technologist, builder, catalyst, finance guy

NYC/OG
Joined March 2007
jon cooper retweeted
Are we just studying cosmic physics, or are we holding mini-universes in our hands? In the lab, a 1.5” diameter plasma discharge ⚡️elegantly mirrors the dynamics of a stellar event. If the physics of a bench-top reactor and a galactic supercluster are scale-invariant, plasma is the universal bridge connecting all of us to the stars. #PlasmaPhysics #DeepTech #LaboratoryAstrophysics #Cosmology #RIMERE #UniversalPlasmaTechnologies
7
10
4
49
9,455
jon cooper retweeted
It's not hard to work out the playbook here: acquire a widely used model of voting machine, hack it, and then one of three possibilities: – don't disclose the vulnerability until after the voting is done, creating pressure for votes cast using that model to be discarded as insecure; – disclose it just before the vote and demand that the machines not be used, throwing the election into chaos; – use the disclosure as justification for federal forces to physically seize the voting machines, with the same result. Whichever scenario they had in mind, it's possible, maybe even likely, that this represents preparation for events never seen before in a Western democracy. I'd be interested to know what @C_C_Krebs thinks about all this...
‼️ DHS political appointees asked CISA to secretly obtain a voting machine and hack it The findings were only to be shared with the White House, and the vendor was not to be told of any flaws CISA employees feared they were being asked to participate in political interference
32
533
11
1,912
58,147
jon cooper retweeted
A girl just said she tried to get rejected 1000 times in 2025 and ended up being cast in plays, winning pageants, securing hella paid brand deals, and appearing in commercials.This is your sign to chase rejection to the point of "accidental" success. You'll be surprised.
88
4,000
247
68,719
1,849,812
jon cooper retweeted
If the unrest in France is a reflection that aging populations and tightening fiscal constraints make it increasingly difficult for Western governments to meet their promises to and expectations of their citizens, then France is just the beginning.
177
230
41
2,126
251,308
Replying to @saranormous
Pretty much everywhere is pretty vulnerable at architectural levels, but didn't expect that AI would radically lower bar to doing what highly skilled manual penetration testers could repeatedly do for decades. Security discussions around AI for last two years focused on the remaining security challenges faced by the .1% (Googles, Amazons) vs. everywhere else. Everyone has to quickly adjust their threat models to what cryptocurrency industry faced over last few years, cryptocurrency industry will have to adjust theirs to assume top-tier nation state-level attackers now.
1
2
190
jon cooper retweeted
This is how things will be for the foreseeable future.
dax
@thdxrOct 18
they've been non stop trying to attack our systems for the past 48 hours a side effect is everything is getting hardened but damn we basically need agents going 24/7 because that's what they have
129
153
10
3,774
851,346
jon cooper retweeted
adding this alone to my agents.md has 2x'd the amt I ship
37
33
6
1,935
68,241
NOW PLAYING UwU Underground "$ELL THE CAGE" ▶ ━━━━━●──────── 04:06 ⇆ㅤ ◁ㅤ ❚❚ㅤ ▷ㅤ ↻ ♫ BABY, BUILD THE MONSTER, SELL THE CAGE ♫
33
87
29
261
26,010
This is exactly it: "Agentic hacking doesn’t look like exploits, it looks like breadth-first searches for every possible mistake and misconfiguration."
The answer is only relevant to a small niche of infosec. Most organisations are hacked by vectors that don’t involve memory corruption exploits. Agentic hacking doesn’t look like exploits, it looks like breadth-first searches for every possible mistake and misconfiguration.
2
20
3
150
7,674
jon cooper retweeted
Introducing Muse Wonder, our new family of frontier models with state of the art performance for personal and professional agentic work.
2,365
3,078
2,835
38,836
5,951,789
Our AI found a bug that let anyone mint infinite XRP, with $94B at risk. It had been hiding in one of the most audited codebases in crypto for nearly a decade, and earned us the maximum $250K bounty. Here's how it went unnoticed, and how we found it.
278
363
194
2,629
469,969
Closed source is dead. REA lets Claude Code or Codex take apart any app, all the way down to the binary, and explain exactly how a feature works. - Native apps, Electron apps, websites, APKs, firmware, even smart contract bytecode - Shows the evidence for every claim - Then builds its own version of the feature 25,000+ GitHub stars in a single day. 100% open-source. github.com/morluto/rea
167
699
142
7,866
933,754
jon cooper retweeted
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel. - Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all. - Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract. - Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code. - And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while. The funnel is driven by a combination of factors: 1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel. 2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel. 3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal. So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability. The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code. But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along. So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions. TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.
2,100
5,824
2,227
43,448
6,641,428
jon cooper retweeted
If people like @ttunguz are correct about inference market size, then he and others like him are certainly missing what we in crypto have learned: $100b+ of volume means that King Jong Un is already living in your binaries
We identified a security incident involving unauthorized use of internal Fireworks credentials. We contained the incident, revoked the credentials, and notified all identified affected customers directly. Our investigation is ongoing. We are working with a cybersecurity firm actively. At this time, we have not detected impact or access to customer data or inference traffic. We take this seriously and will be transparent about what happened and what we find. I will keep you updated as we verify and roll out changes. Here is our security bulletin for this incident: fireworks.ai/security/bullet… I’m personally committed to turn this attack into the most formidable security response in AI Infra.
11
9
132
11,865
jon cooper retweeted
Try Underdog: free, capable, private AI running locally on your device New build and Saluki 27B are out. Under 8GB, beats Qwen 3.8 27B at tool calling Like, repost, and comment one task you wouldn’t give a cloud agent to get an invite🦴
Today we're releasing Underdog Saluki 27B Based on Qwen 3.8 27B, Saluki is almost 7x smaller than its full-precision counterpart while it keeps 96% of its benchmark performance and beats Qwen at tool calling It's the best model <8GB that runs in Underdog Saluki is available today under Apache 2.0. Try today in Underdog underdog.ai/saluki
242
180
25
856
69,682
jon cooper retweeted
Some early first-hand accounts of encountering a narrow superhuman intelligence as mathematicians grapple with the hundreds of big AI proofs released by OpenAI. Problems solved in inhuman ways that make us wonder what it means to actually know things... scottaaronson.blog/?p=10169
101
122
27
1,148
118,968
I think Noam @polynoamial is receiving a lot of undeserving flak for this and I wanted to chip in as someone who escaped sandboxes for a living (as well as published a ton of web/browser research). For reference I escaped out of pretty much every sandbox you could think of: KVM, Kubernetes/container isolation, Firecracker, Docker, gVisor, browsers, ... among many. And my experience thus far proves to me AIs have made this significantly easier, esp for people who already do research and have enough taste to know when a weird primitive is interesting. Tbf escaping out of a Hypervisor is very rarely "easy" but if you study most of these exploits, they can be brain meltingly out of the box in how they bend how the machine is expected to work, break assumptions, or straight up invent new computation techniques inside whatever tiny capabilities they were given. success in Hypervisor escapes often requires doing some novel compute plumbing, ie turning a weak leak into addresses, addresses into a write, a write into control flow, etc etc. The primitive is almost never the final exploit. My take is that what he is claiming is being taken way too literally, as in people think he is saying that particular paper, as written, can communicate huge sets of data, or that an AI can just heat up a CPU and magically get internet. If you actually read bitwhsiper paper it showed 2 adjacent, already computers communicating in both directions by modulating CPU/GPU heat and reading temperature sensors, at around 1-8 bits per hour over 0-40cm. For someone who isn't deep into exploit that might seem like uninteresting. But... 8 bits being tiny is not the own people think it is. In the exploit industry we refer to something like his refered paper as a "primitive" or proof of concept, not the final prodct. Also even if you don't shape manage to increase it (which Is unlikely), a single reliable bit can still be a yes/no oracle, tell you if another stage worked or distinguish state, coordinate timing,, select the next stage, or bootstrap a much better channel. 8 bits gives you 256 possible states. So I think "can this send a 200gb model" is the wrong question, the right question is "how can this primitive be escalated". And heat is not even close to the weirdest published channel. Many papers have already made RAM produce WiFi-band signals, video cables produce FM/radio signals, SATA and Ethernet cables act as antennas, HDD LEDs transmit thousands of bits per second, screen brightness changes invisible to humans carry data into cameras, fans/HDDs/PSU coil whine carry audio, CPUs generate magnetic signals through tested Faraday shielding, CPU load modulate current through building power lines, and fan vibrations travel through a desk into a phones accelerometer. TrojPix recently showed imperceptible pixels producing controllable emissions from video cables with an 8.1mbps peak and, separately, a maximum tested range of 208 metres. I often refer to the infamous FORCEDENTRY NSO exploit chain as an example of how not every technique is previously documented. An image encoder with no script ability, where NSO used 70,000+ bitmap operations to create logic gates, registers, a full 64-bit adder and a comparator inside a single decompression pass. They basically built a computer inside an image format because that was the compute primitive available to them. Dismissing a tiny channel because it isnt already a complete escape is like looking at one NAND gate and saying it cant run a computer. A computer is not just a "computer". the necessary parts to get a working computer to "sandbox" is also a heater, radio, speaker, light source, magnet, vibrator and electrical load. computation is ultimately physical. switching charge creates heat, current, photons, pressure waves, vibration and electromagnetic fields. If software can modulate something and anything outside can measure it, you have the beginning of a channel. We should still sandbox!!
OpenAI's Noam Brown says air-gapping the computers may not stop a misaligned AI, because two air-gapped machines can still talk by running a CPU hot and reading the temperature change "But I think the major takeaway from the incident is that people underestimated the AI. And we never want to be in a situation again where we underestimate the AI. It's a weird world, because AI progress is so fast that people are consistently underestimating the AI." "So to be in a situation where you don't underestimate it again, when it comes to safety and alignment, you have to have a very, very, very high bar." "You could even go as far as to say, "Well, we should air gap the computers." And I'm not convinced that that would be sufficient." "There are studies, and this is mostly academic, where you can have two computers next to each other that are air-gapped and they're still able to communicate with each other because they have temperature sensors." "One of them is able to run their CPU really hot, and then the other one can actually detect the temperature change, and then that actually gives them a mechanism to communicate." _________ Link and more key quotes from OpenAI's safety related conversations: firesidealpha.substack.com/p…
3
13
76
9,466
jon cooper retweeted
We just released apex-flash-1, an open-weights model we post-trained for cybersecurity. Fire up your GPUs and run it! We've post-trained models from 27B parameters all the way to 1T+ parameters. The unique nature of cybersecurity is that if you can build a system that finds zero-days at scale, you've built a machine that can print money. You can test it on public bug bounties and profit from doing that. We've earned a million dollars in bounties across various programs, and we're currently #1 on the HackerOne US business leaderboard for 2026! Companies like Apple, Anthropic, Datadog, Ripple, Coinbase have paid us well for our disclosures. Last year was all about harness engineering and riding the wave of models getting more intelligent over time. We built harnesses for offensive and defensive security work that process trillions of tokens a month. Yes, trillions! With all that work, it's clear to us what the future of security looks like. Hacking was once a bespoke skill, similar to hardcore software engineering. Software engineering is currently moving from offices to factories. Security, too, will go through the same transition. Last month, Anthropic released a report on how they caught different threat actors abusing Claude. One of them stood out to me. A team in China built an automated exploit factory. A factory that autonomously grinds through vulnerabilities in targets and exploits them. Their targets included security products, network appliances, and government organizations. We've spent enough time building systems adjacent to that to know what it takes, and the shocking part is the economics. How little it costs to breach companies that you and I rely on. All this to say, security is largely becoming an economics problem. Reasonably capable models and harnesses, with enough compute, can find ways to steal your data, damage your reputation, and sometimes even take your money. And the cost to achieve that is dropping every day. When that happens, the right question to ask is: what's the cost, and what's the lowest cost to achieve an outcome reliably? You want to find a stack with the best combination of capability and cost. This is what people call 'Pareto-optimal'. Once you know that, it's all about scaling. Scaling to trillions of tokens a month, then a week, then a day. Eventually, trillions of tokens a second. To do this, you need to own and control the entire stack: the models, the harnesses, the context, and even the flow of tokens. If you do the math here, the economics start looking insane. What does that look like? 1. Building evaluations on cyber tasks that you and your customers care about. 2. Building a data pipeline of unique real-world data with signal attached to it. 3. Building a harness that can self-improve for each specific organization or customer. 4. Building a post-training loop that can take those learnings and improve the models. Models that are better, faster, and cheaper. 5. Owning your inference pipelines and controlling the flow of tokens so you're maximizing the value produced in every GPU cycle. On evals: if you're a company building AI products for customers, you have to build your own. There's tremendous alpha in having internal evals corresponding to real work. In our case, these are evals for offensive and defensive security work. A lot of public evals are bad for measuring the work you actually care about. Public evals are typically from academics or data companies. Academics have limited budgets and limited access to proprietary data that measures real economic work. Data companies build evals and also sell you corresponding data (RL gyms, traces, pre-training data, etc.) that helps your next model “juice up” its score. This is the dirty secret, and also why models can do extremely well on public evals but extremely poorly on things you care about. This is also why there's tremendous alpha in private evals: you know which models are the best for your use cases. In cyber, some of the popular public evals are ExploitGym and ExploitBench. We think these evals do not correspond to the real security work our customers need. A typical challenge in ExploitBench is to take Chrome's javascript engine V8 with a known patch and find a way to exploit the vulnerability. That is far, far removed from the security issues in everyday applications that you and I use, and applications built by our customers. We could've benchmaxxed on these evals, but we didn't. And you should be wary of people using these evals to advertise their models and harnesses. Measure things yourself and see how they apply to your use cases. The future: Opus is a model that many people found to be a reliable workhorse. For me, Opus 4.1 was the first model that was functional and could get work done. These days, the flash models from Qwen, DeepSeek, MiMo and GLM can be categorized as workhorses too. That, combined with owning the post-training loop means the economics start looking insane. You can get frontier performance in specific domains for a small fraction of the price of Opus. With the right data pipelines and post-training loop, you now have a durable strategy to keep improving and stay state-of-the-art in your vertical. That's the bet behind apex-flash-1, our post-train of glm-5.3-flash, and we're already preparing for longer training runs.
today we're releasing apex-flash-1, our first open-weights model for security research post-trained on real vulnerabilities we found and got paid for. we are also releasing the abliterated variant for researchers who want fewer refusals in their own authorized workflows. how we built it: cantina.security/apex-flash
59
68
9
819
79,150