
Co-founder @ensdomains. Distilling the complicated into the simple. In local AI psychosis.
Joined December 2010
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Thread of my threads distilling the complicated into the simple.
Previous topics include:
- Zero Knowledge Proofs
- EIP-1559
- Rollups
- ETH2 and the merge
I’ll add new threads here for easy referencing for myself and others.
I've already convinced more than 1 person to buy a cluster of @nvidia DGX sparks and following @ashxhart and @MiaAI_lab to start their local AI journey.
And so the evangelism begins...
There are a few moments in ENS history that are as momentous as this. We’ve been building for almost 10 years already and this is really the foundations of the next few decades where a programmable, permisionless naming system will be required to shape the next sovereign internet
The vote to activate ENSv2 on Ethereum mainnet is now live.
This is a major step toward launching the next generation of ENS, with the decision in the hands of the DAO.
Read the proposal and vote ⤵
ens.gov.blockful.io/proposal…
Local AI reminds me of Ethereum in 2015. We don’t do it because it’s the easiest, the cheapest or the fastest. We do it because it is right.
Sovereign intelligence.
It’s kind of mad that i could lose internet at home and i still have access to pretty much frontier level inference.
Code is freedom of speech.
This applies to smart contracts.
That also applies to open weight models.
The fight hasn’t changed.
It’s kind of wild that in 2026 you can get high quality code for literally free.
a few more things i’ve learned replacing Muse Spark 1.3 in OpenCode:
1. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash can last me ~8 hours of work before i hit the daily free limit, as long as i’m not constantly spawning subagents.
2. the 200K context cap is manageable, but i usually hit compaction several times during a long session. for bigger repos, that matters.
3. when context starts becoming the bottleneck, i switch to Space Bunny for the 1M window instead of forcing DeepSeek through repeated compactions.
4. for planning, i still prefer GLM 5.3 Flash, but i don’t use it for everything. on simple build tasks, it can take 2–3x more turns than DeepSeek.
5. if DeepSeek starts making weird implementation choices, MiMo 2.6 Flash is my fallback before i jump to a paid frontier model.
right now my free stack is basically:
GLM → plan
DeepSeek → build
Space Bunny → long context
MiMo → backup
Been running Mia's recipes on my sparks the last week or so since mine arrived. It's been really nice to see how on it the local AI community is
Run DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 on 2x DGX Sparks ✨
- 1M total KV pool, 512K context
- 75 tok/s on prose, single stream
- 130 tok/s on prose, 4 concurrent streams
- Prefill 2000-2175 tok/s
- EXL3-EAQv1, 2.9 bpw
The quant in this recipe got about the same calibration as my GLM 5.3 Flash, with some extras. Feedback would be appreciated!
Special thanks to @bertholomusai and all the contributors for the engine work, and to @ashxhart for TensorFold.
Get it here:
github.com/MiaAI-Lab/DeepSee…
Just in time for Deep Seek v4.1 flash 1017.
Feels like the distance between frontier and open weights is getting smaller. Or the level a user cares about that is “good enough” is getting very close to open weight level
The biggest paradigm shift I get from local AI is about how I can get comparable intelligence with less intelligence.
We were able to fine tune an open weight model (Qwen3.5-9B) on proprietary internal data at @coinbase, and it out performed frontier models, at much lower cost and speed, for a specialized task (fraud prevention in this case).
I think we'll see more of this pattern inside companies. The frontier models are amazing generalists. But increasingly you'll see specialist models out perform on more narrow tasks, either working on teams, or by themselves.
We're making it easy to fine tune models internally for our employees. We even have a skill for it in our internal harness that makes it easy to spin these up and start training them:
"/fine-tune-and-serve-llm I want to fine-tune Qwen for payments risk review. help me get started"
I imagine we'll have some backend services that could be replaced entirely by this new architecture.
Inspired by @VitalikButerin updating his ENS with a local AI on his laptop. Wanted to try it myself.
DeepSeek V4 Flash or GLM-5.3-Flash first?
This is so true.
We are at the everyone has a camera moment for AI. This was the prerequisite for Instagram, snapchat and other photo/video focussed social media.
What will software without an engineer enable?
Saying software is dead because anyone can build it is like saying photography is dead now that everyone in the world has a camera in their pocket
Not only is it not dead it's the beginning of the Kodak Brownie moment for software, and we will see an absolute explosion of it
It will be the first generation for who building software will feel no different than using it. This is crazy!
The quality and bar of what we expect from our everyday apps will be raised dramatically, we'll have personal software, we'll have disposable software, and agents will be the foundation for most of it
Tech has always been chaotic and evolving, the people who have been able to adapt and move in front of new opportunities have always excelled, this is nothing new, I'm seeing it now and we'll see it 10 years from now
Find the opportunities in the chaose and disruption, there are countless of them
It’s humbling that our generation gets to see the proliferation of the PC, the internet, the smartphone, blockchain and AI, all in the span of a few decades.
We are so lucky to have a front seat in what we could never imagined when we were all in school playing WoW vanilla and @VitalikButerin was getting his warlock nerfed.
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.
ENS being easily accessible to any agent permissionlessly and globally is one of the most bullish things I’ve heard and thought of this year.
Names are more important than ever before, why?
Because the machines can read now and so names aren’t just for people anymore.
Vitalik: AI Will Become the New UI
On October 6, 2026, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin @VitalikButerin said at OKX NOW @okx in Singapore that AI will become the new user interface in more and more scenarios. He shared how a local AI agent wrote a script to update his ENS hash in about five minutes, and said performing complex blockchain operations without a traditional UI will become normal.
This could reduce security risks associated with traditional frontends, while introducing new challenges such as prompt injection, AI safety, and whether agents correctly understand onchain operations.


















