MORE OR LESS — Hit The Brakes They'll Fly Right By — (max lessin has the preview)… If there is one thing that AI has been great at for years it is optimizing attention… and Dario once again proves that Anthropic is in the lead, with a ‘slow down’ memo / meme perfectly suited for the moment to maximize time spent on twitter. Regardless of if it is principle or what you say when you are losing, my read is old-school game theory: "hey, if I slow down will you slow down" only ever comes out when a few runners are out ahead of the pack and overclocked… and the moment nobody is running their hardest, nobody knows what anyone has left in the tank or when someone breaks the truce — so nobody actually slows down. In the end I think MZ hit the perfect line (both from his seat and in reality) … grow up guys, getting security right is a core part of the business (and implicitly if you don’t you are gonna get sued / nationalized out of existence anyway so your IPO might not work out - NYT small-scale Carmen Sandiego theft of all human content be damned) All episodes + transcripts →
HOT TAKES
- If people really want to slow AI down, force the researchers to go on vacation for 100 days… fully paid, Hawaii, no laptops, every lab contributes 100 researchers. the reverse Manhattan Project. Yes, I admit, a bit too ‘put the smart people un a gulag’ coded for comfort — but at least it is honest… Alcatraz really should be a data center
- It turns out there is nearly infinite money in vibes. — one sentence, no chart, and it might be the truest thing I said all week… the market has fully decoupled narrative from cash flow and the amazing part is that the narrative keeps clearing the market anyway — the bubble question is boring, the interesting question is what the exchange rate on vibes ends up being when someone finally asks for the money back…
- We are witnessing the third era of tech political strategy… — 1st era: Bill Gates, indignation and denial — that didn't work. 2nd era: Google and Meta fight back — that worked better. 3rd era: the AI leaders embrace and extend — don't change the government's mind, just become load-bearing to it… which is exactly why the "slow down" debate above is being had in op-eds and DC meetings rather than in code…
- Judaism is really interesting … never mind the timing in the year… and it turns out that this week my number-one use case by far was unleveling my personal approach to learning torah, talmud, and how it all intersects with real history. It turns out that when you ask the right questions you get amazing answers. http://torah.wlessin.com/ — daily fascinating emails, my TestFlight with learnings of the day & Magid the bot for questions… and great video shorts on Kol Nidre… honestly the most interesting stuff I have seen AI make. The pre-historic polytheism overtones in Moses’s poem, the legalistic anti-Semitic tropes pulled from Kol Nidre, the separation of land and people, covenant before land… etc. Thousands of years of encoded debate and history… and with a 2026 lens covenant before land is a very interesting conversation….
- We def don't need super-intelligence for AI to kill us all… here are 8 practical ways it ends. — forget the galaxy-brained doom debates… zero-day models to hold banks and countries for ransom is the only AI business model that obviously makes sense — everything else is commodity. and for what it's worth, this was also the off-the-record consensus in a conversation I had this week with one of the most serious, decidedly non-doomer people in AI: you don't need super-intelligence for things to get really bad — manipulation, mass deception, and cyberattacks at scale are already here, and the breaches you've read about are the canary, not the anomaly…
- Two requests, 4 clicks… a fully functioning, updating, interactive Jewish study iOS app deployed on TestFlight. — wild. the marginal cost of personal software is now effectively zero — the leverage all sits in knowing exactly what to ask for… and yes, the daily learning is genuinely great
- It has clearly become time to make max… lessin. — if you get it, you get it. game on… these daily updates slap IMHO, and if you don’t like it or get it — that is on you.
What do we do now that all VC / even seed is ‘trading’ not investing… do we all become traders? What if we don’t like the aesthetics?
Best,
Sam
P.S. an Ode to sport — I have started getting back into running and it is brutal… but there is focus and meaning in the suffering…. So inevitably I am now in Running reels… watching this girl’s 800 is just so beautiful / gritty & powerful with the meaning of great coaching / the human experience / dialog of being alone and with people, pain, triumph which only matters to you in the context of your own lived human experience,… This is what humanity is about. The joy of competition, the edge - feeling it all.
P.P.S. and if that is too heavy, then it is just about comedy — and this is hilarious