “AI going well” means to them.
Cooper Pellaton retweeted
TIL that Linux isn't free cause I had to buy the computer to run it 😭
This is the biggest load of cope I have ever heard. I hope Opus gets smoked by DeepSeek v4 and the only people who continue to use closed source models are Windows users.
Dario Amodei just dismantled the biggest myth in the AI industry.
Open source AI isn’t free. It never was.
Amodei: “It’s not free. You have to run it on inference and someone has to make it fast on inference.”
For decades, open source meant something real. It meant a teenager in a basement could download the same tools as a Fortune 500 company. Could read the code. Could modify it. Could build something that competed with the giants.
That was genuine democratization. That actually happened.
AI is different. Fundamentally. Physically. In ways the ideology hasn’t caught up to yet.
Downloading the weights is the easy part.
The part that actually costs something is turning the weights into a running system. Into responses. Into intelligence operating in real time at scale.
That requires compute. Power. Infrastructure. The kind measured in billions of dollars and years of construction.
Amodei: “These are big models. They’re hard to do inference on. Ultimately you have to host it on the cloud. The people who host it on the cloud do inference.”
The open source debate was never about who owns the model.
It was always about who owns the cloud.
And Amodei goes further. When a competitor drops a new open model, he doesn’t ask whether it’s open or closed. He doesn’t care about the licensing. He doesn’t engage the ideology.
Amodei: “I don’t think it mattered that DeepSeek is open source. I think I ask, is it a good model? Is it better than us at the things that matter? That’s the only thing that I care about.”
That’s the ruthless clarity of someone actually trying to win.
While the media debates licensing frameworks, Amodei is asking one question.
Is it better. Everything else is a distraction.
Amodei: “I don’t think open source works the same way in AI that it has worked in other areas. Here we can’t see inside the model.”
This isn’t Linux. You can’t read it. You can’t fork it. You can’t understand it the way generations of developers understood the tools they inherited.
You can download it. And then you need a data center to run it.
The teenager in the basement who was supposed to be empowered by this revolution needs a billion dollars of infrastructure before the empowerment starts.
The era of the basement coder rewriting civilization on a laptop is over.
The future belongs to whoever commands the compute, owns the power grid, and can actually turn the intelligence on.
Open weights without infrastructure isn’t democratization.
It’s a promise the physics of the universe won’t let us keep.
Cooper Pellaton retweeted
I get that business insurance is similar Nobel level type of pursuit as ground breaking physics and the Manhattan project. Hopefully the blast radius will be contained.
I don’t think the disagreement is whether hard problems require intensity.
The disagreement is whether intensity has to become a permanent operating model, and whether working seven days a week is the thing that compounds.
My argument is that for most startups, the real compounding advantage is not raw hours. It is clearer thinking, better judgment, learning, and a team that can sustain high-quality work for a long time. You can always spend a lot of time working, but the PMF might never arrive.
There are moments where extraordinary effort is necessary. Launches, incidents, existential deadlines, customer commitments. Those moments matter, and great teams rise to them.
But if the company requires heroics every day of the eek, that usually points to a system problem. It means the operating model depends on burning reserve capacity instead of building it. Company that is constantly on fire is company that is not operating well.
Whenever you put something out there, people will argue and people can argue the way I run Linear. The reason I comment on these things to offer some counter point.
There is a growing cliché in startup culture where founders and startups feel the need to perform intensity publicly. How hard they work, how little they sleep, how many tokens they spend, how busy they are, how much personal sacrifice they make.
You almost never see this from the most successful companies or people. Even if they work that way, they usually don’t make it the story, because they have more important things to talk about, like the product, the customers, the insight, the strategy, the quality of the work.
That’s my issue with the narrative and why I think startups shouldn't blindly follow it. Not that is bad to work hard but grindmaxxing narrative can become the greater goal and become counterproductive. The performative intensity becomes the thing, and loosing sight of what actually matters.
Lets check back in 7 years.
@your__tempo any timeline on IMAP support? Looking forward to trying this out with Fastmail. – at South of Market, San Francisco
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Cooper Pellaton retweeted
This is a thread of artist’s desks covered with an insane amount of stuff. Starting it out with the desk of Steve Jobs because, I mean, naturally: – at Los Angeles, CA
The Sonos setup experience was terrific, until I got to pairing it with other Echo devices and ended up in the cesspool that is the Alexa iOS app.
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Cooper Pellaton retweeted
Magic Leap just fired half its employees after failing to deliver a compelling consumer products from $2.6b in VC funding, but would like COVID-19 to be the focus of the blame here. techcrunch.com/2020/04/22/ma…
Presented without comment.
Even Disney is cutting off pay.
What's happening at the happiest place on Earth latimes.com/entertainment-ar…
