CEO Additive AI. Ask me about passthrough entities đ¤đ
San Francisco, CA
Joined January 2010
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Dwight Crow retweeted
Over 70 percent of you are younger than I am by a few decades. My editor recently asked me what I hope the American public understands about my generation. This was my answer:
My generation often faced impossible situations, but we accepted the missions we were given. As stated in Isaiah 6:8: "Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?' And I said, "Here am I. Send me!"
We may not have been the greatest generation, but we are their proud sons and daughters, and we learned from them. I think we made them proud.
Dwight Crow retweeted
I recently got back from nearly 2-month trip to Utah 3 years after my last trip in 2023.
They really cleaned up Salt Lake City of its "homeless" issue which is just drug addicts (mostly the state, the city is blue and incompetent).
What I learned is they started checking every one of them to see if they had drugs. If they did, they were given a choice. Go to jail or go to rehab. Most of them picked jail. They removed all the homeless camps.
So the difference is,
In 2023 I saw junkies strung out in barely more than undies on the street.
In 2026 I saw no one that resembled that anywhere in downtown SLC.
I suspect most American cities have a drug problem, not a homeless problem.
one of the most important startups in existence. materials science is upstream of almost all human endeavor
We built high-throughput materials labs in Menlo Park to create a loop between experiments and models. The labs generate fresh data, the models learn from it, and then help us decide what to try next.
Using only 1,300 H200s, plus months of our experimental data, we mid-trained and RLâd an open-source model to surpass GPT-6 Astra on our analysis benchmark. We call it Neon.
This is real footage from our lab. Weâre focusing first on hard problems in materials science, including superconductors, magnets, and semiconductor materials.
Read our blog posts below.
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Dwight Crow retweeted
My testimony today at the Texas State capital
Iâm the co-founder of CostPlusDrugs.com.
We started Cost Plus Drugs because the prescription drug market is too complicated, too opaque and too expensive.
Our model is simple: we show what we pay for a drug, add a transparent markup and pharmacy fee, and show the customer the price.
No games. No hidden spread.
And a large percentage of our customers already have insurance.
They come to us because our cash price is often lower than what their insurance plan asks them to pay.
That tells you something is wrong.
Here are five things Texas can do about it.
1. Let patients shop for cheaper drugs
If someone's insurance says a prescription costs $500, but they can buy the exact same drug for $100 cash, let them buy it for $100.
Then credit that $100 toward their deductible and out-of-pocket maximum wherever Texas has authority to do so.
Patients should be rewarded for saving themselves and their health plan money.
They shouldn't be punished for it.
That's how you create something healthcare desperately needs:
Price competition.
2. Standardize PBM and TPA contracts
Texas should require the state, cities, counties and school districts to use standardized model contracts and mandatory terms for PBMs and TPAs.
I've reviewed these contracts.
They routinely run hundreds of pages.
I've seen contracting packages longer than a thousand pages.
There is no human beingâor group of human beingsâon this planet who can stay awake and understand every provision in contracts that complicated.
I don't care how much coffee they drink.
I call it contractual terrorism.
The vendor only has to sneak a couple of tricks through hundreds of pages.
The employer has to find every one.
It can't.
I've developed a model PBM contract designed to eliminate the major tricks and hidden economics we've identified.
Texas can have it for free.
Use mine. Improve it. Open source it.
I don't care.
Just stop making every government entity negotiate these contracts from scratch.
3. Make the economics public
If taxpayers are paying the bill, taxpayers should know the price.
Pricing. Fees. Rebates. Guarantees. Pharmacy reimbursement. Affiliate compensation. Audit rights.
Make them public.
I'm not talking about patient information or legitimate security information.
I'm talking about the money.
You cannot have an efficient market without price discovery.
Without price discovery, you get information asymmetry.
And when one side knows dramatically more than the other, guess who wins?
Not taxpayers.
Not employers.
Not patients.
Open the contracts up and let competitors see what they have to beat.
That giant sucking sound you hear will be money moving away from healthcare conglomerates that are too big to care and back toward taxpayers, employers and patients.
In the immortal words of Charles Barkley:
I guarantee it.
4. Kill the gag clauses
PBM contracts are like Fight Club.
The number one rule of Fight Club is that you can't talk about Fight Club.
The number one rule of many PBM contracts seems to be that you can't talk about your PBM contract.
That's insane.
Let employers compare pricing, rebates, fees, guarantees and reimbursement terms.
Markets work better when buyers know what other buyers are paying.
5. Make enforcement hurt
If a healthcare company commits a serious violation, give them one mulligan.
But after a second material federal or Texas enforcement action within a defined period, make them ineligible for new Texas government contracts for a period of time.
Two strikes.
You're out.
Today, some of these companies can make billions, get caught, pay a fine and write it off more easily than I wrote off an NBA fine.
That's not deterrence.
That's a cost of doing business.
And Texas should spend more on enforcement.
If Texas spends $10 million auditing contracts and analyzing claims and prevents $100 million in unnecessary spending, that's not overhead.
That's a 10x return on investmen
Dwight Crow retweeted
for scale, sf just kicked off a study for this part.
a one station extension. where the tunnel already exists.
the study is scheduled to finish in mid 2028. not construction, just the study. for a one station extension. where the tunnel already exists.
i am as big of a transitboi as anyone (and even a big manny fan!) but these maps are a wank until we get rid of CEQA and community input and lowest-bid procurement and become serious people instead of process fetishists too afraid of a room full of angry boomers to approve a bike lane.
Dwight Crow retweeted
do you have any concept how hard it is to get a cancer drug approved and how much it costs? i hate these statistics below too, but you are the one with the power to fix this! FDA reform isn't 90% of the answer, it is *100%* of the answer!
Dwight Crow retweeted
Awesome news today -- @sunyesf scientists are de-extincting lost American trees!
@USDA just approved a genetically modified version of one of the great American trees, the American Chestnut, that went effectively extinct due to an Asian fungal blight introduced in 1904 that killed 3-4 BILLION trees (some 120 feet tall) by 1950.
By adding in one gene from wheat to the American Chestnut genome, conservation scientists at @sunyesf have shown they can make the American Chestnut resistant to the fungal blight and revive and bring back this American classic.
Let's finish this approval by @EPA and get these planted so our kids can visit these forests!!!
Dwight Crow retweeted
NEW: @ENERGY and @MTDEQ released the final environmental impact statement for the North Plains Connector.
This proposed project will link the Eastern and Western U.S. grids, boosting reliability and helping to meet rising demand! energy.gov/oe/articles/energâŚ
Dwight Crow retweeted
My opinion?
Scott Wiener is the only sensible choice for San Franciscoâs Congressional race in November.
I donât agree with him on everythingâprobably about 70% of his positions. But thatâs WAY better than agreeing with essentially none of Connie Chanâs.
Wiener is a policy wonk and a GSD Democrat: he gets shit done. He is smart, effective and has a long record of turning ideas into actual legislation. And enough with the BS sexual-predator and âgroomerâ tropes. Debate his policies, but stop recycling demonstrably false anti-gay smears.
Chan, by contrast, strikes me as a GND Democrat: gets nothing done. After years representing District 1, she has remarkably little to show for it. She repeatedly opposed the housing, public-safety and government-reform efforts that have helped San Francisco begin recovering. Her tired ideological worldview helped drive the city into the ditch.
Pelosiâs endorsement doesnât impress me. It looks like old-fashioned machine politics: back Chan now while cultivating labor support for her daughterâs future ambitions. That makes the endorsement somewhat meaningless.
Look at the people and organizations most loudly supporting Chan and ask yourself: Did they help drive San Francisco into the ditch, or did they help pull it back out?
The answer isnât difficult to see.
Wiener isnât perfect, but he is serious, knowledgeable and effective. Iâll take a GSD Democrat over a GND Democrat any day of the week.
Dwight Crow retweeted
A ROBOT DOG AND A DRONE ARE SHOOTING FIREWORKS AT EACH OTHER IN AN OPEN FIELD. THIS IS NOT A MOVIE.
dirt field. empty lot. a four-legged robot dog with firework rockets strapped to its back fires them into the air. a drone hovers above it firing back. sparks fly everywhere. smoke fills the frame.
the robot dog doesn't flinch. doesn't run. just stands there launching rockets while getting hit by return fire from above. the drone circles, shoots, reloads. the dog pivots, aims up, fires again.
someone strapped $50 worth of fireworks to a $2,500 robot dog and a $1,500 drone and started a war in a parking lot.
this is what happens when military-grade hardware gets cheap enough for people with YouTube channels. a robot dog costs less than a used Honda Civic. a combat drone costs less than a MacBook. fireworks cost less than dinner.
the US military spends $14 billion a year on drone programs. these two machines are doing the same thing for the price of a weekend at Best Buy.
the scary part isn't the fireworks. it's how easy this was to build. no lab. no funding. no government contract. just two machines, some rockets, and someone who thought it would make a good video.
it did. but the next person who builds this might not be filming for content.
who's sleeping well tonight?
Dwight Crow retweeted
This is incredible footage.
A police officer arrives at a burning house, kicks open the door, and rescues a mother and her children.
You can see the moment he mentally decides to risk his life right before he runs into the fire.
Heroes walk among us.
Dwight Crow retweeted
âopenai should pay its taxesâ is a coherent position
âopenai should pay its taxes, then personally build our housing and run our schools because city hall didnâtâ is not
but thatâs the argument being by the sf gate in this article
the funniest part is that if openai actually did it, the backlash would be immediate
build 1000 apartments in the mission? gentrification
start a school? billionaires shouldnât control education
fund a hospital? keep tech out of healthcare
we donât even have to speculate. weâve run this experiment already
zuck gave $100m to newark schools and got attacked for billionaire influence over public education
he and priscilla chan gave $75m to sf general, the largest private gift in its history.
a few years later, people were protesting to get his name off the hospital
ray dalio put $100m toward helping connecticutâs poorest students. the public-private partnership collapsed amid fights over transparency and private influence
so what exactly is the acceptable option here?
pay taxes? apparently not enough
directly solve the problem? unacceptable corporate influence
give the government even more money? thatâs just taxes again
if sf takes hundreds of millions from openai and still canât deliver housing or education, the obvious question is what happened to the hundreds of millions
not why openai hasnât started running schools and building apartments itself
OpenAI and Anthropic are ruining San Francisco sfgate.com/local/article/opeâŚ
ALT OpenAI and Anthropic are ruining San Francisco
Dwight Crow retweeted
Promote the people responsible and give them another worthy project with performance-linked bonuses and lots of authority and responsibility!
Dwight Crow retweeted
Let me say what too many seem scared to:
America is stronger because the best and brightest from around the world come here and build here.
They fuel innovation, which creates more jobs for Americans.
And the world benefits from what we all build together.
Dwight Crow retweeted
California state senators are now weighing in, asking the University of California to bring the SAT/ACT back as soon as possible.
@SenOchoaBogh @SenatorChoi @SenRogerNiello
Letter 1: â⌠students entering the University of California are not prepared for the rigorous coursework that is required to complete their degrees⌠we call upon the Board of Regents to move quickly towards reinstatement without delayâ 1/3
Dwight Crow retweeted
In terms of time, money, and penalties, I think building infrastructure for the common good is actually *more* illegal than murder.
Yes, in principle there's a pathway to permitting anything you want. In practice, it requires either an Act of Congress or a gigantic bribe or both - but murderers get away with it every day.
It's because building anything at all is illegal. We have multiple canal systems built nearly a century ago that leak or can't run anywhere near capacity, because fixing them would (normatively) take two guys and a bulldozer but (descriptively) consume 10 years and billions of dollars of payoffs to a 100-turtle-deep layer of the usual suspects. We could easily desalinate another 10 million acre feet of water per year, but ... building anything at all is illegal.
Dwight Crow retweeted
Graphic showing how the Colorado River's water is used.
More water goes to alfalfa than ALL household + non-ag industrial use combined. Is this the correct regional priority?
Long term answer IMO: make water abundant (energy + the ocean)
2024 study:
nature.com/articles/s43247-0âŚ
Dwight Crow retweeted
It seems a common experience in the lives of people with high agency is that they, at some point, metaphorically, lean against a wall and discover that there is a hidden door. That some constraint theyâve been told about turns out not to hold, and this allows them to experience something positive. And from this they get into the habit of testing if walls are actually doors, and the more they do so, the more examples of hidden doors they find, and the more inclined they are to look for them. Far from the only thing that sets them apart, but having that experience can be transformative
â Henrik Olof Karlsson
Dwight Crow retweeted
A key stat that every environmentalist who is serious about solving climate change should know:
The US Navy has put into operation over 400 nuclear reactors without a single failure that resulted in any radioactive release.
That is equivalent to the entire total number of civilian reactors deployed worldwide, but the Navyâs reactors are literally deployed in BOATS IN THE WATER, that continually move, rock, get shot at, etc.
There are non-trivial engineering challenges, but the core reality is that safe, clean, abundant nuclear is a matter of political will, intelligence, and organizational culture.
