I applaud my friends for giving their time, effort and money to help veterans with PTSD and victims of trauma. They are sincerely trying to do something good for the world and I believe they have already made a real difference to many veterans.

Anthropic pre-IPO gamesmanship post. Pure speculation but sharing as curious for thoughts. Anthropic shifted from gross to net ARR accounting and stripped out both Meta and Chinese distillation from their $65 billion ARR number. Meta speculated to be over $5 billion in ARR so taking them out means they can easily weather it when Meta turns them off shortly after being public, which is widely expected. Also decreases the odds of Meta turning them off, watermelon quality dependent. All smart. Then release Fable 5.1 so OpenAI feels confident releasing Astra. Vibes here on Astra are really good btw. I think that Astra was probably better than Anthropic was expecting. Now there are whispers that Anthropic has solved Navier-Stokes, which would be super impressive. Anthropic probably releases Fable 5.2, which should be better than Astra unless something is awry, sometime before the IPO. Likely also planning on showing a significant reacceleration in ARR in September which will of course leak to the press. Grok 4.7, Meta’s Watermelon and ChatGPT 6.1 all likely coming in the next 6 weeks as well. All those labs are confident about their roadmaps in a way I have not seen in the last 18 months. And we will see about Gemini 4. Competitors get a vote in all these plans. Grok Bot feels like the best agentic harness yet for enterprise use cases and Instinct is a promising agentic harness for consumer use cases. Should see variations of both from competitors soon. Grok Bot remains transformational for my use cases. And all this is happening into a continued acceleration in overall AI demand. Wild times. As an aside, I think Krishna might turn out to be an exceptional CFO. His former Blackstone colleagues speak super highly of him. Going to be important as communicating clearly to Wall Street if they decide to shift their compute from inference to training will be difficult to digest the first time. Probably worth studying Amazon’s invest and then “check-in” margin strategy from 2010 through maybe 2016, which investors eventually understood.

The Hugging Face acquisition is important for America and I think Nvidia will be a good steward for the ecosystem. The Poolside transaction may end up mattering even more. I think Jensen is likely to bring American open-weight AI to the frontier, which is going to be awesome for America. We might see a multi-billion $ training run from Nvidia in the next 18 months for Nemotron v5-6 that is easy for customers to post-train and optimize for their own use case. Would be cool to see a 10 trillion plus parameter American open-weight model. If the best open-weight base is American, cheap to run, and actually post-trainable, then people, companies, labs, and governments can own their own intelligence instead of renting it from a company that might not share their values. Would be good for freedom to have a rich variety of AIs that reflect our own individual human preferences. And for the sake of the clarity, I think cheaper, specialized open-weight intelligence might end up making frontier tokens more valuable!

AI was seasonal in 2024-2025. Growth decelerated during the summer (students/people work less is the theory) and reaccelerated after Labor Day. This year, AI accelerated in July/August led by OpenAI, Grok and open-source. And today is the first time I’ve ever seen this:

Releasing Fable 5.1 before Astra is quite a flex. Makes me think Fable 5.2 is ready to go. So much gamesmanship between Anthropic and OpenAI right now. And I am very much looking forward to the next version of Grok. Exciting times.

Talking to brilliant physicists who have thought about orbital compute for 3 hours and are convinced it will never work makes me think of this Keanu Reeves quote: “I'm at that stage in life where I stay out of arguments. Even if you say 1+1=5, you're right. Have fun."

Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday. What I should have said: There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this. On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way. On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project. On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns. On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians. On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers. 
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries. On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land. Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged. When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America. I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw. Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.

Nature is healing. Any politician opposed to data centers is unqualified to hold public office. Data centers are revitalizing small towns all over America, a godsend for blue collar workers, lowering electricity costs, accelerating the transition to sustainable energy and use negligible amounts of water.

Hmm. I might ask @dylan522p if Attention-FFN disaggregation (AFD) is compatible with data locality and not moving the KV cache. That constraint is what OpenAI focused on with Jalapeño. They absolutely did not make an “explicit bet that disagg is not the way to go.” There are multiple forms of disaggregation, and one disaggregated topology compatible with data locality is prefill and attention computed on Jalapeño and FFN on another chip.   And they are obviously doing relatively crude disaggregated inference (PD) at scale today with their GPU fleet. Today.   AFD is a hard networking problem that everyone is working on as it can be generally superior to simpler PD disaggregation via approaching similar interactivity without making the traditional tradeoffs between latency and throughput for growing KV caches.   The CS-4 Wafer I/O Module was described as a “programmable, universal disaggregation interface” designed to support multiple forms of disaggregation, including both prefill-decode disaggregation and attention-FFN disaggregation.   We know that CS-4 is capable of crude PD disaggregation today with GPUs (Helios) and the Trainiums. Likely already generating tokens today in one - and probably both - of these setups.   And I think this is about as explicit a statement as one will get from a public company about Jalapeño and its potential FFN disaggregation companion chip. “Jalapeño+Cerebras.”   And if can do AFD disaggregation with Jalapeño then can almost certainly do it with Trainiums and at a minimum Helios GPUs. Note they probs have technical line of sight to this - would be surprised if they have it working today for all models. And might also be possible to pair Jalapeño with LP30s in an AFD setup.   The more interesting question is what cruder PD disaggregation with an SRAM rack (whether LPX or CS-4) unlocks for the existing GPU fleet. Even Hoppers. And what this might mean for the useful life of Hoppers…