Amir Efrati
@amir
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Executive Editor @theinformation. We're hiring. amir @ https://t.co/XVwTW5cS62 DM for Signal
Joined February 2010
new: DeepSeek's owner asked R&D staff to hand in passports so they can't travel abroad. Ladies & gentlemen. China:
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Exclusive: Microsoft deepens partnership w/ OpenAI as it looks to add GPT to Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Teams, etc. Big move with big implications. @aaronpholmes @KevKubernetes.
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NEW: Prominent Google AI researcher resigned after warning Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and other senior execs that Bard—Google’s rival to ChatGPT—was *using data from ChatGPT*. Big no-no in that world. w/ @jon_victor_
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OpenAI NEWS: . Sam Altman, Jony Ive, and Masa Son working on a AI hardware device, per @Jessicalessin @steph_palazzolo .
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Jensen Huang to CEOs: Tell me how much you lov—. Every CEO: Done.
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New: 3 OpenAI leaders are leaving. President Greg Brockman going on extended leave, John Shulman to rival Anthropic, and product leader Peter Deng is also out.
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Why OpenAI is beating Google Gemini so badly, in one screenshot.
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F—ing blockbuster bonkers criminal allegations against Uber. This is like reading a spy flick script:
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news: OpenAI's upcomning Orion model shows how GPT improvements are slowing down. It's prompting OpenAI to bake in reasoning and other tweaks after the initial model training phase.
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New: @fast is shutting down, a dramatic collapse for a 3yo company that raised $120M from @stripe & others, and hired hundreds of employees despite generating barely any revenue from its fast-checkout software. by @Jessicalessin @luxeoflique.
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News:. When Google CEO Sundar Pichai called @realDonaldTrump to congratulate him on the election win… a familiar tech face was on the line— Elon Musk. @erinkwoo
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Apple made Facebook ads appear worthless, but often they weren’t.
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❗️Almost 700 of 770 OpenAI employees including Sutskever have signed letter demanding Sam and Greg back and reconstituted board with Sam allies on it. That’s…powerful.
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if you use X / Twitter a lot, you might think ~everyone~ is supporting Trump after recent events. turns out, no:.
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~Big~ news in AI land—. Meta wants to make the next version of LLaMA — its open source LLM —available for commercial use. @SylviaVarnham @jon_victor_
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#Android OEM profitability by @charlesarthur (. OEMs tell me they're at peace with this. http://t.co/tU4PB5GZAf.
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new: OpenAI developing AI coding agent that aims to replicate a level 6 engineer, which its believe is a key step to AGI / ASI
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🚀notable startup-funding alert🚀: productivity app maker @NotionHQ just raised $10M at $800M valuation. Only new investor is @danielgross. Lot of funds have been asking to get in on this. We talked to COO @akothari this afternoon.
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"Her" is coming :) . NEW: OpenAI developed a new model with audio-in, audio-out capabilities and better reasoning. Even beats GPT-4 Turbo on some queries. @steph_palazzolo #AI
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Uh oh— . After Google got hammered for trying to use OpenAI data to train Bard, news has emerged that OpenAI secretly used YouTube data to train its models. @jon_victor_
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Exclusive: Uber algorithm calculated lowest possible comp offer for job candidates, perpetuating gender pay gap
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new: OpenAI leaders are worried about Musk's supercomputer, but they've worried even more about Anthropic's advances in AI coding. The rivalry between Sam & Greg and the Amodeis is also deeply personal.
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Some news: OpenAI has been preparing to release its first open-source language model. Meaning the startup taking a more hybrid approach than we realized. Pressure will rise on Google to follow. by @jon_victor_.
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👀 Google, Microsoft and Meta have ordered an ~incredible~ number of Nvidia's next flagship AI chips, the GB200.
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I can confirm that the Expensify Lounge in downtown SF is one of the most head-turning things I have seen here in the past 10 years.
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News: AI coding startup said it made a breakthrough in AI reasoning, not unlike OpenAI's Q*. w/ @steph_palazzolo
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You didn’t really think Microsoft—a $3T company with a shrewd CEO—would let OpenAI declare AGI based on a subjective, hazy definition, did you?. LINK:
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Ok it’s real. Woof. Google has some serious work to do in the coming weeks to clean up its confidence scoring on conversational answers.
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wow -> TikTok has been buying an ~astounding~ amount of calls to OpenAI's GPT-4 as it. [develops competing models?]. @aaronpholmes
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New: Travis Kalanick has said his kitchen-rental startup, CloudKitchens, could be worth $2.5b *now*, up from $450m in early 2018, and will be bigger than Uber. $uber
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people call @satyanadella bet on OpenAI a management masterclass. getting the rest of $msft to fall in lockstep behind outsourcing R&D. not simple. Love this top from @aaronpholmes
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News: . Revenue at OpenAI ~doubled~ in the last 6 months. And while many ppl thought a lot of revenue was coming from Microsoft selling OpenAI tech and giving the startup a cut… au contraire. This revenue is almost all direct from ChatGPT and other OpenAI sales.
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Here's one advantage of taking $$ from @sequoia: They can squeeze your company's short sellers e.g. Instacart. $cart @coryweinberg @theo_wayt
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Ilya Sutskever has reaffirmed his earlier decision to remove Sam.
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New: . OpenAI developing two types of “AI agents.” . You’ll hear a lot about agents this year as they become all the rage.
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Breaking: Nvidia's Blackwell chip is delayed, the company tells big customers. Design flaw prevented the start of mass production. $nvda @QianerLiu @anissagardizy8
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news: ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has barely left the building but already talked to some OAI colleagues about potentially joining her where she's going to next.
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Google’s CEO just said he is unaware of tech theft by China, targeting US cos. He may have forgotten the seminal 2009 Aurora cyberattack from 🇨🇳, allegedly tied to PLA, that Google itself said successfully obtained *Google IP/source code*.
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Exclusive:. OpenAI is blowing by earlier revenue projections, already passed $1b ARR. Turns out plenty of big companies like LLMs :). w / @aaronpholmes @OpenAI $msft
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new: One of OpenAI's next supercomputing clusters will have 100,000 Nvidia GB200s. It will be rather powerful. more here: @anissagardizy8
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Sam Altman’s tweet Easter eggs are pretty cool I have to admit. OpenAI’s Orion is coming….
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May seem like a small thing to non-reporters but Facebook loses credibility by issuing a Friday night press release to “front-run” publications that were set to publish negative articles about its platform. If you want us to become more suspicious, mission accomplished.
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Senior execs/managers at 🚗🛴Uber🚐🍟 say:. *"Ride-sharing" aka UberPool doesn't work.*Uber less efficient than rival startups in food + scooters/bikes .*Autonomous vehicle R&D: 👎.*Uber Cash, Uber Bus: 🦥.*Unit leaders being held accountable?🤷♂️🤷♀️.$uber.
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whoever did Oracle's due diligence for its $30B acquisition of electronic health records firm Cerner in 2022 did bad, bad job. quite a story. @dodgeblake @ashannstew
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At a high level, the self-driving car race is between:. Team Integrated: @waymo @Ford @GM @voyage @DidiChuxing @UberATG @torcrobotics @aurora_inno @driveai_ @Tesla @AI_motive. Team Modular: @BMW @DelphiAuto @fiat @Volkswagen @Baidu_Inc @renovo_auto @nvidia @lyft @Zenuity @Daimler.
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.@Waymo engineers said today that using neural nets and behavior cloning to do an "end to end" self-driving system probably will not work. ( . They do not name Tesla but it appears to be an implicit dig at Tesla's approach/long-term philosophy.
I also learned a lot about how Autopilot works, including the use of “behavior cloning” in path planning and the limitations of “shadow mode” testing on the existing fleet.
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Want to know why Wiz grew so quickly and went from zero to (maybe) $23B in four years? . Part of the answer lies with its earliest backer, Cyberstarts, and its network of corporate CISOs that buy startup products. @aaronpholmes
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New:. Andreessen Horowitz and other investors / partners in Synapse, the just-collapsed fintech, were aware of recordkeeping discrepancies for years. @MichaelRoddan
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news: the DeepSeek freakout is ~real~. Meta Platforms, worried DS is better than Llama 4 (which isn't out yet), sets up four war rooms to figure out how Chinese did what they did. Meta is NOT alone.
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~news~ . OpenAI has demo'ed its unreleased Strawberry reasoning AI to U.S. national security officials. Every rival will feel pressure to do the same.
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❗️exclusive: Jony Ive & Sam Altman's mysterious AI device company in funding talks w/ Laurene Powell Jobs's firm & OpenAI investor Thrive. it will not look like a phone btw :). more here: @Jessicalessin @KateClarkTweets @coryweinberg
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A senior DataRobot data scientist resigned last night and sent this note to staff:
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it's true: OpenAI is developing an X-like social feed for ChatGPT. at the moment, posting to the feed is known as a "yeet." 😀
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OpenAI’s ability to shrink its reasoning model without losing many capabilities might be as big a deal as the reasoning power itself.
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🚨OpenAI made a major technical breakthrough before Altman firing and we figured out what it is. Meet Q* (Q star) & the method Ilya Sutskever developed to get over LLM limitations around training data. @jon_victor_
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@steph_palazzolo @erinkwoo To put a finer point on it, the future seems to be LLMs combined with reasoning models that do better with more inference power. The sky isn’t falling.
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Google just made one of the most expensive acquihires in Silicon Valley history to get back some AI talent it lost. For comparison, Apple paid about $900 million (in 2024 bucks) to get Steve Jobs back in 1996. More here:.
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New: . OpenAI’s full P&L and financial projections through 2029, the first year it is projecting a profit. Losses will triple to $14b by 2026. @coryweinberg
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new: want to 'feel the AGI'?. talk to some scientists. OpenAI sure is.
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🐶 you guys -- an ex-OpenAI engineer is actually trying to make Dug's dog collar from "UP.". more here: @jingyanghk
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NEW: Silicon Valley Bank CEO just held a call with VC firms where he asked them to stay calm during the “panic” and that the bank is fine—unless everyone tells everyone SVB is in trouble. $sivb
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Vast majority of Uber & Lyft drivers *still* don't want to be employees, prefer being independent contractors, per @TheRideshareGuy. (Presumably because these have been side gigs for them, not primary source of income.) .
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New:. OpenAI employees are jumping ship after Sutskever reaffirms Altman firing. Sunday bloody Sunday.
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Addendum: Vast majority of Uber employees arrived after Uber's share price reached $48.77, and many of them got RSUs at that price or near it. Current price: $41.60. For many, the bonus awards they received are worth less today than at the time they were granted. #UberIPO.
The story of $uber IPO isnt the massive amounts made by the founders and investors, but the 1000s of employees that are receiving life changing money for their hard work. They are the future angel investors, founders and philanthropists. They are the story of Silicon Valley.
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NEW: Trouble in the Musk-verse as his hand-picked leader for anti-woke AI company was arrested last month for domestic violence. by @jon_victor_
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Ted Lasso is as good as they say it is and is good for the world.
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New: Nvidia is trying to dictate how its chips are installed in its customers’ data centers, and is designing server racks too. That led to a standoff with Microsoft and could eat up profit margins of Dell, HPE and Supermicro. $smci $dell $hpe
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~Drama~ at AI agent startup Holistic ("H") that recently raised $220M seed round: 3 of its 5 founders are out. The departing founders were previously longtime Google DeepMind researchers. @KalleyHuang @SylviaVarnham.
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Ethereum: ~30 transactions per second. Visa: 24,000 transactions per second. “We are in the dial up days.” — @katie_haun of @a16z .Architecture hasn’t been built yet to scale up programmable money. #subscribersummit
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honest question: why does twitter allow an account to follow 20k or 50k people? most such accounts aren't actually reviewing the content generated by those people.
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Goldman Sachs paid $5M for 14M Uber shares in 2011. Sold those shares for about $420M in past 2 years. And Goldman got some business from Uber (handling fundraisings, SoftBank secondary transaction, though not the IPO lead). Not a bad haul!.
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Love it when @aamir_khan says controversial things. Shows me what it's like to be Twitter celeb. My notifications:
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San Francisco's newly elected mayor @DanielLurie, who rode a wave of dissatisfaction over public safety etc., is courting tech to help make big changes, starting with longtime resident @sama
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Not bad: Anthropic revenue grew 40% in the last six weeks or so.
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🚗👮Just in: ex-Google & Uber exec Anthony Levandowski gets 18-month prison sentence for stealing a document from Google's self-driving car program. Judge Alsup had a lot to say about why it was the "biggest trade secret crime" he had seen. More here:
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Whoa. Gov’t workers use @telegram to keep conversations out of public record. @coryweinberg
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