Looking for the frontiers. — AI/App consulting, founder @apptentive (acquired), ex-Apple, 5th gen California cattle rancher.

San Francisco, CA
Joined February 2007
Trying hard not to comment on the Current Thing.
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In 2002 I was a new grad desperate for a job. Passed Google phone screen but they were only hiring people with graduate degrees. In 2007 I was at Apple and had just moved onto Time Machine. Google tried to poach me, bypassing the SJ ban on poaching (which they mentioned!), but I had just switched teams and didn’t want to leave. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️
i have a funny story on this. i got flown out by @Google for an interview, this was very early in my career, i was 19 or 20. they found my work on @dribbble. i'd only been designing professionally for about a year and wasn't really in the tech scene yet. i was doing emails and ebay templates on the side. a google recruiter called me and said they were supposed to do several rounds of phone interviews first, but they liked my work so much they were just going to fly me out. i was like...really? they rented me a car, a hotel and i was on my way to mountain view. i'm sure once i got there, it was immediately clear to them they should've done those phone calls. they were asking me about product design. how would i solve this complex problem. how would i design this or that. my experience at that time was making ebay templates for a guy who flipped electronics. so i didn't get the job. about 15 years later google reached out again, in tokyo. this time i got the job, but i passed the offer. i didn't want to move back to sf. so yeah, never give up!
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(On my previous team at Apple I wrote a source code search engine that got me some attention internally.)
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Andrew Wooster retweeted
The sustained info war assault on open models is an agenda driven, self sabotage for our society. The PHP vulnerabilities were found by Sol 5.6 as part of a defensive audit, for example, not abliterated models. Putting our head in the sand and pretending vulnerabilities do not exist is idiotic. Better we find all these old, human written mistakes and fix them with AI. If you have a pair of magic glasses that show you what buildings will fall down the answer is to fix the buildings, not smash the glasses. When HuggingFace was under attack and when OpenCode was under attack they needed open models to defend them because closed models refused. Eventually OpenCode, because they're a prominent project, were granted access to OpenAI Daybreak Blue. Many individual researchers get denied with obscure errors and no explanation. To be clear, DayBreak is a fantastic project, and OpenAI is doing their best to be responsible here, but not everyone gets access and everyone has a right to defend themselves. Nobody should have to beg for permission to defend themselves from cyber assault. When you're under attack, waiting to see if you get granted access to defend yourself via a black box KYC process is how we end up helpless, watching as our shop burns while raging looters storm it and destroy our life's work. AI can be used for attack and defense and many of the recent attacks used both open and closed models, by the lab's own admissions. Open models are often the only thing standing between us and the new reality of cyber assault. If we ban them or restrict them in the US, then US companies will just be defenseless against global cyber assault actors who are not going to respect those bans.
I strongly believe a part of why so many critical vulnerabilities are happening all over the proliferation of "abliterated" models, or models with safeguards removed. You can access an abliterated GLM 5.3, a near frontier AI model, on @abliteration_ai today. And it's a world class penetration tester for like $10.
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It’s cute when it is just PHP or whatever, but when your model takes out the power grid for four weeks you’re going to be charged with terrorism.
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Andrew Wooster retweeted
Replying to @ofdistantworlds
my only comment is “we warned you that the thing we’re building would hurt you” will not fly with the general public
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Andrew Wooster retweeted
"we tried to warn the world". What a way to say: "we gate kept our models so that only the to 100 companies who could afford to pay us millions of dollars had access to them" "we created the most unrealistic guardrails for every small business, code maintainer, and hobbyist around so you couldn't actually check your shit for vulnerabilties" "we created a FAKE CVP that takes your identity, but doesn't actually given any usability to solve for cyber issues" "AI will kill 10% of the population if you dont let us be the only ones to tell you whats good and bad in AI" Is everyone in this company living inside of a bubble, inside of a bubble, where they think they are humanities saviors? "Dont worry guys, we're going to save you if you just pay us millions a month for access to our models, but only if you're a top F100 company, and than you little peons have to pay millions to them to get to the millions from us." Oh yeah....you tried to warn us.
quite the statement from Anthropic's head of security
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Andrew Wooster retweeted
We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence. block.xyz/dessa
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Andrew Wooster retweeted
I just created this SF voter guide comparison with Claude Design, holy moly what a great infographic Grouped by ideological faction, sorted by controversial Incredible cheat-sheet to grasp the state of politics in the city right now
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I could buy a large ranch in California for that. I’ve basically stopped house hunting here for now. This market is dumb money.
This 600 square foot cottage at 617 Sanchez street San Francisco sold off market for 6 million. $10,000 per square foot! That’s gotta be a price per square foot record. Lot size: 2,622
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Andrew Wooster retweeted
The entire point of a rules-based liberal system is that, when you play by the rules and win, then what you've won is yours, by right. That's the whole foundation of the system. When there's an "except if you win too big" exception, then it's all just lawless fugazi
Seeing the tsunami of comments, I realize the irony: You are right that I was admitting to puzzlement at the fact that (many, not all) centi-billionaires act like the homo economicus of the basic economic textbook😀: They maximize utility (or at least wealth), try to keep as much as they can, and the hell with other motives. And, indeed, this is what puzzles me. I would have thought (but this is the left wing me…) that they would care about more, including the welfare of others less lucky, and would be willing to pay the tax. That they might even volunteer to help (a few of them actually do). I hear from the comments (although I suspect none comes from a centibillionaire…) is that maybe they care (although some of the comments are : Why should they?). But, even if they do, they do not trust the government not to come back with another “one time tax”. And that money given to the government is a waste of money. This may indeed be the reason, and I should not have been surprised. I am afraid that there is not much the CA state can do in terms of credible commitments not to come back for more. But on the waste argument. The centibillionaires could have come back and offered public private partnerships to fund specific projects that they find worth funding. (Or maybe the state could have offered them)
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I am hopeful we will just move to higher level tasks, but this is certainly a possibility. Maybe even the most likely one, short term.
Wake up. Every profession deemed white-collar, the middle class dream, is about to be decimated by AI, at a much faster pace than anticipated, with monstrous social consequences.
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Andrew Wooster retweeted
started reaching out to people in LA 🇺🇸 for @Maniadotinc ✨ wasn't ready for this 😂
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Andrew Wooster retweeted
You could argue we're actually witnessing the opposite of a stock market bubble right now.
Chart of the year
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Market movement feels totally disconnected from the technology direction.
AI basket looks like dotcom style collapse ...
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Andrew Wooster retweeted
Fantasy computer security problems: "Maybe by sending packets and detecting the timing of the vibrations of the computer case, it is possible for an attacker to gain information about the private key." Real computer security problems: "The private key was 4. Not 4 digits. 4."
‼️ BREAKING: The private keys of 8 certificates from Indian certificate authority eMudhra were compromised, Mozilla says. Firefox blocked them within 3 hours. Each key should be a 116-digit number, but one was just 4. Anyone can guess them and forge HTTPS certs for any website.
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Often when you explain something to someone, they have to find a reference in their own experience to anchor their understanding. The problem with the state of AI is when we explain the current state of things, there is no anchor. Or it is wildly out of date. So what we are saying seems impossible.
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The tech job market is bad nationally, but it's awful in California Official state data released today showed the Golden State has lost 30k tech jobs over the last year alone and is now 36k below pre-COVID levels
The US tech sector continues bleeding jobs in official data released today—overall, employment decreased by 17k last month and is down 69k over the last year That's nearly as bad as the worst of the 2024 tech-cession, and much worse than the 2022 boom or even pre-2020 norms
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That would actually explain a lot.
Man some of the stuff in Anthropic's IPO S-1 is wild... 'sufficiently advanced systems could discover methods of transmitting information, matter or autonomous systems backward in time, potentially allowing future AI systems to influence events preceding their own creation.'
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The quoted text and screenshot are not from Anthropic's S-1; media reviews of the confidential filing describe existential risks and model behaviors like resisting shutdown but not time travel, and no public S-1 has been filed on EDGAR. theverge.com/ai-artificial-… iposcouter.com/anthropic-ipo-…
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It’s a joke. But, you know, only kind of.
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