In re-sharing this post, I went down a rabbit hole on the Empire State Building. It was built in 1930 in 410 days and landed under budget, despite having none of our modern-day advantages or technologies. As a corollary, the World Trade Center broke ground in 1966 and took 7 years to build. The ESB is ~1,250ft to roofline, the WTC was ~1,370ft to roofline. The ESB did it by subordinating every design decision to speed: - No exotic materials or systems were used; just known steel, floor, and window systems - Window placement, stone thickness, and cladding attachment were all chosen to minimize on-site cutting and hand-fitting - Engineers explicitly designed systems so trades could work independently and in parallel without waiting on each other, reducing the risk of delays - Demolition started before design was finished, foundations were poured while upper floors were still being designed, steel was ordered a month ahead of need - The owner, architect, engineer, and contractor sat together through construction, resolving details jointly instead of each one handing off their piece independently - On-site narrow-gauge railways, dedicated hoists for brick and stone, and on-floor cafeterias removed friction from moving material and people Interestingly, the profit-maximizing design was determined to be 63 stories, but they built it to 85 stories for prestige and to beat Chrysler. Speed discipline saved the vanity height economics. For contrast, the WTC took over a decade because it was plagued by lawsuits, political fights, and novel/untested systems, the reverse of the ESB's playbook. Lots of learnings for startups, both inside the building (focus, parallelizing vs serializing, etc) and outside the building (regulatory, etc).

Today we're introducing Hark Handoff Handoff has been independently verified as the best internet-use model ever built, outperforming ChatGPT 5.4 & Opus 4.8 While others focus on coding, we focus on everyday life: ordering food, booking flights, shopping, & navigating the web

For nearly two decades, @JasonKoon has defined excellence on poker’s biggest stage. At just 40 years old, he is already one of the most accomplished high stakes tournament players in history. His résumé includes more than $14.8 million in WSOP earnings, two WSOP bracelets, and third place on poker’s all time money list. One of the most respected players of his generation joins poker’s immortals. Welcome to the Poker Hall of Fame, Jason. 👏🏽

If you are an enterprise product or engineering leader evaluating Software Factory, come join our Q&A on Aug 12. @melbourneandrew, Head of Engineering for Software Factory, takes your hardest questions live. 1 hr (9am PT/12pm ET). Register here:

📢Meet Qwen3.8-Max — our most capable model to date. Next week, the open weights of Qwen3.8-Max will be released, and Qwen3.8-27B is also going open-weights to meet you all!🎉 Qwen3.8-Max, a new bar for coding and cowork at 2.4T parameters: - Autonomous coding: 10+ days of self-evolving development, from empty folder to production without hand-holding, complete project trace in the GitHub： - Real work, real results: Production-quality deliverables across hundreds of professions. - Long-horizon mastery: System-level autonomous planning with closed-loop adaptive learning, driving 500+ turns of chip design optimization and 365 days of e-commerce strategy. - Native multimodal intelligence: Vision isn't just input — it's a continuous feedback loop for planning, execution, and self-correction. 💰Pricing: Input: $2.0 / M tokens Output: $6.0 / M tokens Implicit Caching: $0.25 / M tokens Start building with Qwen3.8-Max! 🚀 📖 Blog: ✅ Qwen Studio: ⚡ API:

People keep asking why DeepSeek’s API is so cheap. Some even make absurd claims that they’re dumping prices to corner the market. No, the answer is simple: their model size is ridiculously small compared to its performance. It's 10x smaller than Opus, and 5x smaller than Sonnet. That means what used to require an 8-chip node can now run on a single chip. And because it's so small, it runs extremely fast. You can multi-serve multiple users from a single chip while maintaining decent speeds. By my math, they can handle 40x~ more traffic than Opus using the exact same compute. This is where the competition is heading, and it’s why they can stay profitable even at these crazy prices.

Chamath says OpenAI and Anthropic could be $5 to $10 trillion companies each if they remain a duopoly "I suspect revenues are going to crank at OpenAI and Anthropic and the open labs for a while. But again, that's not the important thing." "If you're thinking about valuation, the markets will look five to 10 years out to answer that question, they're not going to give you a premium valuation on something that they feel could be fragile in the first two to three years." "Somebody has to answer that question precisely. Because if the answer is that it is a duopoly, then there is no risk to the revenue five to 10 years from now, these things are $5 to $10 trillion companies each." "But if there are harnesses that cut the token consumption, because you stop wasting tokens to get to the same output, then it's a little bit more of a question mark. And I think that'll need to get sorted out."