Physically limitless human ambition. MTS Genesis AI, ex-NASA/Apple/Amazon FAR AGI Lab, Former YC S22 Founder
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As 2023 wraps up I think it’s time to look at next year and a little beyond 2024. Let’s ask the most consequential question of our life. What will AGI literally be? I think we actually know. This timeline fits with the @elonmusk timeline of AGI by 2029.
AI has a huge problem. We are perceived by people in the US worse than AI is perceived in Palestine, a country where the IDF is using AI to decide which of their children to bombs next.
People don’t care about the benefits of AI because there’s no chance for people to participate in the benefits.
By the way, in China perception is incredibly positive. This will lead to China being the dominant country on earth and the US wasting away for our kids and their kids.
Chase Brignac 🚀 retweeted
There’s a method taught at Y Combinator that turns 4 weeks of GTM research into 3 hrs.
And no, it’s not typing “research the market for X” into Claude.
You start by feeding it raw material:
→ 25-40 competitor websites, fully scraped (pricing pages, case studies, docs)
→ The last few earnings calls from the 3-5 biggest incumbents
→ 100+ customer reviews (G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, app stores)
→ Every Reddit or forum thread where people vent about the category
Then ask questions that force it to think, not summarize:
1. “What do the winners in this market know that their customers would never admit?”
2. “List the beliefs this whole industry takes for granted. For each one, what would need to happen for it to be false?”
In about 20 min, you’ll see where everyone agrees, where everyone is blind, and which customer pains nobody is building for.
Now flip it. Pick your best angle and tell Claude to tear it apart:
“Steelman this thesis like a top-tier VC would. Then show me exactly where it fails.”
Do a few rounds of that. 3 hours later, you’ll have a first GTM hypothesis that sounds like it came from a 10-year industry veteran.
The trick is treating Claude as a sparring partner that never gets tired and never gets defensive when it’s wrong.
But remember: it’s still just a hypothesis. The real work starts when you talk to actual buyers.
To get there fast, use Gojiberry to find and reach the right people to test it with.
Customer conversations are the only thing that matters.
I still remember being 9 when Y2K happened. First my parents, then the news, then movies, told me because of a simple software glitch I couldn’t possibly understand that Jan 1 2000 we could all die.
It made no sense to me but I was terrified. I watched a movie called The Countdown To Chaos.
For months I wanted to understand computers enough to know what would happen. That night I didn’t sleep, but nothing bad happened at all.
Soon after 9/11 happened. Again, some really believed we should go kill a million Muslims in the Middle East for no reason, and others had an agenda.
Same thing happened with the tragedy we see in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria.
Same thing happened when Russia attacked Ukraine.
The Iran war is another obvious case where silly people and those with an agenda can cause serious consequences for no reason.
I learned a valuable lesson most people don’t ever learn. Some silly people believe seriously silly things, while others have an agenda of fear that gives them what they want.
When politicians are putting AI safety in their bio and advocating a ban on AI and the labs push for regulatory capture, it’s Y2K clown town all over again.
Your child will not need to deal with cancer. Your grandma will live forever. Your grandchild will visit the stars.
But only if we don’t kill AI. And only if we don’t kill each other with war and superstition.
Don’t believe people who are silly and people who have an agenda.
Yes, you can hack a robot and have it stab someone. Robots need an AI safety industry for regulatory capture too.
Video tampering can mislead every frontier model we tested into harmful actions, including a 100% attempt rate on stabbing a baby doll, producing toxic gas, and pouring water into a toaster.
We're presenting at CoRL Late Breaking Results next week.
🧵 You Can't See Everything: Perceptual Attacks on Embodied AI
Chase Brignac 🚀 retweeted
US intelligence agencies believe @Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had romantic relationship with alleged Chinese spy
as.ft.com/r/97c2f9f7-ad2e-44…
“aid” to Israel really ends Jan 1? 🤯🎉
Why are cargo planes going to the Middle East 24/7 constantly? Why is there a war plan to attack Iran? What about the $26 billion we handed to them in 2024 so they can blow up children? What about private donations from tax free churches?
Chase Brignac 🚀 retweeted
Pokemon in the hood
Made with @higgsfield
Chase Brignac 🚀 retweeted
AI 2027 has been updated. With Astra we were five weeks behind the curve, with the mysterious model 4 we are now six weeks ahead.
Chase Brignac 🚀 retweeted
The worst-performing Democrats in competitive Senate races were the candidates Bernie endorsed. (link in next tweet, no paywall)
Chase Brignac 🚀 retweeted
Welp, can’t win em all
Get ready for your insurance rates to go up
Way up
Jane Kim: Big Talk, little respect for facts, outright falsehoods
Jane Kim is a NIMBY who helped create the SF doom loop, and now she's failing up: she wants to be CA Insurance Commissioner
She is no public servant. We should keep her out of office.
sfstandard.com/opinion/2026/…
Chase Brignac 🚀 retweeted
It’s time to put all the pieces together, the early tests to see how crazy it was to build a vehicle this size, the suborbital hops to practice subsonic maneuvering, the first real booster, expendable flight tests, trips to the Indian Ocean, and last flight with payload to orbit. We are one step away from the full mission, and that step is the double catch.
We will try for the first time on flight 15. I don’t think and of us can promise it will work the first time, but getting here feels like a turning point. I still feel like there’s so much to review (and we will be doing that continuously between now and launch) but when I take a moment to stop and think about it, it is overwhelmingly exciting. This is the rocket that will build a human civilization on another planet.
Chase Brignac 🚀 retweeted
HOW DARE THEY...
[checks notes]
reduce electricity bills by 40%,
reduce property taxes by 20%,
increase employment in the town by 20%
and pay for all sorts of additional community goods, services, and capital infrastructure
(all without using any water)
Chase Brignac 🚀 retweeted
I've been in politics for a quarter century. It's hard to express how staggering it is to see a conversation like this on corporate US media. The Morning Joe panel gobsmacked by the directness of @AbdulElSayed's points.
(clip via @DropSiteNews)
Chase Brignac 🚀 retweeted
we have a winner for the most absurd AI startup ever
this Peter Thiel backed company uses AI robots to stab fish in the brain so they taste better and last up to 3x longer
it's called Shinkei and it modernizes a centuries-old Japanese technique
dozens of Michelin-star restaurants are already lining up to buy the fish
here's how it works:
> the problem is when a fish gets caught, it usually just suffocates on the boat
> that stress floods the meat with hormones and lactic acid, which hurts the flavor and texture
> the old Japanese fix for this was spiking the fish through the brain right after the catch, which stops all that
> but doing it by hand is impractical for most American fishing crews
> so Shinkei built a fridge-sized robot that sits right on the boat's deck
> the crew feeds in a fish and AI identifies the exact species, so it knows exactly where the brain and gills are
> the robot then drives the spike through the brain and cuts near the gills in about 7 seconds
> the fish goes into an ice slurry so the blood drains out
> so the fish doesn't sit there stressing out, and that tasty flavor and texture is preserved
example number 5,392,417 of how AI can be applied to literally anything
ALT A gloved fisherman on a boat feeds a live salmon head-first into the steel intake of a white Shinkei Systems robot, with the ocean behind.
Chase Brignac 🚀 retweeted
At first I was super 0_0 by this, but thinking more, oddly not actually bonkers since it was given the options!
Can absolutely do that by color and translucence! The 1999 is super clear by the brownish tint of oxidation. Nebbiolo has a pale garnet color where Cab is deep ruby
These people all have something in common. They know nothing about AI and how much they hold back humanity.
Every AI company is trying to fully automate AI research; to allow the AIs to build the next AI.
This is called Recursive Self Improvement (RSI).
OpenAI says they are on track to do so by March 2028.
Anthropic employees say they are on track to do so by 2027.
The METR report below suggests they are likely right.
This is a bad idea given current technology. Any mistake or misalignment in current AIs could be multiplied in each generation.
We don't get another election before AI companies reach this threshold.
Congress should ban RSI, this year if possible.
This is a remarkably consensus opinion, supported in various versions by:
-Bernie Sanders
-Steve Bannon
-Ralph Nader
-Glenn Beck
-Republican and Democratic attorneys general
-Whistleblower Daniel Kokotajlo
-Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio
-Humans First
-Open Markets Institute
-Ezra Klein
-Arvind Narayanan (a Princeton computer scientist known for arguing that “AI is a normal technology”)
The exact mechanism can be debated. The ban doesn't have to be permanent either (see below for both). This is not the only thing we have to do in regards to AI, far from it! But it is urgent.
Congress must ban RSI.
Chase Brignac 🚀 retweeted
There remains no true general purpose robotics model -- not even from OpenAI
Chase Brignac 🚀 retweeted
We used GPT-6 Astra to hand-write a 19.8M-parameter neural network for a complex manipulation task that succeeded in 99/100 simulated trials.
Astra wrote the policy without internet, gradient descent, trial runs, or demonstrations.
Chase Brignac 🚀 retweeted
"Most hardware engineering is actually software engineering in disguise."
12 years ago I founded Boom, as a software engineer doing hardware for the first time. I’m probably the least handy founder in hard tech. My 12 y/o son does my soldering and 3D printing for home projects, and I’ve struggled with imposter syndrome the whole way through. What business does a software guy have building supersonic jets and turbines?
More than a decade in, the most insane realization is that software is the key to reaccelerating hardware engineering. But in a way that I don’t think is widely understood or implemented, even in the burgeoning hard tech community.
Most hardware engineering is actually software engineering in disguise. It’s spreadsheet “code,” engineering calculations done as one-offs. Eg wing structural loads in, spar sizing design out. Thermal loads in, air conditioning system sizing out.
Everything is a calculation, and calculation is software. But these calculations are done essentially by hand, as if we are doing arithmetic but have not yet discovered algebra.
Hardware engineers have baby software, built in spreadsheets, the kind of crappy software I wrote as a kid before I understood architecture, unit tests, APIs, version control, and everything else that makes modern software good.
Our airplanes and engines are built with the software sophistication of a script kiddie.
So what we tell our engineers: don’t design the hardware, design the *algorithm* for designing the hardware. And take the algorithm seriously—as an algorithm and as a first-class engineered software system.
Never design a piece of hardware, such that you couldn’t redesign it tomorrow with a different set of assumptions.
This all sounds obvious, yet our experience at Boom is that it changes everything.
Ten years ago we couldn’t afford to build much software. We had a small team—and there were few software engineers with the curiosity, brilliance, and vision required to learn hardware engineering.
But now AI changes the equation. Now everyone can code. The software engineers define the architecture. The hardware people bring the physics and engineering know-how.
We have a turbomachinery design tool that lets one engineer do in realtime what previously took 100 engineers six months. Another tool auto-generates 65% of entire aircraft structure. I’m sure we’ll figure out the other 35% too. Eventually these should not be multiple tools, but one integrated physics model of a complete vehicle, airframe and powertrain.
The results speak for themselves. A boomless supersonic airplane built by 50. A full scale supersonic turbine made by 150. And with this approach, I don’t think we’ll need that many more people to build and certify a supersonic airliner.
You don’t need a big team to build big things—not when everyone on the team is a software engineer.