We're currently in the herd immunity phase of AI-assisted cyber.
The wave of hacks and exploits is brutal. But we have to go through it, and it will ultimately make all of our software more robust.
In 10 years, we will look at AI-assisted formally verified software the same way we'll look at self-driving cars. We'll be horrified someday that we once allowed distracted chimps to muscle around 4,000 pound motorized death machines. And we'll be just as horrified that we once allowed humans to hand-write unverified code. It will be considered engineering malpractice.
We're not there yet. But we'll get there.
There's no way out but through.
Future billionaires are gonna roll like anime villains
Today, we’re announcing Route 66 (a new initiative co-led by @coinbase to make it faster and cheaper to connect to specialized blockchains) and a strategic investment from @cbventures.
If you use crypto regularly, have you ever been successfully hacked, drained, address poisoned, or accidentally used a fake interface in a way that caused you to lose money?
(Scams/rugs don't count)
Yes I have
No, never
Results
Fascinating paper.
Sparse autoencoders => natural language autoencoders. These generate natural language descriptions of the "internal state" of a model at each token, like reading its mind (loss function: ability to use those descriptions to faithfully reconstruct the activations, kind of like an SAE, but the compressed representation is natural language).
Anthropic has shown how to generate these descriptions for frontier models, capturing great insights on confabulation, reward hacking, etc. Amazing interpretability work.
I'm partial @m2jr 's framework on this:
As a VC you mostly want to be backing Freshmen and Seniors, but be more cautious around Sophomores and Juniors.
Freshmen founders are first-timers. They have 0 assumptions. That means they break the rules, but sometimes break their businesses. They could be amazing or terrible. It's like drafting a rookie.
Senior founders have exited before. These are the superstars. They can do it again, and come in with unfair advantages. You have to pay up to back a senior.
Sophomore and juniors are the founders who tried and failed previously. These are often the "serial entrepreneurs" with buzzword salad LinkedIns. You want to do the most diligence around backing sophomores and juniors, because they can talk the talk and they're good at raising money, but they're not necessarily good at the rest of it.
"I think it was maybe @hosseeb who was tweeting that if you revived Satoshi and said, 'Is a stablecoin a cypherpunk product?' I think the answer would have to absolutely be yes. I think we're letting perfect be the enemy of good."
@guywuolletjr on @therollupco:
"It's very easy
They’re starting to figure it out: Avalanche is built for business 🔺
There’s an accelerating shift toward dedicated, interoperable L1s, as @hosseeb from @dragonfly_xyz recently pointed out on The Layer One Podcast.
Why? Institutions need control, compliance, and predictable
“Stablecoins are intrinsically subversive. Most people in the world live under capital controls. Most people don’t have the freedom to own whatever financial assets they want” - @hosseeb
Always sad to see (~700 laid off). But Brian's commentary on management changes are telling:
- Flattening org structure to 5 levels
- All managers must now be ICs
- "We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents"
Work post-AI is changing fast.
Rain is now a @Mastercard Principal Member.
That means greater choice for our partners, backed by the same stablecoin-powered authorization and settlement technology under the hood. Partners will be able to offer cards that work everywhere Mastercard is accepted across 210+
Most people have never managed anyone. Those who have, most have never managed anyone smarter than themselves.
This is about to change for everyone. You will be surrounded by agents that are smarter than you, working for you 24/7. In a world of cognitive abundance, your understanding becomes the bottleneck.
You can genuinely delegate a lot of cognitive work now. This is not sci-fi. It's already permanently changed the texture of knowledge work.
But the less you understand what your agents are doing and how they're doing it, the less you will be able to get out of them. This is why it's still important to understand things like software, coding, economics, math, statistics, game theory. Not because you need to DO them (you don't), but you need to understand what's easy and what's impossible.
Try to be as smart as your agents. You will inevitably fail, but you don't need to get all the way there. You just need to become smart enough to manage things smarter than you.
