Kurt Schrader retweeted
🥳 Excited to start revealing what we've been working on in the last few months. First, we decided to reinvent Kubernetes for agentic workloads with statefulness and fast resumption. Secondly, we are building an agentic orchestrator that will be Google's open agentic orchestrator and runtime. github.com/google/ax
Kurt Schrader retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Kurt Schrader retweeted
NYC announced a one-year moratorium on the use of AI in its schools through 8th grade. This affects 600,000 students. This is a regrettable decision because it is based on a misunderstanding of the benefits AI will have in education. Instead of just banning ChatGPT-like service, a sensible decision, the order also bans carefully controlled experimentation with AI tutoring and instructional tools. NYC schools produce mediocre results at extraordinary cost. Why is not pursuing rigorous experimentation as a responsible alternative to reckless AI adoption?
Kurt Schrader retweeted
I have long argued that software components should be tiny: small enough to understand, change, or throw away.
This paper suggests something I hadn’t considered then:
The developers can be tiny too.
1,000+ finite-lived agents build a 250K-line compiler. The project persists. The programmers don’t.
arxiv.org/abs/2608.10450?utm…
Kurt Schrader retweeted
some engineers are struggling to adapt to using agents because they are not used to being outcome oriented.
Kurt Schrader retweeted
There’s an insane amount of alpha in:
- People in SF leaving SF to see how people and companies around the world are using AI (hint: most are still using it primarily as search)
- People outside SF spending even two weeks in SF to see how people and companies are operating here (hint: many are already living in the future)
This may be obvious to some, but the gap right now is staggering. The global diffusion of AI is a massive opportunity.
Kurt Schrader retweeted
Makes me proud of humanity to watch us mount an antibody response to the Claude Hard Questions video and the Brian Chesky slop post.
Kurt Schrader retweeted
one common trait I find in high achieving individuals is urgency. it looks almost like impatience until you understand it is closer to reverence, a deep refusal to waste the one thing they can’t buy more of. the alarm goes and they rise. the message is answered while it is still warm. the small task is done before it can find a shelf to hide on. they commit and move in a single motion. an idea sparks and they chase it that day, before the world talks them out of it. they run at their own lives like something is at stake, because they have decided something is.
Kurt Schrader retweeted
A Brown professor gave his students a take-home midterm exam. After suspecting many cheated using AI, he made the final in-person. The orange dots are the midterm scores and the gray dots are the final scores. Looks like all but 3 cheated on the midterm.
Kurt Schrader retweeted
If you want to know whether you have good taste, a pretty reliable test is whether you can evaluate the validity of a piece of content in your domain, with logic, without bias, without any regard to the number of likes its received, who created it, who’s endorsing/amplifying it.
Kurt Schrader retweeted
Feels like people are learning how software orgs work, but misattributing to AI what is just normal team dynamics
As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team I see what I think is five archetypes:
1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship
2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra
3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance
4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit
5. Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales
Many people span across 2 roles, and sometimes 3 roles. I also notice that these roles are not really tied to job function -- eg. across Anthropic, some designers match category 1, some 2, some 3; same for engineers, PM, DS.
A healthy team needs a mix of these, depending on the product:
- A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at 1+2+3
- A product that is growing and has found PMF needs 2+3+4 and some 5
- A product that has strong PMF needs 3+4+5 and some 2
Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of today?
Kurt Schrader retweeted
here is Mamdani's entire speech at the Knicks parade, which is easily the best speech I've ever heard at an event of this sort
Kurt Schrader retweeted
While they are clear exceptions, the more I listen to AI company CEOs, the stranger they sound. They’re full of ideas that no normal person can relate to, talking past the people they’re supposed to reach. The more they talk only to each other and to investors eager to throw money at them, the less they seem to know how detached they sound. Funny, but also a warning sign.
Kurt Schrader retweeted
Massive crowd on the Upper West Side starts chanting “UPS” simply because a UPS truck pulls up #GoKnicks