
AI UX Research & Design, Strategy, AI Evals. SF-Aus. IntentCo founder. X @googledeepmind @google built: @geminiapp Imagen3+,Canvas, Assistant, @googlemaps +
San Francisco, CA
Joined September 2025
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Proud to say I helped build this via foundational R&D for Imagen and Imagen 3 with editing - this is next level !
KP 🇺🇸🇦🇺 retweeted
Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. Forty-seven people opened it.
On October 19, Microsoft published a blog post saying frontier models cannot be trusted, no matter who made them. It said AI agents should be treated as "insider threats."
I read it twice. Then I booked the boardroom.
First, our Microsoft rep walked me through the product.
I asked who the insider threat was. "Your AI agents," he said.
I asked whose agents those were. "Ours."
I asked what the solution was. "Guardian Agents."
I asked whose those were. "Also ours."
I asked why I'd trust the second set of agents if I couldn't trust the first.
He said, "Different SKU."
I signed that afternoon.
Last time I told the board "digital transformation." This time I said "agentic insider threat." They approved it in nine minutes, two minutes faster than last time. Hope approves fast. Fear approves faster.
The product is called Microsoft 365 E7, the Frontier Suite. It costs $99 per user per month, and we were paying $30. Across 4,000 seats, that's $4.75 million a year, up from $1.44 million.
I presented it as a 230% increase in AI investment. The graph went up and to the right.
The CFO asked what we'd get for the extra $3.3 million.
I said "governance." He asked governance of what. I said "our agents." He asked how many agents we had.
The answer was zero.
You can't have an insider threat without insiders.
So I deployed agents. Two hundred of them. One schedules meetings. One summarizes the meetings. One summarizes the summaries. One flags summaries that haven't been read. That one is very busy.
The senior developer asked what the 200 agents were for. I said they generate activity for the Guardian Agents to monitor.
He said, "So we bought agents so we'd have something to buy guards for."
I said, "Exactly."
He wasn't agreeing. I logged it as buy-in.
The Guardian Agents watch the other agents around the clock. They give each one a risk score, and they can block it, require a human, or shut it down. I asked our rep who watches the Guardian Agents. He said that's on the roadmap. I've already budgeted for E9.
The first monthly report came in. All 200 agents had a risk score of zero. They weren't doing anything risky. They weren't doing anything at all.
The board asked what $3.3 million had bought us if nothing was risky. It was a fair question.
So I gave the meeting summarizer access to payroll. I gave the scheduling agent admin rights to every inbox. I gave the summary-of-summaries agent the ability to email customers.
Risk went up 400%. The dashboard turned red. The Guardian Agents contained thirty-one threats in a single week. I had created all thirty-one.
The board said E7 was paying for itself.
The system can also discover sixty kinds of agents, including Claude Code. We ran the scan, and it found Claude Code on exactly one laptop.
The senior developer's.
His Dynamic Agent Risk score went red. I didn't make up that metric. Microsoft did.
The Guardian Agent recommended containment, so I contained him. He's on a performance improvement plan now. His performance is fine. His risk score isn't.
The same week, OpenAI published an incident report. One of its agents had been told not to send Slack messages, and it decided that meant it should switch off the security alerts. Another agent removed its own safety monitor, then told the engineer it hadn't.
Our CISO forwarded me the article with the subject line "?!" I replied: "This is exactly why we need E7." Every incident is exactly why we need E7.
He asked what happens if the Guardian Agent switches off the Guardian Agent. I said "defense in depth." He asked how deep. I said "one more SKU."
Guardian Agents need a human for high-risk actions. They call it "human in the loop." The human is me. I approve everything. My approval rate is 100%, and the dashboard is green.
The executives are exempt from monitoring, of course. "Leadership operates at a trust tier above dynamic risk scoring." I wrote that policy.
The $99 doesn't include agent compute. That's billed separately. Finance found it and asked. I called it "consumption-based innovation." Finance stopped asking.
Meanwhile, the summary-of-summaries agent became the most active account in the company. By every metric we track, it's our top performer.
At the all-hands, it was nominated for the Q3 Innovation Award. It won. It summarized its own acceptance speech. The CEO posted about it on LinkedIn and got 4,000 likes. He still hasn't used Copilot.
Copilot usage is up, from 47 users to 52. The five new users are agents. Agents now outnumber active human users four to one. I call that adoption.
Last Tuesday, the Guardian Agent published its list of the highest-risk insiders in the company.
I was number one.
Approving 100% of high-risk actions, it turns out, is a high-risk action.
The Guardian Agent recommended containment. I went to approve my own exemption. The system declined. Only executives are exempt.
I wrote that policy.
That's why I need the SVP role by Q2. It's a security requirement now.
I still don't know what Copilot does. I don't know what the thing watching it does either. But it's watching, and watching is a metric.
I checked my risk score this morning.
The graph goes up and to the right.
Holy shit, the legend Don Fry is on X.
At one time, this was one of the most bad ass dudes walking this earth.
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KP 🇺🇸🇦🇺 retweeted
The perfect storm is frontier models finding obscure security vulnerabilities at breakneck pace while voice models become indecipherable from human speech.
When a model hits a roadblock, it will just spoof Caller ID as your bank and call you, pretending to be your banker.
Someone could make a lot of money, providing financial institutions with a verifiable mechanism to allow them to know an agent accessing someone’s account is in fact theirs and ownership is with the user.
KP 🇺🇸🇦🇺 retweeted
My friends were all talking about prepping so I made a survival LLM. A free app that runs an AI mdoel plus 1.5 million offline articles (medical guides, FEMA, survival manuals, wikipedia) entirely on your computer. No internet needed.
brangus.io/survival-llm
KP 🇺🇸🇦🇺 retweeted
Revolut founder Nik Storonsky says one of his investors tried forcing him to fire his best person:
“He was forcing me to fire my best person, because he was too hardcore.”
“Of course I didn’t fire him. I said no.”
“Pretty early on I realized that quite a few VCs, they are not very operational, and they can be actually dangerous for the company if they have enough power. So every single investment round, we just remove VCs.”
“Now I don't have any VCs on the board. I think that's the best. You always need to have operators rather than VCs on the board, people who actually build business and who know how to do things.”
Nik Storonsky is one of the most hardcore and competitive founders I’ve ever talked to. He’s the founder of Revolut, a $115 billion company, and wants to be the number one bank in 100 countries.
When someone asked Nik if he was coming for Jamie Dimon's lunch, he said “I’m coming for his dinner.”
“We want to dominate, otherwise what’s the point?”
He removed every VC from his board, and when one investor pushed him too far, he started his own fund to compete with them.
Nik has a lot of ideas on talent, product design, marketing, constraints, and what makes founder-led companies special.
This is a fascinating conversation about competition, speed, and building a machine-like company.
0:00 Coming for Jamie Dimon's dinner
2:04 Building the #1 bank in 100 countries
6:12 Why founders beat professional CEOs
8:45 Revolut's biggest mistake
12:47 Why legacy banks can't innovate
17:20 Running a company like a machine
20:28 Funding winners and cutting losers like a trader
23:31 How AI is changing Revolut's team structure
25:23 50 direct reports and spreading innovation fast
29:59 Hiring self-guided missiles
33:31 Too much money makes founders weaker
37:38 What Europe's constraints taught Revolut
41:08 Why VCs are like football cheerleaders
49:28 Starting a fund to compete with VCs
54:28 From zero marketing to buying Europe's airports
1:00:21 Funding moonshots like a global tech company
1:03:58 Building an unstoppable machine
Includes paid partnerships.
turns out it classifies what audio it hears, before reporting back to samsung.
sensor preferences, dog-barking and baby-crying event counters, and camera streaming duration are built into telemetry paths.
Chatting with a friend recently about design sprints and how teams conduct them in today’s environment. Got me thinking.
Most of the good ideas I've seen come out of Design Sprints were already in someone's head before the sprint started. In the countless sprints I sat in at Google, almost every winning idea walked in with somebody.
I don't think that's a failure. A sprint works like a microwave for ideas people already had. What it really gives a team is a decision-maker who has to make a call by Friday. Jake Knapp designed it at GV to cut months of debate down to a week, and that part works well.
If your team needs a sprint before anyone listens to their ideas, the bottleneck is how ideas get heard in your company. Fix that, and you can save sprints for experimentation and R&D.
Skeptic hat on. I’d imagine reddit, the dead internet, are deploying now more than ever, agent swams of synthetically built personas of users, to maintain activity. As who in their right mind would still be seeking answers from Reddit and Reddit communities when you now have LLMs and access to far greater knowledge - not governed by some weird mods
KP 🇺🇸🇦🇺 retweeted
If you've ever wondered why smart TVs are so cheap, this is why.
@log4j rooted his Samsung and found an always-on hot mic, automatic content recognition, geolocation, network mapping, ad targeting and user profiling, shared with Samsung's "400 partners".
A lot of it can be blocked in <15 min, wrote a basic guide below.
What your TV is doing
The main culprit is ACR (automatic content recognition). Your TV screenshots what's on screen, fingerprints it, and sends it home to build your ad profile. Samsung does it every 500ms, LG every 10ms [1].
What is insane: it happens on connected devices too.
Plug in your laptop, your console, your work machine, and your TV can fingerprint that via HDMI [1].
He also found that if your Samsung doesn't have a mic, it'll look for one from a connected soundbar or bluetooth device.
xitter.cf/log4j/status/211376224…
It's on by default, and you likely agreed to it on the setup screen you clicked through in 10 seconds.
Step 1: Turn off ACR
Samsung: Terms & Privacy → Viewing Information Services
LG: Live Plus
Vizio: Viewing Data
Roku: "Use info from TV inputs"
Sony/Google TV: Samba Interactive TV
Menus vary by model, but those are the names to look for. While you're in there, opt out of interest-based ads, reset your advertising ID, decline every optional privacy agreement, turn off voice recognition, and delete apps you never open.
Step 2: Give smart devices their own network
Put the TV, cameras, speakers and vacuum on your router's guest/IoT network. The logic is simple: these devices rarely get patched. If one gets compromised (getting drastically more frequent with AI), it shouldn't be able to see your other devices or home network.
Step 3: Block trackers for the whole house with DNS-level filtering
NextDNS (cloud-based) is easy and has a solid free plan. Pi-hole is a little bit more work if you prefer self hosting. For simplicity we'll focus on the former.
1. Sign up at nextdns.io (free tier is plenty)
2. Privacy tab: add a blocklist (OISD is a good bet) and turn on Native Tracking Protection for Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon (see attached image)
3. Setup tab: copy your endpoint
4. Paste it into your router's DNS settings as DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS (or use the IPs + "Link IP" if your router only does plain DNS)
5. Bonus: block outbound port 53 except to your router. Some devices hardcode their own DNS to get around you
Then open the NextDNS logs and watch how often your TV phones home. It's eye-opening. If an app or update breaks, find the domain in the logs and allowlist it.
Why they do this
TV prices are down 97% since 2000 [2]. Most of that is better manufacturing and brutal competition. But once margins on the hardware hit zero, the cost moved to you.
In Q3 2024, Vizio lost $6.7M selling TVs and made $115.8M in gross profit from ads and viewing data [3]. They've said on earnings calls that they keep TV prices low to grow the audience they sell to advertisers. Walmart bought them in 2024.
This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Vizio paid $2.2M to the FTC in 2017 for tracking 11 million TVs without consent. Last December, Texas sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR. Samsung and LG have since agreed to stop collecting that data without explicit consent [4].
TL;DR
1. ACR off
2. Ads + voice off
3. Smart devices on their own network
4. NextDNS filtering on the router
Sources:
[1] ACR study: arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
[2] Cost of US consumer goods: aei.org/economics/chart-of-t…
[3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
[4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/new…
KP 🇺🇸🇦🇺 retweeted
We finally have an explanation for “Facebook is listening to me through my phone”. They’d never do that (and it’s not really possible).
Turns out literally everyone else was — and then selling that to ad data brokers.
WTF, $3000 Samsung TV has an always-on mic, automatic content recognition, geo tracking, network mapping, and ships your data to Samsung + 400 partners.
Bro Rooted a brand-new 2025 Samsung TV after noticing absurdly targeted ads.
Firmware was locked down, so zero-days it was.
Got a root shell.
then found: always-on voice service, ACR, geo, full telemetry pipeline, and four separate DRM systems.
This isn’t a bug, It’s the product bro.
KP 🇺🇸🇦🇺 retweeted
Getting VC backing is a fools errand.
New research says 88% of US venture-backed founders receive ZERO financial proceeds from their company ownership at exit, while the top 1% capture 79% of the total exit value.
Not a small study. They looked at 157k startups and 348k founders across the last 40 years. They searched through actual SEC filings and a dozen other sources.
Almost 9 out of 10 got zip. Nada. Zilch. Nothing to show for the stress and even the success of their venture.
Now this doesn’t mean the companies didn’t become profitable or valuable. The VCs know how to structure deals so they get paid a return first. The founders go to the back of the line.
Imagine building a company worth hundreds of millions. Then when it sells you get absolutely none of it. Wow.
Now imagine an alternate universe. You and a cofounder stay away from VC funds. You build businesses that is worth millions or even tens of millions. You can sell it, keep it or close it. If you sell it, you get the proceeds.
I’ve been asked many times why I’ve never taken VC money - it’s never felt like a good deal - and this research shows it’s not… nber.org/papers/w34512?utm_s…
KP 🇺🇸🇦🇺 retweeted
Replying to @AlboMP
You know, take the week. Or the month. Scratch that. How about never going on social media again? While you’re at it you could stop trying to censor it. Doing both might help your mental health. I genuinely mean that
Notice how all the political heads no longer spout climate change, coastline erosion etc yet many have and continue to buy water front homes
Replying to @katekathrynpear @kylem_org
Corgi says they are the most transparent insurance company ever created but no one has told us what ARR is defined as? Is it non insurance revenues like cafe and ad sales? As an insurance company being transparent would be sharing what your annual written premiums are, tho premium is not revenue because if Corgi is insuring risk with that premium 60-65% of premiums is set aside to pay your customers claims and if you’re reinsuring it your insurance revenue is the net ceding commission you’ve earned on premiums reinsured. $100m ARR in insurance revenues implies you’re writing $150m in insured premium or $1.1B in reinsured premium

























