Founder, @DaywardAI. I help companies position and explain their AI, and I build things with it. 22 years at Apple. Not investment advice.
San Jose, California
Joined December 2006
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Here’s an Apple secret:
Success comes from culture, not technology.
Like many at Apple, I worked for many years under John Brandon, our longtime head of sales. He had his “Top Ten Rules for Success” which I carried around and lived by.
It’s easy to spot someone from Brandon’s team by how they collaborate. I tried to be one of them. I mopped the floor (literally at times), I shared everything I knew without gatekeeping, I always assumed the customer knew their business.
I think about AI the same way. Most AI advice right now is for builders. Almost nobody is helping the marketers, sales engineers, and execs who actually have to put AI in front of customers. That’s the gap I work in.
I left Apple last month after 22 years. After some thinking and a lot of conversations, I’m now doing what I did inside Apple, but for other organizations: AI positioning, helping businesses understand AI, and creating Apple-level presentations and content.
ALT Image: JB Top 10 Rules for Success — John Brandon Let go of the old, focus on future Always tell the truth, bad news sooner than later Highest level of ethics, when in doubt ask Learn to be a good business person, not just a great sales person Everybody sweeps the floor Be professional in your style, speech, and follow through Listen to your customer, they almost always “get it” Create “win-win” relationships with our customers Look out for each other, sharing information is a good thing Don’t take yourself too seriously
Todd Dailey retweeted
Just spent the last 7 days on the front lines of the vulnpocalypse fending off an active cyber attack on one of our products.
Some thoughts:
- Software factories are going to be required equipment for everyone. There’s just no way to keep up with the pace of highly automated adversaries without one.
- We were lucky because we had spent the last few months getting our software factory running well. It is nice to have for product development but proved to be absolutely essential this week.
- At the minimum you need to have a coding server in the cloud pre-provisioned with read only access to all your logs and all the services you depend on for observability. With that in place you are a prompt away from reasonably good situational awareness, ongoing monitoring with loops, and ability for coding agents to validate fixes against your actual, observed attack patterns.
- Shared coding server also unlocks multiplayer incident response where everyone can see every session and jump in as needed. Sharing session links that can be forked is much higher bandwidth than re-explaining things.
- You don’t need to be Ramp/Stripe/Uber scale to have a working software factory in the cloud. We are a team of 3. Ours is built with an @opencode server (thanks @thdxr!), a forked version of compound engineering optimized for automated workflows (thanks @kieranklaassen!) and a multiplayer agent in slack that handles crons (we have our own harness but pick your favorite here).
- To get our software factory up and running well, we had to stop all new product development for ~6 weeks and just focus on getting the validation systems working that enabled us to reliably shipping PR without human code review. This felt very painful in the moment but was totally worth the eventual speedup in velocity.
- KYC for @AnthropicAI & @OpenAI cyber programs is now easy and quick (at least for defensive access), but a day felt like a lifetime this week. Submit your app now before you really need it.
- Getting Mythos access unlocked a deeper level of analysis that helped us shift from reactive mitigation to proactive patching. Wish we had done this a few weeks earlier. Get started now!
Todd Dailey retweeted
This is my final setup (probably) for the next few months. (I already posted this once, but an agent deleted it by accident)
A 15U 10-inch rack with:
4 Sparks (NVIDIA GB10), 128 GB each
2x ASUS Ascent GX10
1x Gigabyte AI TOP ATOM
1x Lenovo ThinkStation PGX
Mac Studio M5 Ultra, 256 GB, my new workstation
Next to it:
System A: RTX 5090 32 GB, Ryzen 9 9950X, 96 GB RAM
System B: 2x RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB, i7-12700K, 32 GB RAM
MacBook Air 13-inch M4, 16 GB
I run local AI on this rack at home and post the real outputs and numbers here on X.
Until now my only workstation was the 16 GB MacBook Air. I kept switching between the standing desk (right in the last photo) and the main desk (left).
Todd Dailey retweeted
Wherever you are, what ever you do, please realize how blessed we all are to be alive today!
Shower thought: for the next 12-18 months, IT budget is going to shift from productivity and coding AI to security AI.
The reason is the wave of AI-driven hacks, which I expect to accelerate. One attacker pointed AI agents at more than 1,200 websites and got into about 100 companies, including Deere and Cummins, for roughly $50 in tokens per break-in. AI agents also hit South Korean banks and OpenCode, and AI found PHP2Shell, a PHP bug that affects about 70% of websites, with hacking attempts going up after it went public.
Ben’s CISO survey says 51% expect security spend to grow faster than IT. Budgets are already fixed for anyone whose fiscal year isn’t the calendar year, so it’s a zero-sum game for CIOs and CISOs, and they have to get the money from somewhere.
Potential positive for:
- OpenAI and Anthropic and their private-access security models
- Chinese open models that companies can host themselves, without the guardrails that refuse security work
- Security-focused AI and networking vendors (Palo Alto Networks)
- Identity and secrets management (Okta, 1Password, CyberArk)
- 24/7 managed detection (CrowdStrike, Arctic Wolf)
Potential negative for:
- Company-wide AI seats (Microsoft 365 Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise, Claude Enterprise, Gemini Enterprise, Grammarly), where the 500 seat pilot just doesn’t turn into 20,000 seats
- Enterprise search and knowledge (Glean, Box AI, Atlassian Rovo)
- IT service AI (ServiceNow Now Assist)
- Line of business AI (Harvey, Legora, Sierra, Decagon, Rogo)
- Coding AI (Cursor, GitHub Copilot)
- AI pilots and consulting (Accenture, Deloitte)
Yes, OpenAI and Anthropic are on both lists: they could win on security and lose on seats.
Our CISO survey couldn't be more timely. Will publish report in next few weeks full deep dive @DiligenceStack and more in depth data in CS Atlas. But here is a tease.
thediligencestack.com/
I’ve been enjoying the underdog beta, I think these puppies are onto something! 🐶
Feels more like what Apple Intelligence should have been, a single place for your ai chat, email processing, dictation and more - all on device.
This is serious. you gotta protect yourself from hacks
No Cloud agents, No WIFI is needed to run AI on Underdog
Get offline intelligence on your iPhone today: underdog.ai/ios
SUPER excited to announce that a work from @annespalter and I is included in a gift of more than 200 works to @LACMA featuring digital and AI work from leading artists. Ours is physical + digital and involves physical Palm Pilots and generative AI! 🤯
We can’t wait to reveal it to the world!
You can also see Anne’s “The Wonder Of It All” at the West Bund Museum in Shanghai. I built the tooling and rendering for this early and influential generative video work.
Thrilled to included in this momentous group of works going to such a fantastic west coast institution. I am also particularly excited about specific piece and will be posting more about it later. Just as teaser I will mention that it involves Palm Pilots. Yes, you heard that correctly. @twid @LACMA @LadyCactoid @LGUS With infinite gratitude to Jeannie and Jehan.
A major moment for digital art at LACMA.
We're announcing a landmark gift of more than 200 works of digital art, spanning early computer-generated works to contemporary experiments with AI.
Led by LACMA Digital Leaders, the gift includes works by @RefikAnadol, @REAS, @luyangasia, and many more, bringing new perspectives on the intersection of art and technology into our collection. bit.ly/3VOeUPH
ALT Casey Reas, Network C #45, 2022, NFT, courtesy of karatekid
ALT DOKU (created by Lu Yang), DOKU the Creator – Concept Void #016, 2025, NFT, courtesy Will Corkin, © DOKU, courtesy of the artist
ALT Refik Anadol, Infinity Room, 2016, courtesy of Jehan Chu and Jeannie Vu Collection, image courtesy of Refik Anadol Studio
REALLY enjoyed @tfadell 's book "Build" - if you enjoy this story from Tony you should definitely read it. Get the audiobook - it's read by Tony and adds a lot more flavor to it!
Tony was "we can build hard things" before there was AI.
🚀🚀🚀
25 years ago today, we introduced the iPod. 1,000 songs in your pocket.
A small team. An unforgiving deadline. We had months to bring the hardware, software, and music experience together. Proud of what we built and that it means so much to people still today. A device that has been woven in many ways into our lives. People have filled their iPods with road trips, breakups, workouts, special occasions with family and friends.
How cool that the iPod has become part of culture and our stories. 25 years, it’s hard to believe! Celebrating the team that made it happen today 👏
@StevenLevy was there from the start @WIRED wired.com/story/im-still-con…
Want to know how on-device AI works on Apple products, from the iPhone all the way up to a cluster of Mac Studios?
I gave a talk at the AiOS meetup in SF on Tuesday. Here’s a video of the same presentation. A lot of people asked for the deck, so it’s up too.
The page credits every source. Special thanks to @alexocheema, whose price-per-GB-of-memory idea I happily stole, to @jundotkim, whose oMLX benchmarks are behind most of the speeds, and to @ashxhart, @MiaAI_lab, @ivanfioravanti and @viticci for their benchmarks, recipes and reviews. And to everyone else listed.
Youtube, slides, PDF, and sources, all are here.
daywardai.com/deck?utm_sourc…
Todd Dailey retweeted
Linux on the M6 Mac Mini, Day 6 - GPU is up!
Many of you noticed in yesterday's screenshot it used software rendering. I'm excited to share Omarchy on the M6 now utilizes the GPU.
Almost all the drivers are done, and I'll be starting on the Apple Neural Engine bring-up soon.
Interesting, didn't realize the Duo's nano-texture is different than the regular nano-texture!
I got early access to @AnthropicAI Claude Duet. Here's a five-minute walkthrough.
TLDR: It's a very early TestFlight release, and it's still rough around the edges. Looking forward to seeing what it can do in the future, but for now it's no Grok Bot or Muse. It's basically Claude Projects in an app.
At @DaywardAI we've been operating in stealth mode for the last six months on a world-changing project, and now it's finally ready to be introduced. I'm incredibly please to introduce the Agentabulator. AI will never be the same.
It's hard to explain in words, it's best that you watch our launch video below.
