Testugio retweeted
I am increasingly concerned about the AI psychosis inside Anthropic.
Imagine zealously trying to build something you believe to be a conscious god while running around claiming it will end the world.
NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious.
Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.” Pope Leo XIV held firm.
For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. thelettersfromleo.com/p/nyt-…
Testugio retweeted
This is extremely dark
🦔The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association says insurers paid out nearly $1 billion more than usual from AI-assisted hospital documentation in 2024-2025. Hospitals use AI to scan records and find secondary diagnoses that human reviewers missed. More diagnoses means higher reimbursements. But treatment levels haven't gone up.
BCBSA's SVP of data science said AI is "identifying more billable conditions, not sicker patients." Insurers now deploy their own AI to deny those same claims. Patients pay for both through higher premiums.
My Take
This might be the most American healthcare story I've ever read. Hospitals bought AI to find more things to bill for. Insurers bought AI to deny those bills. The technology cost money on each end and the tab went straight to patients through higher premiums. A billion dollars moved and no one got any healthier. The only thing that changed was the size of the invoices.
Two sides of a trillion-dollar industry found a new tool to fight over the same pool of money and the person in the hospital bed pays for all of it. Premiums go up, denials go up, and the AI vendors collect from everyone. If you want to know who AI works for, stop reading the press releases and look at where the money goes. In healthcare it went straight into the billing department.
Hedgie🤗
Testugio retweeted
Wow, I sure have to disagree with this quote: "My goal as a venture-backed business is to increase the tails of the distribution. It's fine if it gets 30% more likelihood that I fail if the odds that I become a $100 billion company also increase by 20%." Great companies are the life's work of exceptional founders. They do NOT think about increasing the tails of distributions. Makes no sense to risk their life's work. They want to win and win BIG but they are not in a rush and will not put their life's work at risk to satisfy hitchikers who want to go along for the ride but will exit as soon as they hit their return targets.
People are very scared to say bubble
Bubble doesn’t mean there aren’t potentially generational companies being built right now
We can have great companies, but enthusiasm and mania that transcends reason and reality. To me that is clearly manifesting in pricing and deal velocity
Our greed, hubris, and pride destroying us would be sad, but unsurprising
I am typically very pro capitalism and letting free markets do their thing
But if this is true and your posture as a company…why should you be allowed to exist? Respectfully, who are they to decide thy is is a tolerable and worthwhile risk?
@DarioAmodei please do much better
I am typically very pro capitalism and letting free markets do their thing
But if this is true and your posture as a company…why should you be allowed to exist? Respectfully, who are they to decide thy is is a tolerable and worthwhile risk?
@DarioAmodei please do much better
The bond market will always feel extremely under appreciated to me.
But finally getting some front page coverage with the surge in yields.
From WSJ journal today, one particularly interesting point on the convergence of oil and energy prices, broader inflation, and now "A flood of bonds issued by U.S. tech companies to pay for the artificial-intelligence boom is also pushing yields higher by eating into demand for government debt"
As far as I can tell there continues to be a massive amount of institutional capital flowing behind the thesis that owning the end customer - their context, workflows, and speed of transformation - through M&A, is superior to selling pure software both in terms of velocity and biz outcome for the underlying entities
What’s the most interesting version folks have seen?
Hard for me to discern the difference across some of these permanent holdco vehicles, deployment companies, transformation agencies, etc
Testugio retweeted
this is insane. i genuinely don't understand why ambitious people aren't shown this lecture before their careers start consuming their entire lives.
clayton christensen spent his career studying why successful companies collapse. in his final class, he asked students to apply the theory to themselves: if you keep allocating your time the same way, what life are you actually building?
he had already seen the answer in his own harvard mba class. everyone looked successful at the fifth reunion; by the 10th, 15th, 20th, and 25th, many were unhappy, divorced, and living far from their children.
work shows you the score immediately. close a sale, ship a product, finish a presentation, earn a promotion, get paid.
an hour with your child may produce nothing you can measure today; it may take 20 years to understand what that hour built. so the next free hour goes back to work, one rational decision at a time.
this is how people build lives they never planned: through hundreds of right decisions that lead in the wrong direction, day after day.
money, titles, and headcount are easy to count. christensen believed a life should be measured by the people who became better because you were there.
he died in 2020.
one question remains: if someone saw only where your time, energy, and attention went this year, what would they think actually mattered to you?
the full 19-minute lecture is in the video below.
Testugio retweeted
Too many founders talk themselves out of starting good, profitable businesses because the idea isn't a 'unicorn.'
A $2M-a-year business can completely change your life. More margin, less overhead, less stress, plenty of people are better off staying right there instead of scaling past it.
The goal was never to swim in unicorn money. The goal is freedom. And freedom is a lot cheaper than most founders think.
The biggest sign of a top to me is the frequency of companies starting with capital rather than product
Testugio retweeted
I see so many people founding because they want to be founders.
Almost all lack a contrarian thesis for why the world should be different.
There are about a dozen companies that matter each decade and meaningfully shape how the world works.
You should generally optimize for contributing meaningfully to one of those.
Testugio retweeted
Should you chase hype or ignore it? The tech industry has been debating this for decades. So at @Sequoia, we dug into 20 years of hype data.
This summer, I worked with Sequoia intern @ochonaut to measure hype over the past 2 decades. The chart below ranks the most hyped topics on Hacker News for every year since 2007. Under each year sits the most valuable company founded that year.
Here are a few observations:
1/ The top company founded in a given year is rarely related to the hype of that period. Airbnb was founded in 2008, when the top topic was Google. Uber arrived in 2009, while the conversation revolved around low-level programming. Anthropic came in 2021, while the internet was consumed by crypto. Chasing hype rarely leads to enduring outcomes. The top companies of recent years have yet to be decided.
2/ New trends announce themselves five to six years early. LLMs first cracked the top 15 in 2016 and took until 2022 to hit #1. AI coding entered at #12 in 2021 and tops the list in 2026. Crypto entered in 2011 before 2017 and 2021 peaks. “New” trends don’t appear out of nowhere, and internet subcommunities are often the first to know where the puck is headed.
3/ Long-term “hype” is a durable signal. The “Musk-Verse” has been a top 15 topic for every one of the past 14 years. Sustained attention on the internet is rare and tends to mark something real.
Next up, we want to run the same analysis with sources like X and LinkedIn. If that's of interest, give us some encouragement and we'll share the results.
