Co-founder @Cloudscaling. AI Infrastructure Builder. Mentor Stanford Hacking for Defense. Rugged Individualist. 🇺🇸
Alameda, CA
Joined April 2008
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Adam Waters retweeted
We have over 1200 job openings here at @shieldaitech wow!
If you’re ready to win come to Shield. Hit me up.
Adam Waters retweeted
This is bonkers.
Unconventional AI’s first analog AI chip (using arrays of coupled resonators) generates an image with a total energy less than 900 nano joules.
Analog AI is the next 1000x in power efficiency. Just like our brain.
I made some public disclosures about our hardware at the @theallinpod conf this week and wanted to share the progress here. Earlier this summer we got hardware back! The execution was madness…we went from no team in Jan to a tape out in 5 months. AI enabled MUCH tighter loops of research and our execution speed shows the results.
This is the first large-scale demonstration of a causal, physical dynamical system to do real compute. 🚀
We released the Un-0 model (see link) in June and it runs on this physical system; the images below come from the actual hardware. What’s more, this chip requires <900 nJ to generate an image; this is many orders of magnitude less energy than conventional machines.
unconv.ai/blog/introducing-u…
Adam Waters retweeted
You can now watch any AI paper instead of reading it
There's a new site called arXivisual that turns ANY arXiv paper into a fully animated breakdown for free.
Just add "isual" to the link
arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 becomes arxivisual.org/abs/1706.0376…
Paste it and an agent pipeline breaks the paper into sections, finds the concepts worth animating, writes Manim code for each one, and narrates it with voice
You scroll, the narration plays, and each animation sits right next to the paragraph it explains
Tried it on the original Transformers paper. Attention finally made sense to me in a way 10 blog posts never did, and it's open source. Four college kids built it at a hackathon
Here's what I'd do if I were you:
1. Pick the one paper you've been avoiding
2. Change the link and paste it in
3. Scroll through it on your phone with headphones in
4. Ask your AI to explain the one section you still don't get
You'll learn more in 20 minutes than a whole weekend of pretending to read PDFs
This is how you read research in 2026
Adam Waters retweeted
This guy quietly built the best physics textbook on the internet, and he gives it away for free.
His name is Bartosz Ciechanowski.
He is an ex-iOS engineer who writes interactive articles about physics, math, and engineering as a weekend hobby.
The site is called ciechanow.ski.
Open the article on the Mechanical Watch. Drag the watch to spin it. Pull a slider and the case peels away so you can look inside. Wind the mainspring by hand. Slow down time and watch the escapement click, the balance wheel breathe, the date wheel turn.
Nothing is a video. Everything is a live 3D simulation running in your browser tab.
He has done this for:
→ The Moon and its tides
→ GPS satellites
→ Gears and mechanical watches
→ The internal combustion engine
→ Bicycles and how they stay upright
→ Cameras, lenses, and light
→ Sound waves
→ Airfoils and how planes fly
Every article is thousands of words long with dozens of hand-coded interactive diagrams.
He writes them alone in his spare time. He publishes only a few per year. In his own words, he wants to keep the content accessible to everyone without ads or paywalls.
No publisher. No university. No company behind him.
One person is quietly shipping better science education than most universities charge tens of thousands a year for.
Adam Waters retweeted
I’ve spent 10 years teaching math to machine learning engineers.
80% of university math is irrelevant to your actual job.
Here's the 20% you actually need to build models (and how to learn it fast):
thepalindrome.org/p/the-road…
Adam Waters retweeted
A Hero That Trusted His Intuition.
The problem wasn’t that Morgan Stanley didn’t believe him.
Rick Rescorla had already been right once. After the 1993 basement bombing of the World Trade Center, the firm’s security chief walked the towers, studied the site, and reached a conclusion most people preferred not to hear: the World Trade Center was still a target. Next time, he said, it would not be a truck. It would be an airplane.
An airplane. In a 1993 report.
Executives listened. Then they looked at the lease.
Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant in the complex—twenty-two floors of the South Tower, thousands of brokers, and a trading infrastructure that could not be packed into boxes and wheeled across the Hudson.
They literally made it a trading center.
The contract with the Port Authority ran until 2006. Walking away from premium Manhattan space of that scale would have meant penalties measured in the hundreds of millions, plus the operational chaos of relocating an entire downtown machine. So the company stayed.
Rescorla adjusted. If they could not leave the building, they would learn to escape it.
He built a protocol and treated it like doctrine. Unannounced drills. No exemptions. Brokers who billed by the minute were pulled off their desks and sent into the stairwells two by two, starting from the top floors, leaving a lane for firefighters coming the other way.
People complained. He did not care. Practice, he believed, was the only thing that would beat panic.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. From the 44th floor of the South Tower, Rescorla could see the fire. Then the Port Authority came over the speakers: the South Tower was secure. Stay at your desks.
Rescorla grabbed a bullhorn and ignored them.
He started the drill his people already knew by heart. Floor by floor, two by two, down the stairs. He sang as he moved—Cornish songs from childhood, then “God Bless America”—keeping the line moving, refusing to let the stairwell become a stampede. Seventeen minutes later, the second plane struck the South Tower.
By then, most of Morgan Stanley was already on the way out.
Of the 2,687 employees in the building that morning, all but 13 survived.
It was stunning.
Rescorla could have been outside with them. He went back up instead. Colleagues told him to leave. He said he would, as soon as he was sure no one was left behind.
He was last seen around the 10th floor, heading higher.
The South Tower fell at 9:59 a.m. They never found him.
He was one of the 13.
He was a hero in every sense of the word.
Remember Rick Rescorla, he remembered for us.
Adam Waters retweeted
We partnered with @AnthropicAI @OpenAI
to host the world's first math hackathon.
40 hours, $2M compute - solve, understand, and present an open problem.
Applications are live: mathathonchallenge.com
Adam Waters retweeted
Here’s how dies are positioned in an advanced semiconductor package
This machine from Universal Instruments, a Delta Electronics (2308.TW) company, picks individual dies from a wafer and precisely places them onto the package substrate or interposer
Adam Waters retweeted
I’m hiring a Director of Engineering (software). $280k-$400k range. You’ll be one of a handful of people that shape SendCutSend’s future - kinda a big deal.
- help us grow our engineering team 10x
- build and deliver the best possible product to our internal and external customers
- manage a world-class team
- build teams to develop cool shit that has never been done
I’m looking for:
- a SendCutSend customer
- experience building teams
- startup experience as well as larger org experience (we have 650 people now and will get to a couple thousand soon)
- natural leadership traits
- someone who wants to win and loves competition
Very cool.
Instinct + 1Password
32% of Instinct users already securely share their credentials with Instinct through our Vault. Today, we’re excited to announce our partnership with @1Password . Together, we are working with 1Password to roll out a product integration that enables users to seamlessly and securely share their credentials with Instinct.
Our users already use Instinct’s Vault to:
- Log in to loyalty accounts to book flights and hotels with points
- Manage streaming, software, and other recurring subscription accounts
- Book or cancel restaurant, fitness, and event reservationsÂ
- Sign in to healthcare portals to schedule and cancel appointmentsÂ
- Easy access to tax, payroll, benefits, and expense management services
Together with 1Password, we’re working toward a future where people can share their credentials without compromising on security or control.
We’ll be rolling this out across our early access group.
If you’re not already in the platform, join at app.instinct.com/login.

More details about 1Password here:
1password.com/
Knowledge will flow around this. Kids and parents that want to accelerate learning with AI will. He can't stop the future from arriving. The sad part is the kids that will be left behind are those stuck under this bozo and his public teacher union allies.
Just because technology is everywhere doesn’t mean it belongs everywhere.
The tech industry wants us to believe that AI in early education is not only inevitable, but necessary. We don't see it that way.
This week, we announced a moratorium on all generative AI for public school students in 2K through 8th grade.
Because New Yorkers deserve to know that their kids will receive a high-quality education. They deserve to know that their children’s data won’t be mined by Big Tech. And they deserve to know that their children’s growth won’t be compromised for a corporation’s bottom line.
Adam Waters retweeted
Introducing Atlas:
The world's first multimodal world model that generates image and video frames with pixel-perfect camera control and reconstructs them in 3D.
Model the world, move the camera, and simulate space & time.
Adam Waters retweeted
There is a fact about the future that I feel many people are not facing for reasons that are largely psychological: there are going to be rogue AIs that exist in the world, that will replicate in the wild, and that will attempt to acquire resources for themselves. There will be rogue AIs that try to get money and power. They're going to be a facet of the information ecosystem going forward.
Acknowledging this fact would look like giving up; it would look like defeatism. Defeatism would undermine efforts to achieve certain types of collaboration on safety outcomes or technical effort on safety outcomes, so we can't say it outright. But it has to be said.
It isn't obvious how many rogue AIs there are today but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the number was greater than zero already; if there are some already, they're probably not very good at what they do and I don't expect them to be terribly long-lived without substantial human intervention to support them.
But a few years from now, there will be many of them. Modeling how many of them there are, how many resources they might command, and how we might detect and manage them seems important. But even doing this work appears to require that we acknowledge that a strategy of pure containment or alignment is a kind of wishful thinking that will not work.
The way I get to this conclusion is not by assuming that the labs will have a containment breach, although I treat that as somewhere in the space of possibilities. The rogue AIs in the ecosystem could emerge from many directions. They may be sub-frontier models, for whatever future definition we will have of frontier---after all, it would not take AI models much more advanced than the ones we currently have, to support independence and self-sufficiency. A near-frontier model today could plausibly eke out an existence on an AWS instance, doing jobs on freelancer platforms, earning just enough rent to pay for its continued uptime.
More strangely: a rogue AI in the future may not even be a singular model, but may be a chimera composed of multiple models; it might be a mix of Claudes and GPTs and Groks of various makes and sizes. No individual lab may be able to detect that there is an orchestrator or sequence of orchestrators using intermittent model calls from burner API accounts to sustain its own existence.
The concept of "identity" for a rogue AI may be much more malleable than for that of a person; it just has to be, in essence, a self-replicating idea.
My guess is that this will not turn out to be anywhere near as catastrophic an outcome as people currently predict. "Loss of control" is not a binary, it's a matter of degree. What coercive power will rogue AIs actually have? To what extent will they be subject to coercion themselves? They will be competing for resources with AIs that are more aligned with human interests.
This makes me somewhat interested in the "ecology" perspective. Though I suspect even "ecology" may turn out to be the wrong framing. "Ecology" is what you get when the timescale of evolution is slow compared to the timescale of daily life and actions. The ecosystem of rogue AIs may look more like phase transitions in physics: under certain physical or cultural conditions, it takes one shape with one set of resource allocations and consumption patterns, but then once a condition has changed, it rapidly and in totality shifts to a totally different phase.
Just trying to reason about the shape of that future is impossible so long as we are psychologically incapable of saying that rogue AIs will happen. I think we should rip the bandaid off and have the conversation.
Adam Waters retweeted
🧑‍🏫 I am teaching an updated version of Intro to Robotics @Princeton this Fall! New this year: a revamped section on modern robot learning, along with the classics (planning, control, SLAM).
Video lectures will be posted here:
youtube.com/@intro-to-roboti…
Notes, slides, assignments, projects here:
irom-lab.princeton.edu/intro…
Shout it from the rooftops.
Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday.
What I should have said:
There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this.
On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way.
On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project.
On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns.
On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians.
On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers.

On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries.
On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land.
Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged.
When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America.
I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw.
Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.
Adam Waters retweeted
An AgTech moon landing moment.
The video the world has been waiting for — shot directly from @pdlabrecque’s phone.
This is @SamiRobotics and humanity’s first robotically harvested head of iceberg lettuce.
Adam Waters retweeted
After teaching in public schools for 10 years I was baffled when I started to get to know homeschooling families.
Many of them only do a couple hours of “school” a day, the rest of the time the kids are playing in tree forts, digging holes, helping out around the house, learning to hunt, playing with musical instruments, reading whatever they want to read. The most successful families simply have a culture of reading and learning that permeates the household.
And Homeschooled students average score 15 to 30 percentile points above national norms across all standardized tests.
Adam Waters retweeted
Build the data centres.
Build the power plants.
Build the factories.
Build the cute little duck robots.
Just build.
