New Delphi Podcast with Alex Wilson (@AlexWilsonTGB), co-founder of Cyclops and The Giving Block He sold The Giving Block to Shift4 a year after raising. Now he's building stablecoin rails for payments companies Shift4 is a customer and an investor. Out of stealth in March, Series A in July, more than 10 customers this year when they hoped for 3 His take: most of the world's 200 currencies won't make it. Fewer than 25 left in five to ten years 00:00 Intro 04:39 The Door-to-Door eBay Hustle 15:59 The $50M Anonymous Donation 17:41 Beating Coinbase by Going Narrow 19:55 Sold to Shift4 a Year Later 25:23 From Shift4 to NASA 27:31 Lessons From Jared 29:33 Hiring to Scare People Away 31:08 Why Start Cyclops 36:22 A Ticket to Space in Stablecoins 37:54 Who Stablecoins Cut Out 40:15 Agents Need New Checkouts 43:04 200 Currencies Down to 25 46:12 Seed to Series A in a Year 49:38 Swinging for a $10B Exit Full episode

US can’t have a war and AI bubble popping at the same time First the war will end then they will backstop the big labs (OpenAI raising less than expected and Anthropic debt rating isn’t good enough)

@tarunchitra doesn't hold back on OpenClaw: "It's kind of the worst developer experience of anything I've used personally" His point: OpenClaw feels like Android. It makes you choose your inference, your attention, your reasoning level and your context before you can use it Codex, Claude Code and Muse went the other way. Something his grandmother could use

Microsoft and Nvidia both came into the Nous Research round @tarunchitra on what that means for Hermes Agent: "Nous is going to be one of the main open source harnesses you can use at Microsoft" And Nvidia installs it by default on its DGX Spark machines

New Delphi Podcast with Tarun Chitra (@tarunchitra), founder of Gauntlet and managing partner at Robot Ventures Robot just led the $90M round in @NousResearch. Tarun spent three to four months on diligence, from OpenRouter data to GitHub forks, before backing Nous and Hermes Agent We get into why crypto's first run at AI went wrong, why the crypto people who dropped the token won, why OpenClaw is the worst developer experience he's used, and why Hermes is closer to Ubuntu than to Android He also found Chinese robot makers building on Hermes, and some inference providers gaming cache pricing His market structure take: all the money goes to the top and the bottom. Harnesses on top, inference underneath. Hermes is like investing in Phantom or FOMO 00:00 Intro 06:34 Robot Leads Nous's $90M Round 09:37 Crypto AI Was Meme Coins With More Steps 14:40 Why Nous Stood Out Early 28:14 Hermes vs OpenClaw 35:39 The End of AI Lock-In 46:33 The Ubuntu of AI 56:17 Microsoft and Nvidia Join the Round 59:42 OpenRouter Is a DEX for AI 1:07:02 All the Money Goes to the Top Disc. Delphi Ventures co-led the seed of Nous Research and invested again in the Series A and B Full episode

AI is bullish for BTC either way On one hand we get massive universal basic income and money printing, which drives BTC higher, or we have an AI blowup and mass money printing to bail everyone out, and BTC goes up

Someone should build a 100-1000 acre modern country club in the Red Lands In Florida Spend your entire day hiking, pools, golf, tennis, padel all of it. People will yearn for nature in the age of AI A private for profit park

"I've known Sam a long time." @arrington reflects on knowing Sam Altman from his startup days through Y Combinator He calls him smart, charismatic, and an exceptional salesperson "Do you think he's evil?" "He's evil."

One way a hypothetical AGI bailout could play out is the U.S. Gov paying for every American to access better models Bailing out saves investors but does nothing for the average American 150M (50%) Americans access $20 a month is $36B a year UBI = free access to good models I just think it’s really unlikely since you can access really good open source models that are too cheap to meter and will have free inference via Apple devices and Meta Muse

The most basic way AI could blow up imo. I'm not saying it does but this is the most obvious way I can see it happening - Per seat subscriptions are massively subsidized. The flat fee was priced way below what heavy usage actually costs - For real business use you have to move to the API anyway. Data protections, work integrations and compliance officer approval - On the API you pay metered rates, and businesses are burning credits way faster than the per seat pricing ever led them to expect - This is everywhere right now. Internally for us, Codex users, Uber torching its entire 2026 AI budget in 4 months, the Microsoft comments. Just go try an API I shared more on this here: - And I don't think most businesses have the money to keep paying increasing API rates without a real change to how they operate (caps needed) - Because they have a cheap alternative. They can reach open source models through any aggregator (OpenRouter, Venice, Baseten, Together) and still get strong privacy. Venice private data centers, or E2EE/TEE serving GLM 5.1. More on open source inference provider raises here: - And the discount is enormous. DeepSeek V4 codes within a hair of Opus on SWE bench at roughly 1/30th the price, and the cheapest open models run closer to 1/100th - Chinese labs open source frontier grade models. The model is the single biggest cost an inference provider has, and they get it for free - This idea dies if China goes closed source. That is actually bullish web2 AI labs, because if everyone is closed you pay up for the best intelligence. China goes closed source if they are tired of giving away an asset and they want the revenue and data flow to train new models - Is this showing up in web2 AI lab revenue yet? No. Revenue is off the charts. Anthropic went from 9B to 47B run rate in five months - So go forward, what happens? - I think revenue slowly starts leaking to the open source inference providers (see Venice usage, OpenRouter's $113M raise, Baseten is raising at $11B or triple its valuation in three months, on revenue that went from $200M to $600M annualized in a single quarter) - It doesnt move overnight, but it caps the labs ability to raise prices, and margins are already deeply negative. OpenAI is reportedly running near negative 122% - With margins that bad there is no cash flow, so the labs are fully dependent on outside capital to buy GPUs, train models, and keep subsidizing usage (I.e. see Google tapping $80b equity sale, granted 30b for employee RSU taxes. Clearly they think Equity is overvalued or you wouldn't sell it) - The break comes when that capital stops. Pricing is capped so margins cant improve, and the moment investors lose conviction on payback, the whole flow reverses - Why would they lose conviction on payback? Back to the start - the inability to improve margins or get businesses to pay more - This is also limiting, if we start making new drugs with AI or create entirely new businesses, you better believe people will pay up to the max for AI usage

Hermes Agent is a launch partner for @nvidia's RTX Spark across the new generation of laptops. Pick it in the built-in @Windows agent setup flow, run the new generative onboarding, and get straight to work locally or in the cloud. Linus is impressed!

You own the bunker. But who is actually in charge when everything falls apart? @arrington poses a question about billionaire survival plans: what happens when the head of security decides they run the place? A bunker might solve one problem while creating another From survival plans to the AI arms race, this is a conversation about what money can and cannot control