Mark Saroufim
It was an honor to give the keynote at MLSys
Covered how AI systems have evolved, why AI is needed to improve them, why results have disappointed, why the future looks amazing, and why I’m working on this at Core Auto
Recording should be out soon, in the meantime slides
Maybe not working at a company that’s doing layoffs and PSC every few months is better for mental health.
George Pu: Meta cut 8,000 people today.
A survivor wrote about a teammate who slept 4 hours a night for months.
Commits at 3am.
Commits at 6am.
IC4. Strong reviews. No PIP.
Cut anyway.
Working harder doesn't move you up the layoff list.
You don't survive by being valuable to them.
TIL @balajis was a one man internal agi for @brian_armstrong before openclaw existed
Mike Levin
This New York Times piece is worth your time. Here’s what is happening, as simply as I can put it.
Back in January, Trump sued the IRS, an agency he controls, demanding $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns a number of years ago.
IRS lawyers did their jobs. They wrote a memo laying out the defenses that could beat the suit, including the fact that Trump filed too late. His own lawyer was in court when the leaker pleaded guilty in October 2023, more than two years before Trump sued.
The Justice Department never showed up to court. Never argued back. Never used the defenses sitting on their desk.
The judge got suspicious and ordered both sides to explain whether they were actually opposing each other or just colluding. The day before that brief was due, Trump dropped the suit.
Same day, his Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization fund.”
Trump gets a formal apology. The IRS agrees to drop any audits of him and his family, even though a 2024 Times report found a loss in an ongoing audit could cost him over $100 million.
The acting Attorney General, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, picks the five commissioners who decide who gets paid. Trump can fire any of them. Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are not ruled out.
This is the most corrupt thing I’ve ever seen from an American president.
Where in the hell are my Republican colleagues?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/admin/irs-trump-lawsuit-deal.html?unlocked_article_code=1.j1A.yiyd.PwJCpsH17y-N&smid=url-share
Kenneth Roth
Trump’s latest corruption seems to breach the constitution, creating a $1.8 billion slush fund for his friends without congressional authorization and effectively pardoning himself by stopping IRS audits of him, his family, and his businesses. https://trib.al/7jBHK3r
ChatGPT team ships
ChatGPT: Gone shipping 🚢
our math result is a milestone in new knowledge generation by AI. very exciting to imagine similar results in other scientific fields. "It's very hard to sleep, man" is a pretty good reaction.
Alex Dimakis: A breakthrough by OpenAI in a very famous Combinatorics problem, the Planar Unit Distance problem by Erdos 1946.
The problem is amazing because it can be described to a first-grader: Find a way to place n points on the plane to maximize the number of pairs that have distance
This is a scam
There will be no GBrain, GStack or any other token
Matt Mahan on Ezra Klein, laying out the most pragmatic approach to homelessness in California:
Convert rundown motels into transitional housing. House people from the local neighborhood first. No-encampment zones only AFTER offering real alternatives.
Result: 911 calls drop. Blight drops. Neighborhoods stabilize.
Meanwhile the state spends $1M per unit on new affordable housing that takes years to build.
This is what happens when a politician actually cares about the outcomes for homeless people before writing policy.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010897310/san-joses-approach-to-homelessness.html
There is a transition here for people across the workforce: the working world needs fewer measurers and more builders
More revenue means there will be more activity and more building, and in the shorter term less measuring
Wall St Engine: Cloudflare CEO Prince on how AI changes who gets laid off first:
Two weeks ago I laid off more than 20% of my workforce. I didn’t do it because Cloudflare is struggling. We posted record revenue growth, have strong free cash flow and are adding an unprecedented number of
Chris Murphy 🟧
Here's how the corruption works:
Thursday: RJ Reynolds donates $5M to Trump
Saturday: Trump invites RJR execs to Mar a Lago; execs ask to loosen regs on flavored vapes; Trump calls up RFK Jr. and tells him to change it
Friday: FDA changes the policy
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/05/21/us/trump-news#donation-big-tobacco-vaping
Hemachandiran
Re @benln Well said. Excellent timing...
Here is the YouTube link to watch the AI series : https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rN447WKQ5oz_YdYbS74M5IA&si=6bmzzbLOIR3sPrCh
Still learning to get better but two things I try to focus on in my interviews are asking about:
1. Real practical examples
2. Topics I'm genuinely curious about
📌 Watch my latest episode here: https://youtu.be/T4ieZPIEmd8
Peter Yang: Here's my new episode with @alexalbert__, who shared an inside look at how Anthropic is building the next Claude.
We talked about how the research team:
→ Plans for the model and harness together
→ Uses Claude to turn user feedback into evals
→ Trains Claude's character &
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. —Simone Weil
Sometimes AI can just be really really fun
It's important to remind yourself that. If you want some fun in your life, try Pops
Y Combinator: Pops (@pops_fyi) lets anyone create and play AI games.
Describe your idea, and Pops turns it into a fun mini game to remix, share, and play with friends. No code required. All you need is an idea. Short-form software.
Congrats on the launch, @alonzuman!
https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/QPl-pops-create-and-play-ai-games-with-friends
Judge Glock
California high-speed rail cost now up to $231 billion. That means the average worker in the state will pay out over $12,000 to fund a single project that almost no one will ride.
CA rail will be studied for generations, a truly once-in-a-lifetime level of government failure.
We are living through the Apple II moment for AI, and people reading this will be some of the people who create the personal AI for billions of people for decades from now.
I want to be one of them. I want you to be one of them with me!
Rockport: The Homebrew Computer Club produced Steve Wozniak. It also produced Steve Jobs.
We turned a 2-hour podcast into a 6-minute summary.
Garry Tan on Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin — the personal AI revolution, YC, and the pattern that has never once been broken.
The personal computer revolution was about giving everyone a bicycle for the mind
The personal AI revolution is about giving everyone a self driving rocket for the mind
Daniel Birker: Rick Rubin just had Garry Tan on Tetragrammaton.
Worth your time.
@garrytan made the comparison I can’t stop thinking about.
The personal AI revolution is happening right now.
Same as when Apple put a computer in your hands in the 80s.
Overnight, individuals could do what only
🔥🔥🔥
Jeremy Bernier: Meta was easily the most toxic company I've worked for. There's a reason the Chinese call it "Squid Game". Others refer to it as "Hunger Games" or "Lord of the Flies". I think they're all accurate.
The company culture is basically every man/woman for themselves. The performance
We’re always excited to talk to customers but you shouldn’t be forced to talk to us to buy the product.
Replit ⠕: Replit Enterprise is now self-serve!
In minutes you can:
- Buy Replit Enterprise
- Configure SSO + SCIM
- Start building with your team
No contract negotiations. No waiting.
the attack at the mosque in san diego is one of the most chilling i have seen.
my deepest condolences to the victims, families, and community.
Eric Topol
The new issue of Daedalus, the open-access Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is chock full of good material on AI. w/@demishassabis @ylecun @alondra @pushmeet and so many others
I wrote about the future of AI-facilitated medicine
https://www.amacad.org/daedalus/ai-science-what-is-the-future-of-discovery
Modal
http://x.com/i/article/2057237807244996608
Hedgie
🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products.
My Take
The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested.
This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown.
Hedgie🤗
Zhen Li
Build something people pay for, and @Replit will reward you with credits.
vibe coding is fun, but it’s much more fun when people actually care, and paying for what you made
the more successful your product is, the happier we are!
Replit ⠕: You can now earn Replit credits when you monetize your apps with Stripe
Build. Earn. Get rewarded
Mike Levin
This New York Times piece on the January 6th slush fund is worth your time. Here’s what is happening, as simply as I can put it.
Back in January, Trump sued the IRS, an agency he controls, demanding $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns a number of years ago.
IRS lawyers did their jobs. They wrote a memo laying out the defenses that could beat the suit, including the fact that Trump filed too late. His own lawyer was in court when the leaker pleaded guilty in October 2023, more than two years before Trump sued.
The Justice Department never showed up to court. Never argued back. Never used the defenses sitting on their desk.
The judge got suspicious and ordered both sides to explain whether they were actually opposing each other or just colluding. The day before that brief was due, Trump dropped the suit.
Same day, his Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization fund.”
Trump gets a formal apology. The IRS agrees to drop any audits of him and his family, even though a 2024 Times report found a loss in an ongoing audit could cost him over $100 million.
The acting Attorney General, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, picks the five commissioners who decide who gets paid. Trump can fire any of them. Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are not ruled out.
This is the most corrupt thing I’ve ever seen from an American president.
Where in the hell are my Republican colleagues?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/admin/irs-trump-lawsuit-deal.html?unlocked_article_code=1.j1A.yiyd.PwJCpsH17y-N&smid=url-share
The Hog
"We're entering a new dawn of personal AI." - @garrytan
The verdict is in from the GStack x GBrain hackathon: builders loved @TheHogAi ! 🐗
A room of ~250 of the best builders, 12 hours of shipping, and one of the most electric moments in AI we've ever been part of.
The Hog gives every agent eyes and ears in the real world. Enterprise-grade real-time web intelligence and enrichment, all under one unified API and one bill. The same context the biggest companies have, now in any builder's hands.
You can test it for yourself here: https://platform.thehog.ai/
DM our founders @hudsonliao and @paulodoestech for support and free credits!
Watch the recap 👇
everyone in ai infrastructure* is finally getting filthy rich and it is so nice to see them succeed
*not the sexy ai research stuff, just “boring” infra
codex app continues to get extremely good, plus features for businesses and enterprise such as token analytics and plugin sharing
OpenAI Developers: It’s Codex Thursday, and yes, we have updates for you.
First up: Appshots, a new way to bring the context of what you’re working on into Codex.
On your Mac, press Command-Command to attach your app window to a Codex thread. Codex gets both a screenshot and text from the window,
Gavin Newsom
Donald Trump is running a theft operation in plain sight. Stock trades. Crypto. Pardons. Slush funds. Sick doesn't even cover it.
SF judges matter a lot, and we have to make a stand. It's time you educated yourself on how to vote for judges in San Francisco
Garry's List: A killer walked free on sentencing day because a judge let him go.
SF voters keep passing reforms. SF judges keep killing them.
June 2. Seat 16. It's the only contested judicial race on the ballot. This one matters.
https://garryslist.org/posts/nothing-changes-until-the-bench-does
Governor Gavin Newsom
This isn't just corruption or grift, it's a full-on criminal enterprise.
If Republicans in Congress hadn't sold themselves out completely, they'd shut this down immediately.
Reuters: Since the Trump administration announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund for Americans deemed to be victims of political 'weaponization,' January 6 Capitol riot defendants and other Trump allies have scrambled to figure out how to get their share https://reut.rs/4tNNu7A
Replit ⠕
New business creation on @stripe is up almost 2x year over year.
Our founder @amasad sat down with @patrickc to talk about what's driving it, who's winning, and why entrepreneurship is the most under-appreciated economic story right now.
https://youtu.be/YgYiF86h0yU
Y Combinator
OpenAI is offering $2M in tokens to every YC company in the spring and summer batches.
We extended the summer deadline to May 25 so more founders can get in on it.
http://ycombinator.com/apply
ChatGPT for PowerPoint:
Ryan Brewer: Excited to announce ChatGPT for Powerpoint! This was another super interesting build. Create new slides, ask questions across your deck, and make updates directly in PowerPoint. https://chatgpt.com/apps/powerpoint/
new codex ships today!
OpenAI Developers: It’s Codex Thursday, and yes, we have updates for you.
First up: Appshots, a new way to bring the context of what you’re working on into Codex.
On your Mac, press Command-Command to attach your app window to a Codex thread. Codex gets both a screenshot and text from the window,
Ankit Gupta
we're extending the summer batch deadline to let more teams take advantage of the new openai deal for YC companies
if you're a tokenmaxxer, apply by this weekend
Y Combinator: OpenAI is offering $2M in tokens to every YC company in the spring and summer batches.
We extended the summer deadline to May 25 so more founders can get in on it.
http://ycombinator.com/apply
Daybreak for helping cybersecurity at major banks:
Adam.GPT: https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/major-banks-use-openai-s-daybreak-for-cybersecurity-defence-20260519-p5zyn9
Alex Miller
Finally tested out @garrytan’s gstack for the first time and I regret to inform you it’s genuinely a better harness for product conception and ui/ux design than Claude Code natively
Alex Miller: Did you know @Cloudflare does email sending now? It’s great but it only sends from workers/api, no SMTP or HTTP.
So I made this - an SMTP/HTTP relay for Cloudflare email. Runs entirely in your CF infra + a small docker container wherever you want
https://github.com/alexlmiller/cf-mail-relay
Startup Archive
Paul Graham: “In the best startups each founder is king of their own domain”
“Woz was not a super forceful person, but he did not let Steve Jobs change anything about the Apple I computer. There was one thing [Jobs] wanted to change. I think fewer expansion slots. And Woz said no. Steve Jobs knew where the limits were.”
He continues:
“Woz didn’t give a damn about the business stuff, so Steve Jobs was off selling the thing and Woz built it. They were each masters of their own domain. That’s the model that works. That’s how you have multiple people who are each extremely effective without stepping on one another’s toes.”
Source: @twistartups @Jason (Mar 2014)
Latent.Space
🆕Daytona’s Agent-Native Compute: 60ms sandboxes, 50K startups in 75 sec, 850K daily runs, RL/evals, CLI > MCP, & the end of localhost https://latent.space/p/daytona
@daytonaio CEO @ivanburazin explains why AI agents need composable computers, how Daytona pivoted from human dev environments to agent sandboxes, why bare metal and stateful snapshots matter, how RL workloads went from 0% to ~50% of usage, why Kubernetes breaks down at agent scale, and why the AI cloud may look more like Stripe than AWS.
Replit ⠕
With over 400 billion impressions and campaigns for Netflix, Coldplay, and major beauty brands, @PaigePiskin is one of today’s most prolific AR creators.
See her take the stage on day one of Vibecon.
NYC, June 17–18.
Get your tickets at http://vibecon.ai
Kenneth Roth
Trump’s use of taxpayer money to create a $1.8 billion political slush fund may be the episode of presidential corruption that is the most blatant and threatening to the constitutional order in modern times. https://trib.al/MsWWHlZ
i think this stack has won the localfirst battle btw. maybe more chapters to this story but i think this is it if you are building fast apps fast
Kyle Mathews: Excited to release a new starter! Sync-first, production-ready, and blazing fast
- @tan_stack Start
- @tan_stack DB for blazing fast client-side queries & optimistic mutations
- @ElectricSQL for real-time sync from PG
- @better_auth
- @DrizzleORM
- @tailwindcss
- Hono OpenAPI
OpenAI for YC companies:
Y Combinator: OpenAI is offering $2M in tokens to every YC company in the spring and summer batches.
We extended the summer deadline to May 25 so more founders can get in on it.
http://ycombinator.com/apply
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼
Ukraine is so militarily strong at this point that Putin is contemplating attacking NATO instead because it's a softer target.
AI Engineer
TLMs: Tiny LLMs and Agents on Edge Devices with @cormacb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TiET_K-E_g
Function Gemma ships at 270 million parameters and runs nearly 2,000 tokens per second prefill on a Pixel 7. Out of the box, it hits 46% accuracy on a fixed set of app intents. Fine tune on a synthetically generated dataset and that clears 90% on eight of ten functions.
Cormac walks through the two paths developers have for on device AI: a skill harness built on Gemma 4 with a restaurant roulette demo running fully on device. Then Eloquent, a production transcription app built by chaining two sub billion parameter models together.
cc @osanseviero
Conor Friedersdorf
This is surprisingly substantive.
Spencer Pratt: If that addict on your street were your own son, what would you do? That is the defining question that guides my 5 step plan to fix the homelessness problem in LA. We *must* end this evil racket of corrupt politicians and NGOs who profit off the misery of these poor souls. They
http://x.com/i/article/2057599529902628864
