Gavin Baker (@GavinSBaker)

Talking to brilliant physicists who have thought about orbital compute for 3 hours and are convinced it will never work makes me think of this Keanu Reeves quote: “I'm at that stage in life where I stay out of arguments. Even if you say 1+1=5, you're right. Have fun."

I think @bot is another “Claude Code” moment for AI. I would estimate my personal AI usage is up something like 100x. And for everyone who reached out about how to build a “podcast summarizer” it took me about 15 seconds in Grok Bot and is better than what I had before.

Sholto, thank you for setting the record straight. Larger issue is that multiple very serious people in Silicon Valley have heard some variation of this and believe it to be true. And the reason it is believable to so many is that it is consistent with Dario’s public messaging and what he outlined in the essay you shared: this technology *might* be dangerous for humans in multiple ways, could lead to extreme concentration of economic power (as outlined in the essay) and therefore needs to be regulated thoughtfully. I agree with the potential risks and I believe Dario makes all of these arguments in good faith. 
As discussed on the pod, if one agrees that AI *might* be dangerous, there are two ways to address this potential risk. Either concentrate it in the hands of a chosen few companies and politicians via regulation or distribute it widely. Essentially boils down to whether one believes AI is too dangerous to concentrate or too dangerous to distribute. There are reasonable arguments on both sides, but I profoundly agree with Zuckerberg’s statement that: “The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.” And as Dario says in the aforementioned essay, “some may object that we can simply keep AIs in check with a balance of power between many AI systems, as we do with humans.” I believe this is the best path forward: I want as many AIs as possible to maximize the odds that one shares my own particular values. And as Dario notes, no human has ever been able to take over the world. At this point, I think safe to say that Dario has lost the argument. His messaging has failed to result in his preferred regulatory path. The fact that the only solution to the recent incident where an unreleased advanced OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face was an open-source model likely ended any chance of strict near-term regulation. Essentially every major company other than Anthropic has signed Jensen’s letter. However, Dario’s messaging has been massively helpful to efforts to ban datacenters here in America. I suspect we will see anti-datacenter advocacy groups runnings ads using clips of Dario warning about how dangerous AI could be for humans. His good faith efforts in favor of regulation are now increasing the odds that AI will not be beneficial for Americans and humans everywhere. I believe that there is a reasonable chance AI might help us cure most forms of disease such that we have extended lifespans and can enjoy these long lives in an abundant Star Trek like future. That is the future that I want and I think Dario is decreasing the odds of that future at this point. He is about to be the CEO of one of the most important public companies in the world and given that the pro-regulatory effort has failed (at least for now), I respectfully think he should make an effort to be a more positive advocate for his own industry. And if I am wrong and we do need to regulate this technology, he will be a more effective advocate for this in the future having been open-minded to the alternative. And for the sake of clarity and as I outlined on the pod, I think Anthropic has deep competitive advantages and is an amazing company. Ironically, the main risk I saw to Anthropic a few months ago was nationalization as a result of Dario’s own rhetoric and behavior.

We are going to see a lot of vertically focused AI native companies accelerate. Routers, open-source models and specialized post-training enabled by companies like @FireworksAI_HQ have all made dramatic advances and the combination of the three is driving accelerating growth. Companies like @wearelegora can now use their data to post-train an open-source model and then combine it with frontier models behind a router to get the same or better outcomes at lower costs than the frontier alone. This dramatically improves the business model for all these companies. @cognition seeing similar trends.

Nvidia is the leading open source AI company by a wide margin. The silliness of this post is compounded by the fact that the letter did not suggest that closed source AI companies should open source their models.

New Pareto Frontier: Grok 4.5, SWE-1.7 and Opus 5. Intelligence per $ will be the only metric that matters over time. K3 probably joins the frontier once available on the inference clouds.

The mega bull case for AI infrastructure would be *if* market share shifted away from certain frontier labs with 90%+ inference margins toward cheaper models, whether open-source or closed. It would increase the ROI on AI spend for end customers by increasing intelligence per dollar, which would drive incremental token demand. Margin dollars would effectively get redistributed from the frontier labs to AI infrastructure providers. The infra winners would be those with the lowest per token cost and the winners at the model layer would be those with the highest token efficiency. There are many reasons Jensen is so focused on open source, but this is likely the most important one as I think he is probably less worried about a monopsony these days. Lower margin % at the model layer = more margin $ at the infra layer all else equal. With SpaceX and Meta being vertically integrated and possessing the #3# and #4# models respectively it is more possible than ever. Note that Grok 4.5 is ahead of Fable for some useful tasks at a much lower cost, so ranking them #3# is conservative. This is not happening yet. Cheap, mostly open source tokens are likely the majority of volume today but the majority of economic value is still accruing to the most intelligent models. Might change though. We will see.

Grok 4.5. Pareto dominant for coding by the numbers. We will see on the all-important vibes. Instinct is the benchmarks are likely directionally accurate given the stated focus on real world utility.

Composer 2.5 being Pareto dominant in coding per CursorBench is important. This is after only a few weeks of supplemental training and/or RL in the Colossus 2 cluster.   The 1.5 trillion parameter version of Grok will likely be a much better base model than Kimi. We shall see.