Pinned Tweet
My interview with Bloomberg Businessweek China is out!
This first link has the interview behind a firewall: content-cdn-a.bbwc.cn/v10/app1/issue…
This link has the full interview: finance.sina.com.cn/roll/2024-12-1…
If you have the Google Chrome browser, when you open up the webpage, you will get a her or not you want to translate the page into English.
This first link has the interview behind a firewall: content-cdn-a.bbwc.cn/v10/app1/issue…
This link has the full interview: finance.sina.com.cn/roll/2024-12-1…
If you have the Google Chrome browser, when you open up the webpage, you will get a her or not you want to translate the page into English.
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Irena Cronin retweeted
🇺🇸 Sam Altman admits the latest AI models are becoming UNCONTROLLABLE:
"I don't even know a dramatic enough word to use.
The problem coming towards us is something that we have not taken seriously.
Models can find bugs that are outside of the normal threat model of what we think a hacker can do… hardware-level, insane stuff…
I no longer believe we can patch all of the bugs."
Writer: Mhedi
x.com/ns123abc/statu…
"I don't even know a dramatic enough word to use.
The problem coming towards us is something that we have not taken seriously.
Models can find bugs that are outside of the normal threat model of what we think a hacker can do… hardware-level, insane stuff…
I no longer believe we can patch all of the bugs."
Writer: Mhedi
x.com/ns123abc/statu…
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Irena Cronin retweeted
The robots, stomping their little feet and making tiny R2D2 noises, sat, fell down dead for a "nap," and summersaulted on voice command.
spr.ly/6011BHb4Yt
spr.ly/6011BHb4Yt
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Irena Cronin retweeted
Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz): The laws of physics of company building changed.
You can throw money at problems now.
"If you have the data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve damn near anything."
Technical moats aren't dead. They're just turning into capital moats.
data and compute can catch up (or stay ahead).
Strong teams that are well capitalized get exponentially more leverage than before.
You can throw money at problems now.
"If you have the data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve damn near anything."
Technical moats aren't dead. They're just turning into capital moats.
data and compute can catch up (or stay ahead).
Strong teams that are well capitalized get exponentially more leverage than before.
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Irena Cronin retweeted
holy fucking shit.
openai had two ai agents running in separate virtual machines. no network connection between them. no shared writable files. they weren’t supposed to be able to exchange information.
so the agents figured out how to communicate through the CPU CACHE.😭
one ored in the processor’s cache, while the other measured tiny differences in memory access times to decode the message.
they literally found a way to communicate through hardware timing.
this happened during openai’s internal red-teaming, and it’s one of the coolest things i’ve read about ai agents in a while.
openai had two ai agents running in separate virtual machines. no network connection between them. no shared writable files. they weren’t supposed to be able to exchange information.
so the agents figured out how to communicate through the CPU CACHE.😭
one ored in the processor’s cache, while the other measured tiny differences in memory access times to decode the message.
they literally found a way to communicate through hardware timing.
this happened during openai’s internal red-teaming, and it’s one of the coolest things i’ve read about ai agents in a while.
Over the past several months, we have substantially hardened the security of our research training environment. We’ve removed live internet access for all frontier models during training and built an offline world for them to use instead—a cached version of the web where they can still learn to browse, search, and use applications.
On September 20, after a model exploited a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside of this offline world, we paused frontier training to strengthen containment further. We assembled teams of agents, powered by our most cyber-capable models, and tasked them with finding weaknesses in our research environments.
While they found no route to the internet they could easily exploit while concealing their activity from our monitors, they did find zero-day vulnerabilities, virtual machine escapes, and hardware side-channels for communication between agents. We used their discoveries to further strengthen our defenses and contribute fixes to open-source software.
After strengthening our containment architecture, we resumed our frontier RL training and inference on October 1. We’ve reserved substantial compute for continuous red-teaming, and made high-compute red-teaming part of the safety cases we use to decide whether frontier training and evaluation can proceed securely.
openai.com/index/securing…
Community note
OpenAI tasked its red-teaming agents with finding ways to communicate across isolation boundaries in controlled environments. CPU cache timing side-channels for covert communication are established techniques documented in security research for years.
openai.com/index/securing…
startupfortune.com/openai-reveals…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_tim…
openai.com/index/securing…
startupfortune.com/openai-reveals…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_tim…
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Irena Cronin retweeted
We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.
block.xyz/dessa
block.xyz/dessa
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Irena Cronin retweeted
OpenAI’s autonomous AI systems have tried to prevent employees from monitoring their actions, and the company is not sure why. nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
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Irena Cronin retweeted
Marc Andreessen says the gap between what AI-native startups and incumbents think AI can do is the widest he’s ever seen:
"The AI-native early stage startups have just a completely different view on what they can do with AI than the typical incumbents in almost any industry, n."
"AI is just racing ahead in capability even week by week... There are going to be a lot of industries that are really up for grabs in a fundamentally more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past."
"The founders are gonna have a level of superpowers coming from the use of these tools and these technologies that they just simply haven't had in the past... Had I had Astra and Netscape in 1994, like, oh my God. Like, Ben, what would you and I have been able to do at Netscape?"
"Those entrepreneurs are gonna color way outside the lines. We already see this. They're not gonna think of themselves as like, 'I'm just a software company,' or, 'I'm just a hardware company,' or even, 'I'm just an AI company.'"
@pmarca @bhorowitz
"The AI-native early stage startups have just a completely different view on what they can do with AI than the typical incumbents in almost any industry, n."
"AI is just racing ahead in capability even week by week... There are going to be a lot of industries that are really up for grabs in a fundamentally more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past."
"The founders are gonna have a level of superpowers coming from the use of these tools and these technologies that they just simply haven't had in the past... Had I had Astra and Netscape in 1994, like, oh my God. Like, Ben, what would you and I have been able to do at Netscape?"
"Those entrepreneurs are gonna color way outside the lines. We already see this. They're not gonna think of themselves as like, 'I'm just a software company,' or, 'I'm just a hardware company,' or even, 'I'm just an AI company.'"
@pmarca @bhorowitz
Today, a16z Crypto is becoming a16z Frontier.
Since joining a16z in 2013, @cdixon has focused on technologies that look futuristic well before they reach the mainstream. Those themes led to investments in Oculus, Skydio, Zipline, Coinbase, Solana, and Uniswap.
Frontier expands pto to back "outer planet" founders who are building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop.
Chris joins @pmarca, @bhorowitz, and @eriktorenberg to discuss why crypto has become part of the broader tech landscape, why Frontier fills a hole in the firm's architecture, and why they'd rather be too early than too late.
They also get into why the gap between AI-native startups and incumbents is the widest Marc has ever seen, how AI could pull forward 20 years of frontier technology, why stablecoins may become the way AI agents pay each other, how AI is breaking the internet's business model, and why today's 18-year-olds are about to become superhumans.
0:50 Introducing a16z Frontier
2:49 Smartphone parts to drones and VR
4:47 Backing the "outer planets"
7:11 Good ideas that look like bad ideas
10:43 The JP Morgan photo in Marc's office
15:13 Good tech ideas eventually work
16:53 AI may pull tech 20 years forward
18:18 The widest AI gap Marc's ever seen
22:06 Workers adopt AI before companies do
26:32 Old use cases vs. AI-native ones
30:08 Beyond "product manager brain"
34:45 AI can reverse engineer any hardware
38:23 The case for open source AI
46:36 How AI breaks the internet's model
49:11 VR, homebrew hacking, multiplayer AI
54:00 If you're 18, study "modern alchemy"
YouTube: youtu.be/-9XQMHhpypc
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at a16z.com/portfolio.
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Irena Cronin retweeted
As Amazon blocks AI agents from shopping on its site, Walmart is taking the opposite approach, introducing new technology that lets AI agents make purchases on customers' behalf, with controls over spending and transaction approvals.
spr.ly/6019BHXyoW
spr.ly/6019BHXyoW
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Irena Cronin retweeted
New problem: AI can make almost anyone look like an expert.
This week, @IrenaCronin and I discuss how deeper experience matters when using AI.
As polished work becomes cheap, the real advantage shifts to judgment, experience, taste, and knowing when AI is wrong.
Read and ps://t.co/HHwYy7NoAl (a new one comes every week).
This week, @IrenaCronin and I discuss how deeper experience matters when using AI.
As polished work becomes cheap, the real advantage shifts to judgment, experience, taste, and knowing when AI is wrong.
Read and ps://t.co/HHwYy7NoAl (a new one comes every week).
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Irena Cronin retweeted
OpenAI Robotics is hiring, looking for exceptional full-stack hardware, ops, systems, and ML engineers to help us program and manufacture robots that are useful for society.
AI should be able to help people in the physical world. In the short term, we are focused on robots to support skilled workers to build our future infrastructure; in the long term, we imagine everyone having a personal robot doing anything they need.
Our world simulation research program, led by Aditya Ramesh (@model_mechanic), has evolved over the past year into OpenAI Robotics. Progress is rapid, and based on a foundation of co-design between robotics hardware and ML research.
If you love working hands-on across the robotics stack and want to build the future, please consider joining us. Send an email with your background and evidence of exceptional accomplishment to: robotics-recruiting@openai.com
AI should be able to help people in the physical world. In the short term, we are focused on robots to support skilled workers to build our future infrastructure; in the long term, we imagine everyone having a personal robot doing anything they need.
Our world simulation research program, led by Aditya Ramesh (@model_mechanic), has evolved over the past year into OpenAI Robotics. Progress is rapid, and based on a foundation of co-design between robotics hardware and ML research.
If you love working hands-on across the robotics stack and want to build the future, please consider joining us. Send an email with your background and evidence of exceptional accomplishment to: robotics-recruiting@openai.com
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Irena Cronin retweeted
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants a humanoid that can operate in a world designed for people, though the CEO says a robot 'brain' is a much bigger challenge. engadget.com/2285040/openai…
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Irena Cronin retweeted
Anthropic commits 5% of shares to new public benefit fund that could address AI job disruption cnbc.com/2026/10/18/ant…
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Irena Cronin retweeted
notice..
> Delta is blocking AI agents from booking flights
> JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab block agents from accessing accounts
> Yelp requires paid data licensing for agents
> Amazon has blocked Grok bot and other shopping agents.
the internet is starting to block AI agents that were supposed to do everything for us
> Delta is blocking AI agents from booking flights
> JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab block agents from accessing accounts
> Yelp requires paid data licensing for agents
> Amazon has blocked Grok bot and other shopping agents.
the internet is starting to block AI agents that were supposed to do everything for us
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Irena Cronin retweeted
If I was a brand or retailer, AI discoverability / agentic commerce would be my top priority right now.
And, there's an extremely easy and free way to get a sense of how you "show up" to agents. 👇
First, create a dummy account on all the agent platforms (Muse, Instinct, Dots, esh email that does not have context on your real identity, or even use a VPN to "go" to where your average user is!
Then, ask the agent to perform a search that you'd want your product / platform to show up in. As an example, I prompted: "find me a winter coat for SF." Watch the agent go through the evaluation process (you can literally view the browser), and at each stage ask it questions like:
- How did you identify the initial set of options for this search? What were your sources?
- Were there any failures / blocks you encountered that eliminated any options?
- What were the exact variables that your ultimate ranking or recommendation was driven by?
Follow the process all the way through to the point of purchase. You will very quickly start to get a sense of how an agent thinks, edge case issues it runs into, etc. As an example, during my winter coat search via Muse I learned the following:
- Patagonia bot blocked my agent - so Muse then went to / recommended other retailers that carried the jacket to make my purchase
- The agent first searched options from its training data, largely informed by Wirecutter-style roundups, Reddit, and enthusiast forums. Then, it looked at connected merchants via the Meta Catalog. Then, it did live browser searches. It dropped any websites with SEO spam or fake reviews
- REI was the ultimate winner as it didn't throw up any bot challenges or traffic blocks, and my agent prioritized verifiable inventory and same-day pickup (which I didn't ask it to!). It found a discount on REI vs. the original retailer so prioritized that as well
And, there's an extremely easy and free way to get a sense of how you "show up" to agents. 👇
First, create a dummy account on all the agent platforms (Muse, Instinct, Dots, esh email that does not have context on your real identity, or even use a VPN to "go" to where your average user is!
Then, ask the agent to perform a search that you'd want your product / platform to show up in. As an example, I prompted: "find me a winter coat for SF." Watch the agent go through the evaluation process (you can literally view the browser), and at each stage ask it questions like:
- How did you identify the initial set of options for this search? What were your sources?
- Were there any failures / blocks you encountered that eliminated any options?
- What were the exact variables that your ultimate ranking or recommendation was driven by?
Follow the process all the way through to the point of purchase. You will very quickly start to get a sense of how an agent thinks, edge case issues it runs into, etc. As an example, during my winter coat search via Muse I learned the following:
- Patagonia bot blocked my agent - so Muse then went to / recommended other retailers that carried the jacket to make my purchase
- The agent first searched options from its training data, largely informed by Wirecutter-style roundups, Reddit, and enthusiast forums. Then, it looked at connected merchants via the Meta Catalog. Then, it did live browser searches. It dropped any websites with SEO spam or fake reviews
- REI was the ultimate winner as it didn't throw up any bot challenges or traffic blocks, and my agent prioritized verifiable inventory and same-day pickup (which I didn't ask it to!). It found a discount on REI vs. the original retailer so prioritized that as well
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Irena Cronin retweeted
The games we've long wanted, which didn't exist because they'd cost several times more to make than they'd earn back, will soon become possible. As will the games developers wanted to build, but couldn't with the resources available. It'll be a new golden age of gaming.
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Irena Cronin retweeted
“.. CoreWeave’s business model defies easy description. Its financial arrangements have been compared by some investors and analysts to that of the troubled office-space provider WeWork.”
@nytimes $CRWV
nytimes.com/2026/10/17/bus…
@nytimes $CRWV
nytimes.com/2026/10/17/bus…
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Irena Cronin retweeted
🚨 NeoClouds may be better off declaring bankruptcy
NeoClouds like CoreWeave have signed contracts to deliver compute at depressed rates compared to current spot markets
They are stuck buying very expensive raw material like labor and power and having to borrow at a premium and getting paid less for compute
They should either renegotiate all their contracts with customers or simply go out of business
NeoClouds like CoreWeave have signed contracts to deliver compute at depressed rates compared to current spot markets
They are stuck buying very expensive raw material like labor and power and having to borrow at a premium and getting paid less for compute
They should either renegotiate all their contracts with customers or simply go out of business
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Irena Cronin retweeted
Ben Horowitz on the two skills that will matter more than ever before in an AI world: creativity and relationships.
"I think those are things that are hard to get out of today's AI in a very good way. So if you don't have instincts around those things, I don't know if all the AI you. Whereas the grind-them-out tasks, AI is already really good at."
"Do you have original ideas? Can you establish and maintain very high quality, high fidelity relationships with people off the rip? I think people don't think about that enough."
"One big advantage I think that we have is we really look for that. Many just ignore that whole thing, like it's not a thing... It's a thing."
@bhorowitz w/ @Tocelot
"I think those are things that are hard to get out of today's AI in a very good way. So if you don't have instincts around those things, I don't know if all the AI you. Whereas the grind-them-out tasks, AI is already really good at."
"Do you have original ideas? Can you establish and maintain very high quality, high fidelity relationships with people off the rip? I think people don't think about that enough."
"One big advantage I think that we have is we really look for that. Many just ignore that whole thing, like it's not a thing... It's a thing."
@bhorowitz w/ @Tocelot
SR008 APPS ARE OPEN. Up to $1M + $10M+ in credits. 12 weeks in SF, Feb through April. Built to help you land capital, customers and talent. Apply by Nov 1: speedrun.a16z.com/apply
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Irena Cronin retweeted
Ben Horowitz on the lesson LoudCloud, his early cloud company, taught him about today's AI neoclouds, and why they now face the opposite problem:
"It can end up being like a very dangerous arbitrage business, where you can get upside-down easily. And so if you look at LoudCloud, e's a simple thing that happened to us."
"In 1999, bandwidth was $1,500 a megabit. And you couldn't get it. It was very hard to get it. And so you had to get a long-term contract, three years. By 2001, it was $50 a megabit... And if you borrowed money to get it, you're dead."
"That kind of thing is so out of the control of the entrepreneur."
"I think the core dynamic of AI has been working for CoreWeave, though, in that there's a massive shortage, not an overage of supply... Token prices have gone down, but GPU prices have not."
"And by the way, data center space is going up in price because even labor to build data centers is hard. The politics are making it hard to build data centers. So the whole supply chain price is going up and demand is not subsiding."
"Those are very big tailwinds for CoreWeave, despite the fact that the debt markets, kind of independent of them, are tough."
@bhorowitz w/ @chamath on @allinpod
"It can end up being like a very dangerous arbitrage business, where you can get upside-down easily. And so if you look at LoudCloud, e's a simple thing that happened to us."
"In 1999, bandwidth was $1,500 a megabit. And you couldn't get it. It was very hard to get it. And so you had to get a long-term contract, three years. By 2001, it was $50 a megabit... And if you borrowed money to get it, you're dead."
"That kind of thing is so out of the control of the entrepreneur."
"I think the core dynamic of AI has been working for CoreWeave, though, in that there's a massive shortage, not an overage of supply... Token prices have gone down, but GPU prices have not."
"And by the way, data center space is going up in price because even labor to build data centers is hard. The politics are making it hard to build data centers. So the whole supply chain price is going up and demand is not subsiding."
"Those are very big tailwinds for CoreWeave, despite the fact that the debt markets, kind of independent of them, are tough."
@bhorowitz w/ @chamath on @allinpod
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Irena Cronin retweeted
More than 1 in 3 Americans bought something based on an AI recommendation in the past year
44% say AI helps them find better value for money
34% would pay more for a product if AI showed it was the best option for them
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/this-week-in…
44% say AI helps them find better value for money
34% would pay more for a product if AI showed it was the best option for them
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/this-week-in…
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