PhD | Co-founder @playmythical | 0-to-1 builder | recovering physicist | AI since ML | explore gt exploit | type II fun
Los Angeles, CA
Joined August 2013
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Is this for bots? Why do posts like this end up with so much engagement? Are 35k real people commenting on this???
The key is in bursts. Crunch time. There is no way this can be maintained.
If this is your default, then I question if what you are doing is even worthwhile. I look at that and instead see a team compensating for an undiagnosed problem.
I'm not minimizing the effort of hardworking awesome people. The effort can of course be real, but the glorification of it is a performative mindset that says hours worked == value created.
To only devote 6-7 hours a day to sleep, exercise, relationships, family? That's a completely 1-dimensional life and definition of success.
If you truly find meaning this way, fair enough. But that type of work is for the clankers imo. Automate the grind. Human creativity, problem solving, intelligence, and innovation, cannot be churned out like a factory.
To all the data company founders, if you can’t do 18 hours of work 6-7 days a week in bursts when needed, you’re ngmi as a category leader.
This is what Mercorians are doing regularly, and what we did at Scale AI back when Scale was still relevant. This is also why folks either survive and thrive after 6 months or they leave after 1-3 when the shiny logo aura wears off and it dawns on them that the work is done with blood, sweat, and tears on top of being adaptable and needing to learn at warpspeed.
This is also why Scale AI is cooked is because I hear folks are doing 50 hr weeks now with good work life balance.
It’s the harsh and brutal honest truth is that for operationally driven products and businesses, the champs will simply outwork you.
But if you can survive and thrive, you get granted with the power of Beast Mode. Afterwards, everything else seems like a walk in the park.
Cameron Thacker retweeted
Very funny that xAI was created to stop Anthropic which was created to stop OpenAI which was created to stop Google which would've actually never developed ASI because it was afraid of cannibalizing its ads revenue from search.
Anyone else right handed but prefer to hold the phone in their left? Will be interesting to try it out I guess
It looks like Astra is the first model that is not monotonic in cost vs thinking level. In some regimes, turning up thinking doesn’t just improve the result, it actually saves money.
I’m curious how broadly this holds. Is it only true for certain types of problems? Or maybe only for tasks that are sufficiently difficult?
We have seen this before with some non-thinking models beating the thinking version in cost for a given task, but nothing this pronounced imo.
Cameron Thacker retweeted
💫 Astra is out
Highlights:
- Much smarter (evals are really saturating...)
- Much more aligned & trustworthy
- Better CUA (see this house Astra made in Blender)
So proud of the team for training it!
Still some issues:
- Too much code slop
- Astra asks for confirmation too often, which can feel lazy. Given how smart it is, we wanted it to be cautious, but likely overcorrected.
We’ll fix those next! What else should we fix?
Note: Astra follows instructions even more carefully than 5.6, including unwanted ones buried in old skills. I’d clean those up before using it.
openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra…
Cameron Thacker retweeted
Introducing GLM-5.3-Flash
- Leading capabilities at a highly competitive price
- Natively multimodal with a 1M-token context window
- A 320B-A18B model released under the MIT License
- Previously previewed as Ox Alpha, running entirely on Chinese AI chips
Blog: z.ai/blog/glm-5.3-flash
Available now across all official platforms:
Weights: huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-5…
API: docs.z.ai/guides/llm/glm-5.3…
Coding Plan: z.ai/subscribe
ZCode: zcode.z.ai/en
Chat: chat.z.ai
AutoClaw: autoclaw.z.ai
Not that I don’t agree the US, especially tech, is probably the most meritocratic field/place in the world, but your story doesn’t prove this. You 100% earned what you got, but you are the exception not the rule.
false; and an absolutely horrible mentality to have.
SF (america, and parts of the internet) is extremely meritocratic.
i was born in a part of india which is extremely conservative and 20 years behind the SOTA; i didn't grow up rich (privileged enough to have food, good clothes and shelter).
yet -- i was able to come from nowhere and build myself from the ground up.
- no college degree
- random spawn in india
- non-tech parents
built a finance app which had $7 milly AUM at 13, worked at unicorns and now i'm finally doing what i love.
part one of my story was the internet; the second part was accelerated by america.
the world is malleable and you're privileged to be born at a time when the world's greatest information and tools are available for $20.
we're living in abundance. you just need grit.
Cameron Thacker retweeted
I've started a new company: @superlogical! We're going to begin by building a terminal multiplexer. The entire vision is much larger, but the multiplexer is the foundation. Sign up for the newsletter to get beta access and devlogs (product updates only I promise).
superlogical.com/
You know what this is going to link to. Dario able to get in a quick one 😆
There’s been a lot of speculation about where we stand on open-weights models. We’ve outlined our views in full here: anthropic.com/news/position-…
Maybe this is just rose-colored glasses, but Reddit and HN used to be a couple of the most interesting places on the internet for me. I would open a thread and come away having learned something or read a genuinely original perspective on a topic.
Now, I feel like they are echo chambers of complaint. Every launch, idea, definitely anything political, is just swarmed by people pseudo-intellectually explaining why it sucks or won't work and anyone who is excited is a sucker.
When did being interested in things become less cool than sneering at them and where is the forum we all want? Is it X now?
My SIMD post was on HN and the general hostility towards understanding how computers work and owning your own outcomes is really depressing. A large amount of people seem to simply have the attitude that they hope someone else pays their bills for them. news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
New gpt 5.6 sol cheats so much, METR can't reliably benchmark it.
Evals are so critical, both for understanding the capabilities of models, but also improving them. Yet reliable measurements seem to be inversely proportional to model intelligence?
It's not concerning ... it's not concerning ...
OpenAI gave METR early access to GPT-5.6 Sol for testing including raw chain-of-thought, a railfree version of the model, and internal information about the model. With this access, METR conducted a pre-deployment evaluation of GPT-5.6 Sol, including an attempted measurement of its 50%-Time Horizon. However, the measurement depends heavily on our treatment of cheating attempts, and GPT-5.6 Sol’s detected cheating rate was higher than any public model we have evaluated.
High signal, not low. Assuming it's not a permanent 100% of their role, getting your hands in the data is very underrated. The idea that it's beneath an engineer is pure ego. I spent weeks hand-labeling data on some previous projects. High quality data is priceless.
Cameron Thacker retweeted
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
Markets are made at the margin. The margins have shifted quickly. If you can’t see that then you have your head in the sand.
AI beating Pokémon red with vision and having material impact on labor are completely unrelated measures. Anyone using agents can see how effective they are with some guidance. AGI is not a requirement to disrupt markets.
