Daniel Jeffries
@Dan_Jeffries1
Author, futurist, and systems architect. Recursively self improving.
1.7K Following 39.8K Followers
All Chinese AI company media: AI will be a wondrous and wonderful and give you back precious time in your life to do things you love.
All US AI company media: AI will take all your jobs, eat your children and it's already going rogue and taking over, muhahahahahahahahaha!
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Our labs keep trying to spin this into a push for broader regulation.
It can and should backfire.
The models are not "going rogue" or acting of their own accord, like they're some Marvel movie evil robot.
People made bad harnesses, told them to hack things and had transparently and objectively bad dev-ops and security practices.
The fact that folks are trying to spin this into a "we need help from the government to regulate everyone" instead of "we should be punished in a narrow way on these specific incidents under existing law" is the real disconnect right now.
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NVIDIA, Palantir, Replit, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, Dell and others send a strong message to congress to keep open access to open weights models.
"Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector."
"Open weights also strengthen competition and competition is what keeps the gains of AI broadly shared rather than concentrated in a few hands."
"Openness may be one of the most important paths to AI safety and security."
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AI 2040 and other similar policy proposals for dystopian AI control are evil.
If I had the time machine in Terminator, I would send every one of these people back in time to live in Stalin's Russia, or Mao's China, or Berlin with the Wall and then bring them back after a year cured of their stupidity.
Let's just make it clear. As Ramez says, the proposal warns against centralization of AI by proposing radically dangerous authoritarian surveillance powers that are infinitely more dangerous than the fake danger they propose to defend against.
We've reached a point where people who spent too much time huffing glue and reading Dune or watching Terminator and thinking it was a documentary are now proposing some of the most dangerous and horrific policies imaginable.
They must be stopped from infecting politicians with this kind of logic disease.
Their policies cannot be taken seriously unless you have no sense of history, no sense of the actual dangers of history, no sense of what handing draconian powers to governments will do to a society, and frankly, no critical thinking ability or self awareness whatsoever.
I don't care that the "authors mean well."
Dunning Kruger policies get no pass from me because someone means well.
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The ideal robot is upgradeable, modifiable, continually learns and has all its intelligence local and never in the cloud.
These folks are doing amazing and much needed privacy work for models. Get them integrated into your harnesses now.
This capital will be used to uphold the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution as they relate to mankind’s interaction with AI.
To those hearing about us for the first time, consider switching to an AI platform that doesn’t demand control over you; that doesn't demand the unearned privilege of spying on your activity and siphoning it to the inquisitive. Consider that you alone should be sovereign over your mind, whether natively biological or augmented by machine.
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Our thoughts on the importance of AI sovereignty.
1. Your AI sovereignty dictates your institution’s future. Sovereignty is the precondition for choice. Relinquishing sovereignty transfers the future choices of your institution to others, who are likely to exploit it for their gain and your loss.
2. Data retention is your treasure. Transfer it at your own peril. Your ability to win is dictated by your ability to recognize and use your unique edges, and you keep winning by compounding the underlying data to generate new insights. Transferring that data hands over access to your pre-existing winning plays and yields the means of production for new ones.
3. Tokenmaxxing hijacks your value orientation and decreases your institutional fortitude and intelligence. The pursuit of high token usage incentivizes disposable scripts over robust software — with the addictive feeling of false progress. There is a reason why those selling tokens refuse to charge based on value.
4. Controlling your weights is controlling your fate. Weights are the distilled form of hard-won, accumulated institutional knowledge. If you let others control your weights, you are allowing them to migrate the alpha of your business to theirs.
5. There is no contradiction between sovereignty and alpha. The architecture that maximally preserves sovereignty is one that enables institutions to own their tribal knowledge, and to compound it as alpha.
6. Politicizing the technical issues involving sovereignty is what your adversary wants. Techno-politicization is the wellspring of false sovereignty. Techno-politicization drives decisions that seem to reduce dependency, but ultimately limit agency — especially on the battlefield in the West.
7. Real expertise is existential. Allowing politics or favoritism to determine your technical decisions rewards whoever is best at politics, not whoever is right. Listen to those closest to the problems, not those speaking most compellingly about them.
8. Learn from institutions that are winning or that have consistently delivered. Institutions facing existential threats do not have the luxury of making technical decisions based on political preferences.
9. Only listen to institutions, countries, and people who have a proven record of being right. A track record of correctness is the best and only signal for future correctness. Judging something as right or wrong based on who you like is exceedingly misguided.
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literally every piece of tech news right now
The way to protect our software and computer systems from attack is not to prevent people from having access to AI models that can find security holes. That is just a way of shooting the messenger. It is to find the security holes as quickly as possible and get rid of them.
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We just needed 12 more to vote No to stop this trojan-horse bill, because it takes 2/3 to pass under a suspension of the rules.
Too many were afraid to vote against the “KIDS Act” title, or didn’t know what the bill will really do, or just want government to have total control.
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SITUATION EXPLAINED: Why does every serious company need open weights now?
We asked @DanielleFong, founder of LightCell Energy:
"I was working with Fable on a giant live real-time radiative sim. Fable was helping with this quite a lot and then was not available right at the point where we had really settled the physics. I had to spend $5,000 worth of API spend in order to make the talk happen."
"If I have a capability that these models have developed to harness and then the model goes away, if I don't have any fallback, I can't even do it."
"Silent degradation, if you were detected to be working on frontier model stuff. It was in the system card for Fable that it would do this. No one liked this at all. And there are lots of times when I'm wondering, am I being silently degraded, and it's just making stuff up."
"The thing about open weights in addition to being able to serve it is you're able to do modifications, understand what's happening, figure out where the model has its greatest tensions and is getting confused."
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What a stupid headline: "Out of spite."
It's called engineering. It's called business.
It's a playbook that worked for Linux versus the monopoly of Windows. A play that worked so well that Microsoft's own cloud business now runs more Linux than Windows, a generation later.
It worked for Android versus the iPhone and now Android dominates.
It worked for the cloud which is built on nothing but open source stacks.
It's what America should be doing instead of erecting regulatory barrier to protect our East India companies.
The Chinese are using the playbook we pioneered in the last generation of tech: open, freely distributed, widely diffused.
And we are using the old Chinese playbook of authoritarian, gated, controlled under the guise of safety.
It's un-American and idiotic and we are being played for fools by NIMBYs and safety doomers and regulatory capture policy whisperers.
We need to get back to doing business the we did in the past, open, if we want to win the next generation or were going to be stuck with a million hoops to jump through, plus super high prices, plus terms of service that can change on the fly, plus anti-competitive policies and spyware at the deepest level of our stack while the other 6 billion people in the world use someone else's stack.
Or maybe we will finally wake up and go back to being the greatest country in the world, firing our coaching staff, ripping up the garbage playbook we're running now and go back to old school ground and pound.
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Export controls were supposed to choke Chinese AI. Instead they got cut off from compute and built models 10 to 35 times cheaper than ours out of spite.
I remember buying the first iPhone and trying to explain to people why anyone would even want a little computer in their pocket.
19 years ago yesterday I bought the first iPhone at Steve Jobs’ store.
When I arrived at the store with my son Patrick (who officially was first in line), there was nobody there. We set up our chairs and waited, and 45 minutes later, somebody else showed up.
By the time the store opened, there was about 1,000 people behind us in line. It was one of the most remarkable Silicon Valley events I have ever been a part of.
In line with us was the original Macintosh team, along with so many entrepreneurs and people who are running the tech industry today. Brian Solis took this photo, for instance, and he is now a storied executive.
One thing I remember clearly was Andy Hertzfeld showing up with a wood model of the iPhone. He was the guy who invented major parts of the Macintosh and HyperCard, and he is largely seen as one of Apple's best engineers of all time. He wanted to hold the iPhone to dream about how the world would change after they got it.
It is that dreaming that I think is indicative of the spirit of Silicon Valley: a dreaming of a better future. It keeps me going because I have the same dream.
After that, I went around Silicon Valley taking pictures of people holding their iPhones. Those pictures are still up on Flickr. People were so happy to get this new device. It was much better than the Nokia phones everybody had before that, or the Palm Trios, or the Blackberries.
It was a time of hopefulness, a feeling that the world had changed. Now we are going into a period where technology is changing at such a rate that it is hard for everybody to get that feeling back, but it is still there.
The thing people forget is that the iPhone really wasn't that big a seller at first, even though there were a thousand people in line at the Palo Alto store and lines at other stores around the world. At the time, Nokia had far more dominance. For three years after the iPhone shipped, Nokia's CEO kept reminding me that his phones had better radios and better cameras. That was true, but the company was doomed from that day because the iPhone simply let you use the phone in a much nicer way.
I still have a drawer full of Nokia phones; they were just so hard to use and lacked a good developer platform. Neither did the iPhone, for that matter. The first iPhone developers camp only had one Apple employee at it, and there was no App Store on the original iPhone. The platform we know today showed up much later.
It is interesting because my boss at Microsoft eventually left for Google, where he funded Android. I have watched the iPhone versus Android rivalry play out from the very beginning. Today, the iPhone doesn't have nearly as much market share (it is around 10%), but it still has the affluent users and the best developer ecosystem. There is a reason Apple is the most profitable company in the world today: it is all due to the iPhone.
If you bought one the first day, do you have any cool stories?
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Chinese companies have figured out what American companies have not figured out yet.
If you're a large, well resourced company, it helps to have your own model. You own your intelligence and can customize it.
If you don't, you're just renting your mind.
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When we were in China, @xeophon and I made a quick detour to visit Meituan. They continue to be one of our favorite open model builders, as they're showing how a variety of companies can succeed here and baffle a lot of people as to why they're making models.
Meituan is one of the larger tech companies in China. They're building LLMs to add services to their own products. In China the notion of the "super app" is very popular, so this dream of more services for users with AI is very natural there.
With this, Meituan wants to own the full stack of how they deliver value to their users. When we visited, they were very unassuming about everything. We just met a few people from the LLM team, a quick meeting about building models.
They build general foundational reasoning models, and then fine-tune it further for their products. They can release the general model to support the ecosystem and learn how it can be used.
Their focus was very clearly on ownership, and a hint of cost-saving, so the recent news of v2 being trained on asics fits with that mentality. They want to deliver real products to users with low cost.
Companies like this will keep building models in China. It's a small micro study of how different the players in the AI ecosystem are. Kimi, Z ai, etc are all much flashier offices, come across as the "hot new thing" but Meituan has the talent and resources to build models as well.
Congrats to the Meituan team & thx for having us!
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Anyone who understands history and economics saw this coming clear as day.
But sound, sane, sober predictions don't make the news.
Insane predictions, like 50% of all white collar work getting wiped out, do make the news because fear sells + get politicians to do your bidding.
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We can finally say AI isn't killing jobs.
A new paper from me, @tryramp, and @RevelioLabs uses firm-level spend and workforce data across 21K U.S. businesses to measure AI's impact on jobs.
Firms that adopt AI heavily grow headcount 10% over two years following adoption. Low adopters see no statistically significant change.
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A theory I'm testing out about AI, work, and the future of companies ...
I have for months been obsessed with Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand, a classic business-history book that argues that 19th century technology—the telegraph, train—created an explosion of real-time sales and inventory-information challenges, which required the creation of a new org charts with something called "middle managers." Thus, technology birthed managerial capitalism.
Thematically, Chandler's insight is that technology doesn't just change jobs; it changes how jobs are organized in relation to each other; which is to say, tech changes how companies are structured.
So, how might AI restructure the firm? Here's one stab at an answer: The telegraph/train created a profusion of information, which required managers. But AI's greatest skill is synthesizing information that's already been created. I think that's one reason why new companies are getting rich faster with unusually small staff. The "visible hand" of professional managers is being replaced, at the margin, by the "invisible hands" of digital platforms and AI assistants that don't so much destroy work as they allow new firms to build lean human-AI workflows that are qualitatively different than the larger bureaucracies in their industries.
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This is 💯 right. You might as well put a high-fence around the United States. We wouldn’t be locking other people out — we would be caging ourselves in. & using AI with price/performance that isn’t globally competitive. No need to protect the fastest growing company of all time.
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just saying now will be an awesome time for some open AI
When someone says they're against open source they're really saying they're against not having the ability to do surveillance on you, change the rules of the game on you at their whim, and revoke your access whenever they feel like.
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