Mike Hill retweeted
When I sold cars we called the deposit hurt money. If someone didn't go through with the order, it would cause hurt. That hurt is what helped people complete what they had partially committed to.
Attach a financial deposit to the decision. Then you'll get real answers.
I’ve seen this first hand in many marriages. Including my own past. Be mindful of how you support each other :)
Mike Hill retweeted
Here's Opus 5.5 with a visual reading of Karpathy's latest tweet. Watch on 2x speed. (one prompt btw)
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Mike Hill retweeted
"Labor and capital are about to divorce because capital doesn't does need your labor, it'll just hire GPUs. So you need to own the means of production."
- Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI:
"In 2 years' time, if your job is on the other side of a screen, you will be the dumbest person on the team that drags down everyone else because all your colleagues will be AIs. And so the value of your cognitive labor is negative.
They would pay you not to be a part of the team. As of this week, we are no longer the smartest things on this planet. "
---
(Full video on 'Risk Takers' Youtube channel, linke in comment)
Mike Hill retweeted
“this recent dump of papers destroyed the careers of early career mathematicians.”
I literally quoted this in February at Flight Club . Saying something like “the future will be corporations toppled by a kid in his bedroom with time, AI and a desire to open source all”
Chamath says IP and software were "effectively rendered worthless" this week, after people decompiled Adobe's core products and published open-source versions, as every service goes headless
"The more important point I want to make though, is I sent this to Nick, there's been a couple things that happened in the last couple days, which I think are incredibly important."
"There have been people that decompiled the entire, the entire big five. What is the big five? Adobe has five very, very important products in their product suite. Freeberg may know them all, but I just know Photoshop. There's like a bunch of others. Okay."
"And these folks decompiled it, distilled it, and published open source versions of these things. And Rust, yeah. And I was so shocked, because I was like, hold on a second, these are like profound products that have existed and have had moats for years, and now they're just open source versions."
"And then Nikita was, I think, trolling, and he was building on that idea, and just talking about GTA, because it's about to get released. I think GTA 6 is about to come out, and we'll reconstruct this."
"Why is this important?"
"I think that IP and software was effectively rendered worthless two days ago."
"Because if you think about it, when everything is headless, so when Elon makes his services headless, Benioff made Salesforce headless a few months earlier, when all of these things are headless, and you can wrap them in agent tools, and you can connect them via MCP to other experiences, the value of IP does no longer exist in software. It doesn't exist."
"And I think that probably is the most profound implication."
"So, like, even in our business, we would argue with some of our customers all the time, because we'll say, oh, we'll build this for you, we'll own the IP. They'll say, no, we want the IP. We don't know how to negotiate it. And two days ago, I walked into the 8090 guys, I said, who cares? Who cares? But before, it was always a negotiation and a set of trade-offs. Now it's a who-cares thing, where, like, the IP is irrelevant."
"It still takes a while for the machinery of a business, and frankly the market, to understand. But that is the most important thing that happened this week in AI, in my opinion."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The referenced open-source Adobe alternatives were not created via decompilation. Their developer describes them as clean-room reimplementations built from public specs, observed behavior and AI assistance in Rust.
github.com/storytold/phot…
arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/sof…
frontiernow.dev/en/resources/a…
Anyone else see what I see
The guy who invented Amazon Prime disappeared for six years. He came back this week with $250 million and a factory that turns lines of code into tiny working machines. Type different code, a different machine comes out the other end.
That sounds fake. Here's why it took six years.
A chip fab is the most precise factory humans have ever built, and it makes exactly one kind of thing. Flat silicon that processes information. The moment you want moving parts, multiple materials, or real 3D structure, you leave the fab for a world where getting one new device into production takes years and tens of millions of dollars. Engineers call it one product, one process. It's the reason micro-machines never got their Moore's Law.
Holden's Matter Compiler kills the per-product process entirely. Features down to a few microns, no new tooling, and the system measures and corrects every step while it builds, then feeds what it learned into the next design.
His first product is the tell on how sharp the strategy is.
PrimeSwitch is a 150-amp relay for 800-volt power in AI data centers. It opens in roughly 50 microseconds, about 1,000x faster than a normal contactor. So the first thing to come out of a universal factory is aimed at the one market where demand is basically infinite and a faster switch means less fried hardware.
Neal Stephenson wrote the Matter Compiler as fiction in 1995. Holden just shipped the first real product out of one, and it's a light switch for AI data centers.
Mike Hill retweeted
“So much of our time is spent dispensing wisdom and knowledge and requests to the wrong people.” — At @GeniusNetwork
Mike Hill retweeted
Ok I have to share this. Russell Brand at the MAHA reception tonight. He said there's no point in this movement if you don't believe people have the right to be healthy. Then he said the age of distraction is over. Whatever you think of him, the room loved it. @rustyrockets @MAHA_Action
Mike Hill retweeted
From $11,000 a month to a million a year, and the turning point was stopping.
One owner I work with set a goal of a million dollars a year, 18 months out. The obvious move was to sprint: more jobs, more hours, more of him in the business.
He did the opposite. He took a deliberate pause, built the systems the business would need at that size, trained the people who would run them, and worked backwards from the goal.
The business went from $11,000 a month to a million a year annualized. He has been fully out of delivery since December 2024.
The growth came from building the thing that could carry it.
Mike Hill retweeted
Two months of short, plain, daily talking videos. Then a deal that closed in two days at $6,000 for the first month, with a monthly retainer behind it.
No sales call. The buyer arrived already sold.
The videos were nothing to look at. Phone in hand, no production, no ads, talking about the work he does. For most of those two months the numbers looked like nothing, and the big accounts in his niche made his clips feel pointless. He told me so.
Then a stranger got in touch, already familiar with everything he had put out, and bought.
The polished accounts were not in the room when that deal closed. The plain daily clips were. The activity that felt too small to matter was the one that did the selling.
Mike Hill retweeted
Often I am called on to save a business when it is not going well.
In every collapse I have sat through, the P&L was the last document to arrive.
Tasks that promised cash came back within hours.
It happened a few times over the last few months.
The one task that showed the real state of the business waited six weeks, then arrived under duress.
Make sure you know your numbers.
Mike Hill retweeted
An owner told me his business had gone from over a million a month to a fraction of it.
When we went through the file, the million was never there.
Almost every sale was paid in full, a year of delivery collected up front, and that cash went straight back out into ads and payroll the same month. On paper it was a record year. Underneath, it had been losing money for months.
All of it came through one traffic source. We had talked about adding different traffic sources several times. While the numbers were great, those conversations went nowhere.
And while the numbers were great, everyone in the business had a hand out. A percentage here, a bonus there. When the channel repriced and the dust settled, they were gone.
Two things would have caught it. Knowing the real numbers, and never letting one source carry the whole business.
How many sources does yours have?
Mike Hill retweeted
$132,949 was sitting in unpaid invoices and she read it as a revenue problem.
A video production agency owner I work with had more than $67,000 of that overdue. She started looking at new offers and new traffic to close the gap.
The twelve-month numbers told a different story. The business was $162,000 net profitable. The money existed. Somebody else was holding it.
So we stopped treating it as a sales conversation and ran it as a collections conversation. The amount, the deadline, and what happens if the deadline passes. No anger, no apology.
She collected $30,000 of it in two days and made payroll without touching a credit card.
Before you go looking for new revenue, collect the revenue you already earned.
Mike Hill retweeted
Every cancellation had the same three weeks of silence in front of it.
A client of mine was losing 15 percent of his members every month.
We went through the people who had left, one by one. Every one of them had gone quiet for around three weeks before cancelling. The exit was visible well before it happened, and nobody was watching for it.
The fix was small. An alert whenever a member went quiet for ten days, and a personal check-in from him to everyone who tripped it. Him, not a template.
Churn was down by a third in the first quarter.
The leak shows up in behavior long before it shows up in the revenue line.
Mike Hill retweeted
The racecourse owner gets paid whichever horse crosses the line first.
A former boss drilled that into me during my time running Mercedes-Benz dealerships. He designed the race, set the rules and collected either way. The horses did the running.
Plenty of online businesses are built as racehorses. They live on a platform they do not own. The algorithm changes, the policy changes, the account gets suspended, and the business disappears overnight with no say in it.
I use the same platforms. I am not dependent on them. My website, my email list, and my content archive stay mine whatever any platform decides. Everything else points traffic back to that base.
One test. If this platform disappeared tomorrow, how much of my business would go with it? If the answer hurts, you are running someone else's race.
Mike Hill retweeted
“I think Amodei is directionally right, that simply racing toward ever more capable AI is dangerous, but I do not think ‘managing’ or merely slowing the development of artificial superintelligence is sufficient,” Roman Yampolskiy, a computer scientist at the University of Louisville, told The Post.
“If ASI (Artificial Superintelligence) cannot be reliably controlled, aligned, predicted, or contained, then the rational policy is not to manage its arrival, but to prevent it. We should be discussing an international ban on the development of ASI, not just a better-regulated race to build it.”
Mike Hill retweeted
Today's the day
ChatGPT-6 Astra will release. The most powerful AI model ever made, with enough usage to do what you want
Days like this don’t happen often. It’s absolutely critical you lock in:
1. Test these models the moment they drop
2. Audit all of your personal operating systems. Put your Grok Bot/Hermes/ business/ career other operating systems through it to see what it thinks
3. If you don’t have your own personal benchmark tests based on your every day workflows and tasks, build them now (will open source mine soon)
4. Put these new models on your latest projects. See how they hold up against what you were doing before
5. Plug them into your Hermes/OpenClaw. Measure cost per task vs speed
6. Have these newer models review your code built by older models. Find security gaps/optimization opportunities the less intelligent models couldn’t find before
99.99% of the world won’t even know what’s happening today. You’re going to be the .01% that jumps on this and attacks
Lock in.
Mike Hill retweeted
Jesus. Two Fable 5.1 prompts and I'm out of usage on the $200/month plan. You can do better @AnthropicAI