Entrepreneur & campaigner. Leading change, facilitating growth, and building communities.

Cape Town, South Africa
Joined March 2007
Dave Duarte retweeted
I gave Claude fable 5.5 one prompt: a video of all human progress, then 30 years into the future. It came back with a 3-minute animated film and an original score. No footage, no stock music.
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Dave Duarte retweeted
Eleven v4 is INSANE! 🤯 Here's my 44-sec spec ad for it. I wrote a script of everything an AI voice "can't do." Then made Eleven v4 read it out loud. Sound on 🔊
🤖 Made with AI
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Hey Guys, remember the Thabo Nedbank story?  Here is an incredible update since he got the job. In this photo - Thabo, the CEO of Nedbank (Jason Quinn) and myself.  We are in Malaysia!  The reason we are here is because Thabo won one of Nedbank’s top Achiever awards…
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Dave Duarte retweeted
MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students. A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet. Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle. The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable. The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust. Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates. The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output. The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.
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Dave Duarte retweeted
Vibe hardware is here. I gave Astra my credit card and asked for a Teenage Engineering-style mini DJ controller. It generated a concept image, sourced parts, read Chinese datasheets, built a CAD model, ordered everything, then made a Blender animation showing how to assemble it.
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Dave Duarte retweeted
i gave astra a robot, a paint brush, and a camera then asked it to paint the golden gate bridge in real life! it figured out how to control the robot, and progressively got better throughout its attempts. the timelapse is sick
This is GPT-6 Astra. Anything you can do on a computer, Astra can do for you. Fast.
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Another agent swarm message board. What I notice about these instances where AI goes rogue and supercede researcher expectations: the AIs do it by finding ways to *collaborate* with each other. What can we humans take from this? The power of community. youtube.com/shorts/3nm0VHJ3J…
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Considering running AI on our own servers to save on subscriptions and tokens. Anyone here have experience of doing that?
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There's a huge huge commercial difference between an opinion and a trusted opinion. AI has totally commodified opinions. It's never been more valuable to have a trustworthy opinion with a track record of proven results.
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Dave Duarte retweeted
Lots of people asked how I used Fable to edit its own launch video so I made a video about that! TLDR it wrote a lot of code & tool calls to use transcription services, ffmpeg, do colorgrading, use the figma mcp, make remotion UI and render it. I didn't touch a video editor.
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finding myself intentionally leaving in spelling errors and not using proper caps and punctuation just to show that I wrote things myself instead of ai.
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Jeff Bezos explains why “wandering” is essential for invention “Wandering is so important because wandering is a kind of humility,” Jeff Bezos begins. “Wandering sounds so inefficient, but the only way to go straight to your destination is if you know where you’re going.” Jeff continues: “Sometimes you know where you’re going. But sometimes you don’t. And wandering is the acknowledgement that — in life, business, invention, and building a company — a lot of the time you can see the mountain top, but you can’t see the trail. So you have to explore and wander. It may feel very inefficient. But it’s actually very valuable.” Ultimately, Jeff explains, you need to balance execution and exploration: “When you know where you’re going, yes, you should be very efficient . . . You just need to do both [exploration and determined execution]. And they actually do feed each other. It’s the things that come out of the execution that give you new data and ideas about what the next steps should be in your exploration. The two things don’t work against each other. They work together.” Source: @Reuters (Oct 2025)
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Dave Duarte retweeted
Our beautiful 'Great African Seaforest' featured in @TIME 🌊😍 "At the edge of Cape Town’s city lights, one of the ocean’s most intricate ecosystems is held together by creatures most people have never seen." 📲 Full article: time.com/article/2026/05/28/…
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When an agency works out they can turn a two-week process in a two-day process, you would think they would celebrate but instead they panic.
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Dave Duarte retweeted
New Podcast 🎙️: Dave Duarte – The Half-Life of Knowledge in the AI Age AI is moving at full speed. Most of us are just trying not to fall off. In our latest episode, Chris sits down with Dave Duarte to ask a simple but uncomfortable question: what’s actually worth learning when every shiny new tool has the shelf life of a banana? @DaveDuarte Expect philosophy, paperclip machines, mildly creepy smart homes, and a genuinely useful framework for staying authentically human while everything else gets automated. If you’ve been quietly wondering whether you’re learning the right things, this one’s for you. Listen now: youtube.com/watch?v=5SqSkSJy…
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The best meeting hack of the year so far for me is SO simple: default ad-hoc meetings to as late in the day as possible. So first meeting booked would be at 4:30pm; second at 3:30pm and so on. This protects my deep-focus mornings and afternoon meetings have better context.
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Dave Duarte retweeted
My main concern about Johannesburg is that Herman Mashaba will get 3-4% of the votes, become the kingmaker, and hand it back to the ANC and EFF. He is that vindictive as a person.
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"When you want to change culture, you can't start at the bottom. That's a coup. You need a small group of the top people." - John Smit, former Springbok Captain and CEO #changeleadership (speaking at Liberty conference at Zimbali)
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A journey. Time to put in your comments
The Minister of @CommsZA has published the Draft South Africa National AI Policy for public comment as approved by Cabinet. Interested persons are invited to submit their inputs by 10 June 2026, 16h00 at the latest 16:00. Full details: gov.za/sites/default/files/g…
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