I build stuff.

San Francisco, CA
Joined February 2011
Samar Birwadker retweeted
The CEO of the most advanced AI company in America just went on national television (Save this) Hours after his company was blacklisted by the US government. Here's what he said. Dario Amodei built the only AI deployed inside the Pentagon's classified networks. His company helped run military operations, intelligence, cyber defense. Then the government told him to drop all safety limits. He said no to two things. Just two. "One is domestic mass surveillance." He explained: the government can already buy your location data, your browsing history, your political affiliations from private companies. AI makes it possible to analyze all of it. On every American, all at once. "That actually isn't illegal. It was just never useful before the era of AI." "Case number two is fully autonomous weapons." Not the drones used in Ukraine and the remote-controlled systems. Weapons that select targets and fire without a single human pressing a button. "The AI systems of today are nowhere near reliable enough." "We don't want to sell something that could get our own people killed or that could get innocent people killed." He approved 98% of what the Pentagon wanted. "No one on the ground has actually run into the limits of any of these exceptions." The government wasn't fighting over something it needed. It was fighting over the right to have no limits at all. They gave him three days. He said no. So the President called his company "radical left woke." Then ordered every federal agency to stop using their technology. Then the Pentagon labeled them a national security risk. A designation that has only ever been used against foreign enemies. When asked if he'd received any formal legal action, he said this: "All we've seen are tweets from the president and tweets from Secretary Hegseth." No letter, filing or a legal document. "When we receive some kind of formal action, we will look at it, we will understand it, and we will challenge it in court." He said the Defense Secretary lied about the law. Hegseth tweeted that any company with military contracts can't do business with Anthropic "at all." Amodei: "That is not what the law said." "The nature of the tweet was designed to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt." Asked if this was an abuse of power, he paused. Then said: "This designation has never happened before with an American company." "It was made very clear that this was retaliatory and punitive." "I don't know what else to call it." Asked if Anthropic could survive, he didn't hesitate. "Not only survive it. We're gonna be fine." Then the final question. "If you had a moment with the President right now tonight, what would you say to him?" "We are patriotic Americans." "Everything we have done has been for the sake of this country." "The red lines we have drawn, we drew because we believe that crossing those red lines is contrary to American values." "Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world." "And we are patriots." A CEO just went on national television and told the President of the United States: You can blacklist us. You can call us names. You can threaten our business through tweets. But we will not build machines that spy on Americans or kill without human hands.
The Pentagon just blacklisted one of America’s most valuable AI companies. For refusing to build surveillance tools aimed at American citizens. Hours later, its biggest rival OpenAI quietly signed the deal of the decade. Here’s what just happened and why it changes everything. This week, the US Department of War gave Anthropic an ultimatum. Drop your safety restrictions and let us use your AI for anything we want. The deadline was 5:01 PM today and Anthropic said no. Their CEO, Dario Amodei, drew two red lines. No mass surveillance of Americans. No fully autonomous weapons without a human pulling the trigger. The Pentagon called this “woke AI.” Anthropic called it a conscience. The Pentagon’s response was swift and brutal. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth branded Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a designation normally reserved for Chinese and Russian companies. President Trump ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic immediately. But here’s where the story turns. That same night, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Anthropic’s biggest competitor posted a message. “Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.” The twist? OpenAI’s deal includes the exact same red lines Anthropic was just destroyed for demanding. No mass surveillance and no autonomous weapons. Human control over the use of force. The Pentagon punished one company for demanding protections it then gave to another company the same day. Altman even defended Anthropic on live television hours earlier. “For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company and I think they really do care about safety.” Then he signed the deal Anthropic couldn’t get. Anthropic was the first and only, AI model deployed on the Pentagon’s classified networks. Replacing it will take months. OpenAI just positioned itself to fill the most powerful AI vacancy in the U.S. military. The stakes are staggering. Anthropic just raised $30 billion and it was preparing for an IPO. Now over 300,000 enterprise clients may be forced to cut ties. Not because the technology failed. Because the company refused to remove a guardrail that said “don’t spy on Americans.” But here’s the real question no one’s asking: If the Pentagon never intended to use AI for mass surveillance as they claim, why was this the hill they chose to die on? Why blacklist a $380 billion American company over a clause the government says doesn’t even matter? Sam Altman called for de-escalation. He asked the Pentagon to offer these same terms to every AI company. Including Anthropic. The world just watched a company get punished for saying “no” to surveillance and a competitor rewarded for saying “yes, but with the same conditions.” Bookmark and share this.
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
Paul Graham
@paulg7 Feb 2025
I tried asking ChatGPT and here's what it said:
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
Complete hardware + software setup for running Deepseek-R1 locally. The actual model, no distillations, and Q8 quantization for full quality. Total cost, $6,000. All download and part links below:
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
DEVELOPING: Chinese entrepreneur boasts receipt of 200 NVIDIA H200 GPUs in Beijing despite US export ban, explains how he circumvents export ban 🧵
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
🇨🇳🇺🇸 These AI models from China are amazing! - Gianluca Mauro #OpenAI #Deepseek
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
This doesn’t seem to be getting enough attention. The Silicon Valley social contract forced on the public by Obama and then Trump and then Biden (minus Lina Khan) and now Trump was straight forward: We will let these bros become the richest people in human history and in exchange they will develop a tech industry that makes the U.S. dominant for a century. They did the first part, then built monopolies to try to keep out competition rather than continue to innovate at a top level, and then got out-competed by Chinese companies in both AI and social media. They are the losers we always thought they were — and now so are we.
For those confused why the US state and Silicon Valley are having a meltdown on twitter today. China released multiple AI models that are 50x more efficient than the best American AI models and made them open source, ruining the AI market
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
Elon Musk
@elonmusk14 Jan 2025
Kids are awesome. Nothing will make you happier.
My daughter has started babbling her first words, and it’s the cutest thing ever. Starting a family has been the most rewarding journey of my life—I can’t recommend it enough.
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
AI is about to eat every indefensible CRUD app. And almost no one sees it coming. ServiceTitan: $9.5B valuation $TTAN ~$700M+ ARR ~12,000 customers >110% NRR But here's the thing: they're ultimately well-executed CRUD applications with no moat for plumbers, HVAC, lawncare, etc..... Let me show you something wild.
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Peter Thiel reluctantly agreed with Elon Musk's belief that if the Democratic Party won the 2024 election, it could consolidate power into a one-party state. "I didn't want to believe Elon when he said this, so I texted him and told him I hadn't believed you when you said this at first. But I think this is because, psychologically, I don't want to believe that." "The sense in which I felt that he was correct was if Trump, with much better substance and much better on so many things, could not win in 2024 against the machine, then the machine would always win." "And if the machine always wins, then you no longer have a democracy. You certainly no longer have a democratic process within the Democratic Party. We can always debate the election shenanigans in November 2020." "The far more extraordinary thing was in March of 2020 when Biden came in fourth or fifth in Iowa and New Hampshire and then somehow got rammed through South Carolina. All the other candidates drop out." "So, this extremely non-democratic primary in the Democratic Party in 2020 led to an even less democratic process in which Biden was replaced with Harris." "If the machine could defeat Trump, I thought it was reasonable that it would gain even more power and somehow be unbeatable, and the country would become like California, a one-party state." @elonmusk @peterthiel
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
I'm German. 16 years ago, the EU and US economies were neck and neck. Today, the US economy is 50% larger than the entire EU combined. Here's the devastating truth behind Europe's ongoing economic suicide 🧵:
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
psychiatrists right now
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
Goldman Sachs just released their AI report on economic growth. They predict 300 million jobs will be lost to automation. Here are the key takeaways everyone must know:
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
In a few months, GPT4 + Audio-to-Audio GPT + different GPT chat "personalities" via GPT jailbreaks = me walking around outside all day in SF prompting through my airpods looking like a schizophrenic talking to myself
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You're thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had your money back in a safe. Your money's not here. Your money is in Adam Neumann's crypto climate project, in social media networks with 15 users, in a16z's 200th B2B Saas startup, and in 100 other unprofitable tech companies!
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
Want to know the secrets to building something impactful in 2023? I talked to 100+ experts across a variety of fields, including web3, machine learning, SaaS, venture capital and the creator economy. You won't want to miss this advice 👇#web3 #ai #vc 021021.substack.com/p/100-fo…
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Season greetings to you all, Anglo-Saxon friends, and their happily oinking piglets!
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
1000 Twitter employees with three months severance. Pray for Mexico City.
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
Replying to @Jason @Twitter
Bring back Vine. The world needs a non-Meta non-TikTok short form video app.
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
Wise words from the smartest growth/marketing person I've ever worked with: "There are two things that increase conversion every single time: 1. Minimize steps in the funnel 2. Minimize the thinking a user has to do"
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Samar Birwadker retweeted
Elon Musk
@elonmusk3 Apr 2022
Replying to @JuicyCreativ3
Old people don’t change their minds, with rare exception, they just die. Without death, there would not be change.
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