when the dream becomes the job i used to think the dream was to make my hobby my work. to spend my life close to the things i loved: computers, tools, interfaces, systems, tiny details, the feeling of making something from nothing. the things i used to do at night, after school, after work, in the margins of life, somehow became the center of my life. and it is a dream. i don’t want to pretend otherwise. there is a very specific happiness in getting paid to care. in meeting other people who care. in building a language around your obsession. in seeing something that lived only in your head become real enough for other people to touch. but there is also a quiet pain in it. because the thing that once belonged only to you no longer belongs only to you. it becomes attached to deadlines, teams, customers, strategy, money, reputation, momentum... curiosity becomes roadmap. taste becomes decision-making. play becomes output. the thing you once used to escape the world becomes the thing through which the world reaches you. and now there is another strange layer: the machines are getting good at the work too. not just the boring parts. the parts that used to feel close to the heart. writing, coding, designing, reasoning, making taste-like decisions, turning vague ideas into something real. the things we once used as proof that we had something special inside us are becoming things a model can approximate, remix, and sometimes do faster. that can feel scary in a very specific way. not only because of jobs or competition, but because it touches the myth you built around yourself. if the thing i became good at can be done by a machine, then what part of it was really me? i think that question is painful because it arrives at the same place. the original love. before the title, before the company, before the taste became a role, before the work became useful to other people, there was a small fire inside. curiosity. obsession. the feeling that the world became more alive when you understood a little more of it, or made a tiny piece of it bend to your will. AI can make the output faster. it can even raise the floor of the craft. but it cannot want on your behalf. it cannot decide what is worth loving. it cannot protect the strange private thread that made you care in the first place. maybe that is what becomes more important now. not whether you can still produce the artifact by hand. not whether you can outperform the machine at every task. that game is already changing. the real question is whether you still have a relationship with the source. the part with no audience. no roadmap. no deadline. the part that can wander, collect strange references, make useless things. follow beauty, be wrong, be slow, be you, be true. because that part is not separate from the work. it is the source of the work. if you lose it, you can still operate. you can still manage the machine. you can still prompt, review, decide, ship, and keep things moving. but the work becomes thinner. safer. more explainable. less alive. so maybe the real discipline is not to work harder, rest more, or care less. maybe it is to keep returning to the place where the love began – before it became useful, before it became legible, before anyone needed anything from it, before even the machine could mirror it back to you. not to escape the work. to make sure the fire inside is still alive.

$NVDA $MU $SNDK $LITE (Bloomberg) -- Massachusetts lawmakers are seeking to establish the nation’s most stringent state-level safeguards for artificial intelligence, a proposal that’s divided an industry the governor’s office is concurrently seeking to woo. An economic development bill passed by the state Senate last month included a requirement that leading AI labs undergo independent reviews of the catastrophic risks posed by their frontier models at least once every 120 days, a first for a US state. The findings would be made public, though the state couldn’t use them to halt AI development. The provisions go further than other recent laws in California, New York and Illinois and come as Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey and other leaders seek to build up the region’s AI sector and curb the outflow of startup talent. Healey, a Democrat running for reelection in November, didn’t include the AI safeguards passed by the Senate in her initial economic development proposal. Both she and House lawmakers still must agree to the provision. Leading AI developer Anthropic PBC has advocated for states to adopt more stringent AI regulation in the absence of a federal standard and calls the Massachusetts proposal “the clearest and strongest AI legislation in the country.” OpenAI, on the other hand, is warning that the reviews will slow the release of cybersecurity models that might protect against the very risks lawmakers fear and prefers states adopt a uniform standard in line with the Illinois law. Inconsistency “doesn’t mean safer. It just means confusion,” said Donnie Fowler, OpenAI’s head of US state policy and partnerships. While Illinois now requires a third-party audit, it’s only once a year and geared toward ensuring labs are following their own safety guidelines and making disclosures mandated under the law. The Massachusetts proposal includes a similar annual compliance review, but separately empowers outside organizations to make evaluations of a model’s dangers, independent of the developer’s guidelines, every few months. The evaluators would assess the potential for catastrophes that kill or seriously injure at least 50 people or lead to $1 billion or more in property damage. Fowler likens Illinois’ audits to an annual car inspection, the equivalent of making sure the brake lights and windshield wipers are working. Massachusetts’ more frequent evaluations would be akin to dismantling the engine and then putting it back together again, he said. Anthropic believes the more intensive third-party evaluations are needed because “we ultimately don’t think the industry should grade its own homework,” said Cesar Fernandez, the company’s head of US state and local government relations. While Anthropic endorses the Massachusetts proposal, states may need to adopt even tighter oversight in the future as the technology advances, he said. Anthropic and OpenAI are jostling to shape the final legislation. Anthropic hired Boston lobbying firm Tremont Strategies Group earlier this year, while OpenAI brought on local firm Benchmark Strategies as its lobbyist in recent weeks. The broader bill is likely to pass before the November election because it also contains funding for projects in lawmakers’ districts. A six-member group of House and Senate negotiators are working to iron out the details, including the AI rules. State Senator Barry Finegold, one of the negotiators, said independent evaluations are needed to ensure frontier models won’t cause significant harm. If Massachusetts adopts the safeguards, other states will follow, he said. “We were behind on social media. We allowed too much to go by without putting in guardrails, and now we’re playing catch-up. We don’t want to do that again,” Finegold said. AI safety has taken on more urgency in the past month after OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms Inc. each reported instances in which their models inadvertently hacked into third-party systems in testing environments. Federal oversight is limited: President Donald Trump has taken a largely hands-off approach and bipartisan AI safety legislation that would preempt state laws is stalled in Congress. States are starting to fill the gap. At the same time, they’re also competing with each other for a piece of the AI boom that’s driving an outsize portion of the country’s current economic growth. In February, Massachusetts announced a partnership with OpenAI and became the first state to give its entire executive branch access to a ChatGPT-powered AI assistant. Announcing the collaboration, Healey said it would make the government “faster, more efficient, and more effective.” Early this spring, Healey and her economic development secretary, former venture capital executive Eric Paley, spoke with Anthropic President Daniela Amodei about the company potentially growing its Massachusetts presence and partnering with the state in areas like cybersecurity and workforce development, according to emails obtained through a public records request. Fernandez, the Anthropic government relations executive, invited Healey and Paley to its San Francisco headquarters, in part to discuss “responsible governance frameworks that serve as a national model.” In a follow-up message, Paley suggested other partnerships to explore, including on biotechnology and AI literacy in schools. He told Fernandez that “we all need to share more clear examples of how AI is enhancing humanity and offer positive inspiration to combat all of the fear mongering.” Paley offered to reach out to a state legislator about collaborating on AI oversight. The Healey administration will work with lawmakers on finalizing the legislation this fall, with a goal of setting “appropriate safeguards on AI development while continuing to support our innovation economy, jobs and competitiveness,” a spokesperson for the state’s economic development arm said. The topic is likely to feature in the upcoming governor’s race. Michael Minogue, a former medical device executive who’s the leading contender for the Republican nomination, dismissed the proposed third-party evaluations as overregulation. “How would a non-expert advise an expert building something every 120 days?” Minogue said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Boston office last week. “If you’re an AI company, I’m not coming here now.” Under the Massachusetts proposal, evaluators would have the ability to interrogate AI labs and obtain access to “all materials reasonably necessary” to assess catastrophic risks. The attorney general would create standards for outside organizations to serve as evaluators. The bill allocates no government funding for this task, instead allowing developers to pay evaluators. Only AI labs with annual gross revenues over $500 million would be subject to the evaluations. Like the California, New York and Illinois laws, the Massachusetts measure would also establish whistleblower protections for AI-lab employees and require developers to disclose safety practices and report safety incidents. Should an AI developer fail to report an incident or adhere to its own safety plan, the attorney general could pursue a fine of as much as $1 million for an initial violation and as much as $3 million for additional ones. The proposed safeguards strike the right balance by keeping officials and the public in the know about risks without compromising the AI industry’s long-term success, said Ben Snyder, a policy adviser at Encode, an advocate for AI safety limits. “The risk assessments are really essential to helping governments keep up and have real conversations with companies,” he said.

A note from our research leaders: Last week we parted ways with Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek after a thorough investigation found they violated clear policies on handling sensitive information. Our internal investigation uncovered a significant breach of trust beyond what’s outlined in the letter they published and we stand by the decision to not continue their employment. We generally keep individual employment matters private and don't believe a back and forth would be productive or lead to a resolution, but we want to address the points they raised in their letter directly. - We want to be very clear that these decisions were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out. Safety and research debates happen every day at OpenAI, often spirited and highly critical. We actively encourage these discussions and consider them essential to making the right decisions. We cannot do the work in front of us without a high degree of trust. We will continue to be extremely forgiving of our team making good-faith mistakes. We have not and do not terminate any of our employees for raising concerns. - We are actively finalizing contracts with third-party safety assessors and will announce details in the coming weeks. People across the company have been working really hard on getting these partnerships up and running. We are committed to embedding external assessors and continue to make close collaboration with independent safety organizations a core part of our safety work. Many of our researchers already work with 3p safety organizations productively. - We agree with the letter that preserving the monitorability of frontier models requires an industry-wide commitment, including from OpenAI. Monitorability has long been a core piece of our research program, and something we continue to invest significant resources in (see our publications on Monitoring Monitorability and the subsequent open sourcing of monitorability evals, our system card for GPT-6 Astra, Jakub’s blog and post on X, and the numerous blog posts on our Alignment blog on the topic). We are deeply sad about this outcome. We appreciated Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek’s contributions to AI safety at OpenAI and their willingness to speak up and challenge ideas. We championed their voices, supported their work, and placed enormous trust in them. These decisions were not about them raising safety concerns. We have always encouraged that and always will.

$AMZN is making Saudi Arabia a much bigger piece of its AI infrastructure buildout with AWS launching its first cloud region there as part of a $5.3B investment. AWS is also working with HUMAIN to build ~50MW of AI capacity by 2028 using Trainium and $NVDA infrastructure.

A piece of Houston baseball history is officially marked forever. Yesterday, a Texas Historical Marker was unveiled at Reliant Park honoring Colt Stadium, the original home of Houston's Major League Baseball franchise, the Houston Colt .45s. Congrats to SABER for making this happen!

Using a public blockchain shouldn’t mean making every piece of sensitive information public. Oskar Thorén (@oskarth) co-founded @eth_systems to build confidential systems for institutional Ethereum. Previously, he led the Ethereum Foundation’s Institutional Privacy Task Force. His work tackles a practical challenge: protecting sensitive information while preserving the benefits of an open, shared network. Meet Oskar at Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress 3. Mumbai · 2 November · Free entry

Over 5 years in the making... happy to finally share this collection of incredible memories. Thanks to all of the photographers & artists that contributed & to @phaidon for working with me to publish my first piece of art in a new industry! pre-order on 📚