doing things • energy + compute @ Edgerunner Ventures • Machine Yearning on Substack • ex Uber
San Francisco, CA
Joined February 2012
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Ryan Cunningham retweeted
Tune in to @theInformation’s program this Friday (10 AM PT / 1PM ET) for a short conversation with @akashpasricha and me on the U.S. & China’s contrasting visions for AI development, the role of governance in the so-called AI race, and prospects for U.S.-China AI coordination.
In the meantime, happy summit watching and check out @rydcunningham’s and my piece for The Information. We argue that, on its current path, AI risks becoming increasingly unpopular with the American public, the very public whose buy-in sits at the heart of any industrial-revolution-scale technological transition. We ask: are there applicable lessons from China? 🔗: theinformation.com/articles/….
Thanks to @jingyanghk, @nickwingfield, & the information team for making this happen!
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
Nobody won the electricity race. We all got electricity. #AI is the same. Software that wants to be everywhere, now small enough to run on a Mac Studio and soon a laptop.
The biggest misconception driving bad policy is the arms-race story: a finish line, one winner, winner takes all, and zero-sum world. None of that is true. It misallocates capital and makes the tech less safe.
The threat that matters is not state-on-state AGI. It is non-state actors with small, specialized models. It’s Chem/Bio models on a laptop.
Cooperation is the only path forward. We can’t compete our way out of the bad actor risk problem.
Please have a watch of the full episode of my conversation with @natebjones on the U.S. China AI Race.
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
Thrilled to announce @positron_ai's $875M Series C at a $5B valuation!
This round was co-led by @NEA, @Atreidesmgmt (@GavinSBaker), @valor (@AntonioGracias), @AndraCapital, @SemiAnalysis_ Capital (@dylan522p), and Jim Clark (Founder of SGI and Netscape). An incredible group to have backing what we’re building.
Also very happy to have strategic backing from VentureTech Alliance, Hudson River Trading, Cisco Investments, and Naver Ventures, alongside continued support from @Arm , @jumptrading , @dfjgrowth, Qatar Investment Authority, and many more.
What I’m most excited about is what this lets us do next. We’re deploying more than 50 racks of Atlas at @OracleCloud, and this financing funds our next-generation Asimov chip’s tapeout, the production ramp for Titan, and the manufacturing capacity to meet the demand ahead of us.
The goal remains simple: make running AI dramatically cheaper and more energy efficient.
A huge thank you to the entire Positron team, especially @mitesh711 and @kmett, our customers, partners, and investors. Building hardware takes an enormous amount of work, and I couldn’t be more proud of this team. We have a lot ahead of us, and I can’t wait to share more.
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
Bloomberg opened its story today on China's AI "death zone" with my comments: China's progress no longer looks like a single-company breakthrough. The recent releases suggest a repeatable system for producing models close to the global frontier.
Five releases in eight weeks: GLM-5.2, Kimi K3, Seedance 2.5, DeepSeek V4 Flash, Qwen3.8-Max. The unit of analysis has shifted from one exceptional lab to a system that keeps shipping.
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.
AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.
Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.
The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.
images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-W…
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
Incredible first day at the World AI Conference in Shanghai...in addition to many sidebar discussions on AI governance, with Ryan Cunningham, visited most of the AI hardware majors at the Exhibition Hall. Yes, compute is the big issue....
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
This special 250th Independence Day, we're celebrating our team & a major milestone.
To mark the occasion our team signed the reactor vessel, arranging our signatures into the shape of the American flag. Every breakthrough is powered by the people behind it.
Happy 4th of July🇺🇸
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
Amanda Askell, who has no children, was previously married to William MacAskill, co-founder of Effective Altruism
Dario and Daniela Amodei, CEO and President of Anthropic, used to live in a rationalist group house with Holden Karnofsky, who co-founded GiveWell, an early Effective Altruism-aligned organization
Daniela and Karnofsky are now married.
Anthropic also received significant funding from Sam Bankman-Fried.
SBF was also a prominent Effective Altruism donor, prior to the collapse of FTX due to fraud.
These connections between Anthropic leadership and the Effective Altruism community are alarming and if you go down the rabbit hole and trace the money trail, it will be very interesting…
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
This article on Chinese humanoids echoes many of my observations from a recent trip: intense domestic competition yielding high quality but low profits, vast local supply chains, substantial gov't supports and capital, and focus on frontier technologies.
wsj.com/tech/china-is-going-…
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
The Genesis Mission represents an inflection point for American science and technology.
By uniting advanced computing, AI, quantum technologies, and our National Laboratories, we will accelerate discovery and strengthen America’s scientific leadership.
genesis.energy.gov
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
BETRAYAL. VIOLATION. TREACHERY. DECEPTION.
Anthropic just ran one of the smartest ad campaigns in modern tech history.
OpenAI is preparing in-chat ads for free ChatGPT users, driven by an eye-watering burn rate and shaky revenue projections.
Checkmate?
1 of 4) BETRAYAL
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
> helped millions get into ai before it became mainstream
> built coursera and changed online education forever
> founded deeplearning. ai to keep teaching the world
> leads major ai projects while staying humble and calm
> no scandals no noise just steady work
> still codes and still experiments
> builds small tools and projects purely for curiosity
> teaches only when he has real value to add
> doesn’t chase hype or predictions
> lives quietly learning and building at his own rhythm
has andrew ng quietly figured out life better than everyone else?
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
Kai-Fu Lee's brutal assessment: America is already losing the AI hardware war to China
Brutal, but complex....
venturebeat.com/ai/kai-fu-le…
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear - an essay where I grapple with how I feel about the continued steady march towards powerful AI systems. The world will bend around AI akin to how a black hole pulls and bends everything around itself.
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
Foreign Affairs: The Cost of the AGI Delusion
By Chasing Superintelligence, America Is Falling Behind in the Real AI Race
I made this argument re: chip sanctions. We accelerated PRC semiconductor development in the long run. The short term pain we inflicted wasn't at all decisive if AGI is still years in the future.
Ryan Cunningham retweeted
🚨Breaking) Huawei unveils 3-year Ascend (昇腾) chip roadmap and goals: 950PR to launch in Q1 next year
• At the Huawei Connect (全联接) conference on September 18, Chairman Xu Zhijun (徐直军) announced for the first time the company’s 3-year evolution plan and goals for the Ascend (昇腾) chips. He revealed that Huawei is preparing several next-generation chips over the next three years, including the 950PR, 950DT, Ascend 960, and Ascend 970. Among them, the 950PR is scheduled for external release in the first quarter of 2026 (Q1 next year) and will feature Huawei’s self-developed HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) technology.
