Experiments in AI, creativity and human potential. tech anthropologist. truth seeker. artist. educator. I don’t use X much.

Los Angeles
Joined September 2008
The US suffers from a productivity virus. AI may be the only thing to save us. We Forgot How To Rest: tarynsouthern.substack.com/p…
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Taryn Southern retweeted
You'll see a lot of doctors come out "against" this kind of broad screening system. They can even get quite agitated about it. This resistance stems from a well-established clinical consensus: traditional population-level imaging fails to improve health outcomes because false positives and invasive follow-ups do more harm than good. But this view suffers from an obvious blind spot. Existing studies rely on static data and completely ignore time-series imaging. And time-series is ignored because we haven't been able to afford to do high frequency imaging at population scale. Clearly, time series is going to be immensely more valuable than a single image. If you drop costs, value can go from 0 -> 1. On a more fundamental level, the argument against screening rests on an obviously false precept "More information is bad" -- just clearly untrue. More information better, you just have to interpret it correctly.
Announcing a new division of Midjourney called "Midjourney Medical"
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A researcher who spent three years training models at both OpenAI and Anthropic resigned, his words: "Neither company is acting responsibly in the race towards self-improving superintelligence." He called the competition "gambling with our lives." His post gained 160 million + views. Two days earlier, Sam Altman called Navier-Stokes "the strongest evidence yet" for slowing down. OpenAI's chief scientist published an essay calling for a voluntary pause. Three signals from inside the labs in five days. -- First AI-designed longevity drug reversed aging clocks by 3–6 years in 4 weeks. -- Google Alpha Genome Atlas: 9 billion possible mutations pre-computed across the entire human genome. -- Better training data = 12x compute efficiency improvement. Better architectures: 3.7x. -- Emad's p-doom dropped from 50% to 20%. -- Anthropic: $6.5B quarterly revenue run rate, 42% of the coding market, $35B cloud deal, mega IPO approaching at $2T+.
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Etched is releasing 10x better compute in the greatest compute shortage of all time. Soon every inference chip will be low voltage
We’ve raised $300M in Series C funding at a $10.3B valuation from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Argo, and SK Hynix. Our mission is to run the world's inference. This round accelerates production of our inference clusters. We've opened an 80,000-sqft, 10-MW facility 15 minutes from our office to expedite production and prototyping.
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Taryn Southern retweeted
it doesn't have to be illegal to be a lie h/t @Carson_C_Block on Summation pod
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Three years ago, two Harvard dropouts set out to build a better AI chip than the largest companies in the world. Almost everyone I called at the time said it was impossible. Today, Etched (@Etched) comes out of stealth with $800M total raised, $1B in signed customer contracts, and a working next-gen AI chip. This was my excuse to ask the two founders, @UbertiGavin and @robertwachen, every question I have about compute and inference. We discuss: - Why they built an entire rack and not just a chip - The two technical bets behind their architecture no one else has tried - How two founders in their twenties recruited industry legends - The night they nearly ran out of money - Why whoever produces the most tokens wins If you care about the future of compute, Gavin and Rob are two people to know. I think you will find the story of what they have built hard to forget. Enjoy! TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:00 Why Nobody Believed Etched Would Work 14:06 Why Inference Is the Bottleneck 22:27 Gavin and Rob’s Origin Stories 33:24 Taking Huge Risks to Move Faster 49:43 Kernels, Compilers, and the AI Stack 1:02:08 Raising $100M to Survive 1:16:00 The Future of Models, Agents, and Intelligence
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Etched is releasing 10x better compute in the greatest compute shortage of all time! Grateful to our friends @oceans for the opportunity to be part of the journey.
We're coming out of stealth. We've built our first racks after a successful A0 tapeout, $1B+ in customer contracts, and $800m raised. Early customer tests show us achieving SOTA throughput, latency, and power efficiency on inference workloads. Our first racks ship this summer.
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Taryn Southern retweeted
Jesse Genet has a number of AI agents on her household staff. There’s Claire, who has access to her Amazon account, as well as her Instacart to monitor her family’s food supply and handle the shopping. There’s also Sylvie, who runs her kids’ homeschool; the Wests — Clark, Dan, and Chloe — who deal with legal and financial paperwork; and a team of coding agents that can build pretty much any app Genet describes. Genet used to manage humans. She was the co-founder and CEO of Lumi, a start-up that sold custom packaging to e-commerce companies until it was acquired in 2021. After that, she became a stay-at-home mom. She and her husband — Ryan Hudson, a co-founder of Honey — moved their family to a horse ranch an hour outside Los Angeles. Her youngest child was just six months old; she had assumed that for the next five years, at least, she was finished with technical projects and with thinking about which company to start next. Then, earlier this year, she started playing with AI agents, “and I got five years back,” she says. That optimistic AI future is still a ways off, if it’s even possible at all. But Genet is already living in a rough draft of it. Many of the people experimenting with agents today are engineers and programmers, and they mostly use them just to do their existing jobs faster: to write code, summarize meetings, and organize their inboxes. Genet, who has never written a line of code, has built her entire home life around them — and become a cheerful evangelist for the tech. Read Lane Brown’s full report: nymag.visitlink.me/ZPdWdV
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Taryn Southern retweeted
You realize what this means!? Stripe just gave you a new way to create generational wealth. They invented an entirely new marketplace. Agents will be spending millions, and eventually billions of dollars for individuals and corporations. The marketpalce is empty right now. IT IS YOURS FOR THE TAKING. Build a service as a software ( YES SAAS V2 ), make it so that agents can use and spend on your platform. WIN WIN WIN. WAAAAAAKE UPPPPP.
Today, we’re launching the @link wallet for agents. It lets you securely empower agents to spend on your behalf. Your payment credentials are never exposed and you approve every purchase. link.com/agents
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Seven years ago, Casey Harrell was diagnosed with ALS and given two years to live. Yet Casey has defied every expectation: he's still working, pioneering scientific research, and doing everything he can to stay alive. But right now his life is in jeopardy. The cost of keeping an ALS patient alive is around $300,000 a year. His incredible wife Levana is now on disability herself while caregiving up to 16 hours a day. They need round-the-clock support at $45/hr and the existing funding is almost gone. I've seen first-hand just how comprehensive Casey's needs are. I work with Casey through our Special Patient Programs at @BlackrockNeuro_, and I also happen to know his wife Levana through mutual friends. I've been fortunate to visit with them both numerous times, virtually and at their home, and witness firsthand the level of care Casey requires. Levana is holding most of it together herself while managing her own health and raising their seven-year-old daughter. What makes Casey's situation truly extraordinary is that he's the only person on the planet to use a fully-functional brain-computer interface all day, every day, from home. In his brain, electrodes translate his thoughts (purposeful intent to speak) into synthesized speech trained on his own voice. This means Casey has contributed more brain data toward the advancement of these systems than perhaps any other patient in the world. As a clinical trial participant, Casey does not get paid for his pioneering work due to rules that govern clinical research. If Casey doesn't get stable care, his life ends. The research ends. There is no other patient like him. There may not be for years. His family has a GoFundMe. Please share it, donate if you can, and help make sure this incredible brain keeps doing what it's doing. Here's a video of Casey using his BCI to communicate (he's talking about how other devices like eye trackers are not sufficient.)
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Taryn Southern retweeted
I created a Claude Skill that make beautiful slides on the web. The world hasn't woken up to the fact that code can create much better slides than most PPT tools. - Claude interviews you first about aesthetics, then generate a few directions to "show not tell", and you can pick your favorite - Cool transitions and animations - Interactive hover states and cursor effects - Auto-fits on any screen - Supports converting existing PPTX files to web-based slides; preserves original images and brand assets I asked Claude to make a slide show about this skill to showcase what it can do. Link to skill below
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As someone who lost their Mom to breast cancer, @TarynSouthern leveraging her battle and AI expertise to help other women with breast cancer is a story I am honored to share. Taryn isn’t using AI to replace care…. She built a custom GTP to help patients formulate the right questions Because better questions can help bring clarity, direction, and hope. 💗
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Newsflash: if you spend more time chasing attention than building, you’re not building anything worth attention
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Taryn Southern retweeted
Every PM, designer and founder needs to see this. Replit just shipped an AI designer that outputs professional-grade work in 2 minutes. Design Mode. Powered by Gemini 3 Pro. Launches today. The quality is unreal 👇
Announcing Design, a new Replit experience focused on beautiful UIs. The first non-slop AI design experience, powered by Gemini 3.0
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