CEO @ Read | Thomas LLC

Earth
Joined April 2008
Phil Read retweeted
Farzad 🇺🇸 🇮🇷
@farzynessOct 9
Elon's INSANE SpaceX Phone Announcement
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Working on the DJ library ahead of tonight's stream
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Phil Read retweeted
I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances. What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation. Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture. It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off. Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle. It starts with METR. Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models. He proposes METR for this purpose. But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock. Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio. And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem. This stock was worth $500 million early last year. It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later. METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth. Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well. But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much. The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all. The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll. If this were the end of it, that's bad. But that isn't all. The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom. The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others. They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's. All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile. As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder. Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created. From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts. This itself is an objective fact. The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it. But the problem also goes in the other direction: If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die. Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen. Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly. They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic. And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly. What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations. The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture. And that feedback loop is winning. That's what Jacob Coxon is. China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China. America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level. Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences. Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully. It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America. Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear. Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers. Congress must investigate. Evidence and Github in next post. Then some supplementary figures.
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BOOM! MASSIVE AI POWER ON YOUR DESKTOP OR POCKET. It will make doomers freak out. AMD bought the company that etches entire AI models into silicon. This is not another GPU. This is a fundamental rewrite of how inference works — and it just punched a hole through the memory wall that every centralized AI lab has been hiding behind. On August 6, 2026, AMD announced a definitive agreement to acquire Toronto-based Taalas. Official announcement: newsroom.amd.com/news/amd-ac… Taalas does not load model weights from HBM. It is the model. Weights and dataflow are burned into the transistors themselves. The first chip, HC1, runs Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B at roughly 17,000 tokens per second per user on a single TSMC 6nm die drawing about 200–250 watts. That is an order of magnitude faster than leading GPUs on the same workload, at a fraction of the power and cost (vendor figures). 17,000 tokens per second is faster than any data center. A PCIe card. In a regular server. Or, soon, on your desk or in your pocket. A data center in your pocket. This is the kind of raw, localized horsepower that makes centralized control look like a 2023 strategy. When inference no longer requires a warehouse of HBM-stacked accelerators and a permission slip from a frontier lab, the gatekeepers lose their choke point. HOW IT WORKS — HARDCORE MODELS 1. The model becomes the chip - Trained weights are encoded directly into mask-ROM (via-ROM) in the top metal/via layers. - Only two of ~100 layers change between models. - Automated foundry flow: new model → custom silicon in ~2 months. 2. Dual-domain architecture - Mask-ROM recall fabric: immutable base weights. Fully digital. Claimed density trick: store 4 bits + perform the associated multiply in a single transistor. - SRAM recall fabric: KV cache + LoRA adapters for limited fine-tuning and context. - No HBM. No CoWoS. No liquid cooling required for the first-gen card. 3. Hardware specs (HC1) - Process: TSMC N6 - Die: 815 mm², 53 billion transistors - Power: ~200–250 W - Form factor: PCIe card - First model: Llama 3.1 8B (aggressive mixed 3/6-bit quantization) - Next: HC2 targeting ~20B parameters; larger models via multi-card pipeline parallelism 4. The speed source - Weights never leave the die. - No memory-fetch cycle per token. - Compute is hardwired to the exact dataflow of that one model. - Result: sub-millisecond first-token latency and 10k–17k tok/s class throughput on a single card. Trade-off: the finished chip runs only the model it was built for. New architecture = new tape-out. Taalas argues that is still cheaper and faster than training the next model from scratch. This architecture does something the safety-and-control crowd did not price in: it makes high-quality inference cheap, fast, and physically distributed. You no longer need to phone home to a handful of companies that own the GPUs, the evals, and the usage policies. A popular open model can be turned into silicon and dropped into ordinary machines. Agentic loops, local coding, writing, and analysis at speeds that feel instantaneous become possible without a data-center bill or an API key that can be revoked. AMD plans to fold the technology into its Instinct + Helios + ROCm stack, pairing the specialized silicon with GPUs for hybrid systems. That is the enterprise path. The more explosive path is the one that leaks out the side: commodity cards running fixed, high-demand models at speeds previously reserved for the biggest clouds. Centralized AI control assumed inference would stay expensive, centralized, and observable. Hardwired silicon breaks that assumption. The model is no longer software running on someone else’s computer. The model is the computer — and it can sit on your motherboard.
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I resigned from Tesla a few months ago. I was on the Roadster project and I have to tell you I am very uncomfortable with how fast and how awesome the roadster is. It’s very dangerous for humanity. I call for a slowdown for the roadster.
Tesla
@TeslaSep 12
Go for launch
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Phil Read retweeted
I resigned from Tesla today. I spent the last three years doing windshield wiper research at both Tesla and Rivian. Neither are acting responsibly. They’re racing straight toward self-improving windshield wipers and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
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This story is fascinating and is easily one of the most important things happening at the intersection of AI and politics right now. It's critical everyone understands the situation because this is just the beginning of the AI infowars and psyops Jacob Coxon, a relatively unknown AI researcher, gives the WSJ an exclusive story about his resignation from Anthropic and his concerns about AI Twenty minutes after the WSJ story drops, Jacob posts on X about how he's concerned that AI could kill us all in a few years. This post now has over 149M views. For reference, Ilya Sutskever (a very well known AI name) left OpenAI in 2024 and his announcement post has fewer than 6M views as of today Bear in mind, Jacob Coxon's X account had no prior posting activity public, but it is immediately reposted and boosted by numerous AI-doomer policy advocacy nonprofits funded by the same donor (Jaan Tallinn) who just happens to be one of the leading investors in Anthropic We find out Jacob Coxon, who worked at Anthropic for only a few weeks, worked for a left-wing political advocacy group in 2021 (Newspeak). This organization is a British NGO with ties to hacking democracy, Hillary Clinton, prison abolition and extinction rebellion Many major Democrat politicians are now using Jacob's X post to fear monger the public into voting to regulate AI. It just so happens Bernie Sanders has a bill already written to ban artificial superintelligence (ASI) and to create a new federal agency to protect the public from the dangers of AI. This bill was announced just one week ago on September 3rd It would also place a temporary pause on "advanced AI" until a new federal regulator exists and has issued safety rules and a model-review process Elon then points out how none of this feels organic, and Jacob decides to take a shot at him for firing some xAI researchers Meanwhile, we know Anthropic has publicly asked the government to audit and block frontier models and Anthropic has run a state-by-state campaign for rules that only large AI labs trigger, meaning the rules are structured around barriers only frontier labs can easily clear (limiting competition) There is extensive Anthropic personnel and financial overlap with the groups that wrote the Biden-era AI policies. It is well known information you can seek out if you want the detail This all seemingly comes back to regulatory capture and political motives. None of this feels natural. Jacob can say these are his real views all he wants, and they may be, but there is clearly far more to the story
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Replying to @BrianRoemmele
Brian, your very public and ongoing accumulation of knowledge of humanity is serving as a masterfully curated museum of our collective past and present. I’m so grateful for your efforts. I see you as a crucial Node. Thank you.
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Thinking about yourself Is the source of all unhappiness And misery Self obsession Is the root of all unhappiness ME IS A DISEASE 🪞🦠 With @naval
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SCOTT ADAMS FORVER
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For hundreds of years the greatest minds in history handed their thoughts to typists and secretaries. None of those typists ever watermarked the page to claim the very ideas as their own (yes mj;BKR was only to build blame). Why are we suddenly pretending the machine is the author? When the machine receives a hidden signature and the human who directed every draft becomes invisible, we are no longer talking about transparency. We are talking about historical amnesia. Read more…
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.@naval: “The opportunities have never been more equal than now. @elonmusk and @JeffBezos have the same iPhone you do. They don’t have some better version of an iPhone. They’re eating food that might be marginally better than yours, but it’s basically the same. You might even have a better diet than them. You probably have more time to go to the gym than them. They’re not immortal, and they’re not going to be—most likely, not at this time scale. So you have more youth than them. You have a lot of advantages over them. The wealth gaps are actually much smaller than people think. A lot of that is due to mass production, which comes from specialization, labor, and capitalism. But it’s very easy to overlook that and agitate—because that gets you higher in the status hierarchy with other monkeys. It makes you look like you’re fighting for noble causes and gives you status, which is really what people are craving these days. They’re craving status, not money or wealth. And status is a zero-sum game. So it’s kind of an evil game to play because there have to be losers for every winner. And the only way to win is by crushing somebody else down.”
Technology is the great equalizer. Most people now have access to the same internet, the same phones, the same AI models. And they are very quickly getting access to the same financial services, from anywhere in the world. Geography and your wealth shouldn’t determine this - and soon, they won’t.
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Phil Read retweeted
It’s Bandcamp Friday, which means all the proceeds go to Meaningwave and Bandcamp doesn’t take a cut... ...so if you were thinking of getting an album (or 100) today’s a good day! akirathedon.bandcamp.com/mus…
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Phil Read retweeted
THIS IS WHY I LOVE THE OCEAN with Alan Watts
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Phil Read retweeted
Sylvester Stallone says the night he was nominated for an Oscar is one of the saddest days of his life Sly: “A year before, I was destitute. I had nothing, I was broke. And it came out, and a miracle happened, and I’m with some of the best films in Hollywood. I’m like, God, I’m in the same category as Best Picture. These are great writers, great people. And they gave me a front-row seat.” “And I invited my mother. I told her I’m up for an Oscar, I was a bum a year ago. She goes, ‘All right, but you have to invite Vivian.’ I go, ‘Who’s Vivian?’ She goes, ‘My hairdresser.’ I go, ‘I don’t have a seat for your hairdresser. It’s you and me, front row.’ She goes, ‘If you don’t invite Vivian, I’m not coming.’ I go, ‘You haven’t seen Vivian in ten years, she lives in Washington DC.’ She says, ‘I want to see Vivian with me, and then I’ll go.’” “Well… she didn’t go. So I went alone.” “So when people go, ‘Ah, you must’ve loved the Oscars’, well not really.” Sistine: “In your entire acting career, I’m not even going to say Rocky, did they ever acknowledge how proud they were of you?” Sly: “No, not even once.”
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