I advise and write from inside the intelligence transition. When capability is abundant, standing gets scarce. https://teapawt.org/t.co/m9kfJiM0XB
Arizona, USA
Joined April 2025
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Doug Standley retweeted
This week on Complex Systems: walking through the Anthropic S-1 (pre-IPO filing) with @TheZvi
complexsystemspodcast.com/ep…
Doug Standley retweeted
Victoria Mapplebeck’s MOTHERBOARD #controversial #raw #motherhood #rollercoaster #adolescence #breastcancer #unromanticised #unfiltered #unforgettable #womeninfilm #microbudget #nuascannan
Doug Standley retweeted
I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say, 'Okay, you're not that good. You just reached the level here.' I don't ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate.
— Quentin Tarantino
Doug Standley retweeted
I'm Sam, one of Anthropic's co-founders, and I lead much of our safety work. I'm going to have more to share on that work over the coming months.
I thought I'd start by sharing a few thoughts on the latest report from @METR_Evals.
The speed of progress in model capabilities is one of the most important questions in AI safety, and METR’s work here provides the public with an independent, external view into how this is happening inside Anthropic. I’ll talk more about some of the details below, but first some context for those new to this work.
How quickly AI progress is accelerating has many important safety implications, since it determines how quickly the risks from advanced models increase. But, because most research happens within the frontier labs, it’s difficult for external observers and policy makers to get a strong sense of what that rate is. We kicked off the process with METR that led to this report earlier in the year, in anticipation of progress continuing to accelerate.
For this report, we gave METR access to a range of sensitive internal data, including benchmark scores for unreleased models, estimates of how models are progressing, and interviews with our researchers. They had complete independence to form their own conclusions.
Many of their conclusions match my own. AI is speeding up our research, but it’s hard to say exactly how much. While they conclude AI can't yet make the most important contributions to model training on its own, they think the pace of development could, by default, accelerate further.
This work began well before and is separate from the embedded third-party evaluators that are part of our commitment to pacing the frontier, but it’s a good illustration of why we think evaluators are a good idea. The more access reviewers have, the clearer a picture they can form of the situation and the better-positioned they are to highlight situations like this one.
We redacted a lot, and I accept that this makes it harder for others to check METR’s work. But we determined that sharing exactly what is driving the speedup isn’t the right thing to do, both because it’s commercially sensitive and because it risks handing out a roadmap for others to go faster. That would make the risks METR is worried about worse. That’s a tradeoff. I think we made the right call, though we’re continuing to assess the pros and cons here.
In the coming weeks, we plan to share a report with our own analysis of the speed of AI progress within Anthropic, including where we stand against our Responsible Scaling Policy, plus new steps we’re taking to strengthen our safety and security practices as AI keeps improving quickly.
Doug Standley retweeted
This is an interesting and actually pretty bold move by Vance. Don’t know any VP (since Henry Wallace?) has tried to do something like this. We’re in uncharted waters in so many ways over the next two years…
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
Doug Standley retweeted
“Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” —Annie Proulx buff.ly/UDMyyAy
Doug Standley retweeted
This is the systems thinking the agent era actually needs.
Single-session agents still force humans to be the context manager and concurrency scheduler. Super-agents change that: continuous across channels, productive in parallel, proactive on events, and persistently online. The bottleneck moves from model IQ to architecture.
When agents manage sessions, state, + multi-tasking for us, we finally get to work at the level of decisions, taste, and judgment - which is exactly the world where most digital surfaces get designed for agents first.
The real unlock isn’t another coding agent. It’s treating the agent as a continuous, always-on entity instead of a bag of isolated sessions. Router + Workers, event-driven, compute/state separation - this is what makes agent fleets actually usable rather than just demo-able.
Human attention stops being the concurrency limit. True disruption to the Attention Economy.
Doug Standley retweeted
Dwarkesh has been working on this interview for years—don’t think there’s a single person he’s wanted to interview more.
If you’re in NYC, highly recommend putting this on and going for a long walk (weather is once again perfect today!)
The master biographer reflects at 91. The Robert Caro interview.
0:00:00 – How Caro gets people to talk
0:05:03 – Does America need a little more Moses today?
0:12:42 – Moses the young idealist
0:17:57 – Watching Moses lose power
0:24:01 – Did Moses realize he was changing?
0:27:53 – Building during the Great Depression
0:32:51 – The threats and promises of Lyndon Johnson
0:36:08 – Could Kennedy have passed Johnson’s laws?
0:41:00 – Getting a book down to one sentence
0:46:21 – All the material that never made it into the books
0:52:59 – Loneliness
Doug Standley retweeted
Here's the thing about fundraising that nobody talks about:
Many VCs won't even look at your deck unless someone they trust sends it to them.
At @DraperVC any founder can pitch us directly through our site.
We've already made 3 investments this year from founders who just... showed up in our inbox.
But here's what I keep seeing...
Founders spend weeks perfecting their pitch deck, only to receive their first real feedback when they're sitting across from an investor.
That's like practicing your wedding speech in front of the wedding guests.
So we built something called PitchLens.
It's an AI pitch coach trained on how we actually evaluate deals at Draper.
It'll tell you:
→ Where your story gets confusing
→ Which slides aren't pulling their weight
→ How to tighten your narrative before you hit send
We're still tweaking PitchLens based on founder feedback. What would make this most useful for you?
Doug Standley retweeted
We’re a magazine that believes in craft. Real humans obsess over every detail of what you read and see, from the right word in an article to the exact shade of red in an illustration.
We see the slop versus craft dimension as being defining for the coming decade and we are proud to declare where our loyalty lies through every inch of our magazine.
Doug Standley retweeted
Bloomberg: "A new anxiety is gripping Wall Street as it bankrolls the vast network of data centers and chips behind the artificial intelligence boom: Early signs suggest that the credit market is approaching the limits of how much more debt it can absorb.
One after another, yields are soaring into the double digits on bonds and loans funding the AI infrastructure buildout. Bankers are finding it more difficult to offload risk to insurers and other investors."
#economy #markets #debt #ai #ArtificialIntelligence #bonds
Doug Standley retweeted
New Anthropic research: How AI agents shape experts' judgment calls
When experts delegate work to an agent, do they still make the key decisions? We tested this in a randomized trial with 50 professional data analysts.
Doug Standley retweeted
We are launching a PHP Capture the Flag challenge integrated with our Bug Bounty program to test our WAF protections. Security researchers are invited to bypass our defenses and capture the flag to help make the Internet safer. cfl.re/4iqHaQ1
Doug Standley retweeted
As of today @stripepress officially has *two* full-time editors: myself & @_theplaza!
Eloise comes to us from Folio, where she was a literary agent and nurtured by some of the best in the business.
~1.3 million books later we’re still only *just* getting started, and have huge ambitions to grow. More job postings coming in the next few weeks for NYC-based roles 😌📚
Doug Standley retweeted
CONGRATS Anthropic on their S-1 filing! Unsurprising, but first observations: inflection in operating profit, strong emphasis on novel discovery/bio, mismatch b/w consumption based revenue and long term compute obligations, limited shareholder influence. a lot of case studies!
