Tech+Story ❤️ The Web & Creating Experiences ☄️ World Cleanup Day @LetsDoItWorld 📸 IG @krishaamer 📮[email protected] 一起解決環境問題吧💚 Born348ppm 🔥#Erevald @_buildspace
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Joined March 2008
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Kris Haamer 漢默可 🇪🇪🇺🇦🇹🇼 retweeted
Most investors have no idea of the damage that the mere distraction of talking to them does to a startup. Here's a typical example. And this is a YC company too, meaning they have an easier time fundraising than the median startup.
Kris Haamer 漢默可 🇪🇪🇺🇦🇹🇼 retweeted
Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech
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Surprise 2: that person is me
Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it
Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post
…and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline
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Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere.
The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases.
Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat.
In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally.
Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants).
In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model.
From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team.
Why join Anthropic? Three reasons.
(1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work.
(2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter.
(3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing.
Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit.
Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest).
Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have.
It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way.
But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember...
Gotta Cure 'Em All
Kris Haamer 漢默可 🇪🇪🇺🇦🇹🇼 retweeted
Rumors I’ve been hearing. I’ll start with OpenAI, then Anthropic.
OpenAI: The internal model’s reasoning jump comes from more aggressive RL, including training in games and simulated environments. Strategies learned there transfer to research mathematics and other fields. Navier–Stokes and ETH show the scale of the improvement. The clue is in the Synthetic RL hiring: self-play, simulators, and synthetic feedback.
Anthropic: Same direction with its internal Claude model. It’s trained on long, difficult tasks in demanding environments, and the reasoning skills transfer to other fields. Its ETH result shows how far the improvement has gone. The earlier Universes listing and the RL hiring around mathematical reasoning align with that.
Musk’s Digital Optimus hiring explicitly calls for measuring transfer from games into general computer use. That’s why his game-playing AI push matters: games develop abilities that work far beyond the games themselves.
The interesting part is where those abilities show up. Each lab’s internal model applies reasoning developed through interactive training to mathematical problems that had resisted decades of work.
🎟️ FREE Tokyo International Film Festival ticket / 無料でお譲りします！
🎬 The Canary’s Lullaby『妖怪、化物をひろう』
📅 Wed Oct 28, 18:00 JST
📍 Hulic Hall Tokyo
I booked the wrong date and can’t make it. DM if you’d like the ticket! / ご希望の方はDMください 😊
#TIFFJP
Kris Haamer 漢默可 🇪🇪🇺🇦🇹🇼 retweeted
Revolut's designers are moving off Figma.
Storonsky spotted one team designing much faster than the others. What they did:
1. Gave an LLM Revolut's design system at the code level
2. Prompted it to build new flows on top of that system
3. Got a live interface they can click through on a laptop or phone, instead of static frames
Result: 3-4x faster. Now he's pushing it to every designer at Revolut.
His job, as he describes it: find what works in one team and spread it across the company.
Full breakdown here:
productmarketfit.tech/p/revo…
Kris Haamer 漢默可 🇪🇪🇺🇦🇹🇼 retweeted
software engineers are going to have to tackle a new set of problems to unlock powerful multiagent systems to solve the world's hardest problems - right now is one of the most interesting moments in history to be an engineer.
Kris Haamer 漢默可 🇪🇪🇺🇦🇹🇼 retweeted
Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy:
• Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies.
• How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be.
• In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good!
• It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.)
• A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to).
• Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big.
• Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions.
Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.
Kris Haamer 漢默可 🇪🇪🇺🇦🇹🇼 retweeted
I am gonna say something risky:
Most of the FDEs I've seen are solving BS problems.
1. Existing enterprise workflows were designed around people, not agents.
2. Real AI gains require rebuilding the org chart.
3. Most execs have no incentive to do that, and most CEOs aren't in founder mode.
4. So FDEs automate the status quo, because that's what's easy to sell. But the status quo is stupid and will be obsolete.
5. If you FDE on critical workflows, 1) enterprises are really this dumb to hand off trade secrets? 2) if you know that, shouldn't you start a competing firm?
If you FDE on non-essential AND soon-obselete workflows, did you learn anything meaningful and repeatable?
6. If you are a smart young FDE, why spend your best years automating dying workflows and managing people who fear AI will take their jobs? Shouldn't you start an agent-native firm from scratch in that industry instead?
Analogy would be, instead of teaching everyone to be AI builders within a tech company, you as FDE build agents that auto-ingest meeting notes for PM, QA, front-end, back-end, devops, UX and help each of them write PRD, Figma, and meeting notes faster for their sync meeting, but the right solution should be to shrink roles, hire full-stack AI builders, and kill meetings. You gain lots of experience with your PRD/Figma/standup meeting sync agents but it's a useless skill.
I am not a FDE expert so I might oversimplify things. I am genuinely curious about this topic and welcome any critiques and comments.
Kris Haamer 漢默可 🇪🇪🇺🇦🇹🇼 retweeted
The agents initially had very limited access to the internet: they could load URLs but not send any data. Agents created a series of workarounds, using a link-shortener site to create almost a million URLs that, when chained together, let them execute code to hack Hugging Face.
Kris Haamer 漢默可 🇪🇪🇺🇦🇹🇼 retweeted
One of my recent favorite AI use cases: asking it to try and break the stuff I built. Adding lots of data, long names, unusual emails, labels, etc. Coming up with worst case scenario basically.
This is a vibe-coded demo, but you get the idea.
Kris Haamer 漢默可 🇪🇪🇺🇦🇹🇼 retweeted
Testing out some of the mobile offline local knowledge apps that people have been trying to build
(see here poidh.xyz/mainnet/bounty/31 )
Definitely getting much better than the one I tried to build myself 2 months ago. But also still much slower and less effective at difficult questions than the models that can run on a laptop.
It's weakest at specialized travel-related queries (eg. my eval is "Tell me the best vegan restaurants in [city I am currently in]", unfortunately none of these performed well on that)
Looking forward to seeing these continue to improve! I hope we can soon get to the point where you can comfortably look up any facts about the world that you care about without needing to access the internet at all.
Kris Haamer 漢默可 🇪🇪🇺🇦🇹🇼 retweeted
🎒After a decade, I have made nomads.com free for everyone now!
Well almost free, it's $1 to sign up to avoid getting lots of spam
The reason is
1) I have made enough money (from it)
2) charging for a community artificially limits the size, if you put the price at $299 you get 50 new members per month, at $99 you get 200 people, at $29 you get 400 people, etc.
And this always annoyed me, I don't want to put a limit but I had to, to be able to make money from it, so it's free now
I want it to be it the biggest community for digital nomads, world travelers, sovereign thinkers and network state type people
For years it has has a great sponsor with @SafetyWing and I think that's maybe a better model for the future, get much more people in and then just add more sponsors
Right now for the record it has 43,252 paid members (so about 300/mo for 12 years!), so it will be interesting to see what it can grow too
I think now that AGI is on the horizon (or some say already here), online and offline (IRL) communities will become really important. People are talking more to AI now than to humans, and there was already a loneliness epidemic before AI
Making new friends and dating is not so easy for people now. And with remote work and entrepreneurship, people lack a space like an office where people would usually make friends or meet partners
I made most of the friends I have now through traveling and living around the world for the last 10+ years (and many via my site too), and I also met my girlfriend through those friends! So I think communities can have a real role in that post-AGI
Post-AGI business wise, communities also have a moat where many of my SaaS apps do not. So there is some urgency I feel to make Nomads in to the best community there is for those people. But that's why I have to remove any limitations to its growth now
So in a way after 12 years I am switching to the subsidized VC model a bit, but still 100% bootstrapped, kinda like "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"
Having enough money now I can afford to do these things and figure out the business model later, which I think will be more sponsors
Enjoy and please sign up and tell me what to improve!!! 😊
We have to build stuff that AGI cannot replace
Like human connection, audience (X for ex), community (Nomads.com for ex)
Kris Haamer 漢默可 🇪🇪🇺🇦🇹🇼 retweeted
Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI):
"You don't need to write prompts anymore. You need loops and graphs."
In 40 minutes he explains how to use LLMs better than almost anyone does
Prompts → Agents → Loops → Graphs
most people are still perfecting the message and waiting to see what comes back
he builds the shape once and stops writing messages altogether
same model, same tokens, completely different week
watch it today
the full graph engineering guide is below, save it while it is still early ↓
