Just a guy who decided to follow his dreams. Founder of Mad City Integrations: AI + automation for local businesses. ↓ Book a call

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Anthony Elert retweeted
The courage to try, the humility to learn, the will to never give up.
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Anthony Elert retweeted
The cold outreach method of doom and despair😂
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Good time to invest in $TSLA?
Turns out the future does have flying cars
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This is why most ppl stay broke : get off of X/ Reddit and start building shit. Be a creator not a consumer.
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Crazy good use case for @ChatGPT dots : literally just tell it to apply to every single startup program, fellowship, grant, or anything that you might be qualified for based on what it knows about you.
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Anthony Elert retweeted
My AI agent got me $67,000 in startup credits in one day: I literally told my @ChatGPT dot “apply to every single startup program you can. Fill in everything yourself and authorize everything.” All I had to do was fill in a few fields when it didn’t know how to answer. Now I have a new problem: a shit ton of software and no use for half of it. One is even sending me a care package to my house. It’s a crazy world we live in😭
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I really think that intelligence is much more a result of your actions than your genetics. Most “smart” people aren’t just born smart. They do smart-person things. They read. They write. They exercise. They meditate. They learn hard things. They spend time alone with their thoughts. Meanwhile, most people are frying their attention with scrolling, gaming, porn, notifications, and constant stimulation. Then they wonder why they can’t think deeply. Your brain adapts to what you repeatedly make it do. If you train it to consume, it gets better at consuming. If you train it to think, it gets better at thinking. That’s why I think intelligence is way more trainable than people realize. Better inputs. More deep thought. Less fake dopamine. More time being bored. Do that for years and you will not be the same person mentally.
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Between OpenAI re-introducing 5hr limits for $100 and $200 users, and introducing ultrafast, devday has just been a huge money grab so far. The dots are pretty cool though. At least they run on Astra.
Replying to @thsottiaux
$100 and $200 are getting 5hrs limit back ?
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After 4 months of building, failing, testing, and questioning whether any of this would actually work… We finally landed our first paying AI agency client. $1,000 setup + $250/month. Here’s how we got there: The client is a car dealership spending roughly $10,000/month on inbound leads. The problem isn’t getting leads. It’s what happens after they come in. A lot of them aren’t being followed up with effectively, so we’re building a lead nurturing system designed to pick up sales that otherwise would’ve fallen through the cracks. If the system helps close one extra car, it can already pay for itself. Everything beyond that is upside. And for us, the better this performs, the stronger the case study and the more confidently we can price future clients. Getting here basically came down to 3 things: 1. Build the business LLC, branding, website, offers, payments, systems, all the boring stuff that has to exist before you can actually sell anything. 2. Learn how to deliver Before selling these systems, we implemented them into our own business and tested them constantly. AI receptionist. SMS agent. Email agent. Lead follow-up workflows. We wanted to know we could actually make this stuff work before asking someone to pay us for it. 3. Get reps We reached out to basically every business owner we knew and offered to build something for free. That led to a database reactivation campaign for a daycare company. That gave us our first real-world experience and something we could point to. A few more conversations later, we landed our first paying client. What those 3 steps leave out is probably the biggest part of the story: Late nights. Early mornings. Systems breaking for reasons you didn’t even know were possible. Feeling like you’re wasting your time. Feeling like you’re onto something huge. Feeling like a loser one day and unstoppable the next. And a lot of loneliness in between. Building a business is weird. There are a million problems you don’t even know exist until you run directly into them. It’s hard, frustrating, lonely, exciting, and incredibly rewarding all at once. We’re still extremely early. One client doesn’t mean we’ve made it. But after months of work with basically nothing tangible to show for it, being able to say someone is finally paying us for something we built feels damn good. Now we have to prove it works. If you have any questions or want to connect, I’m happy to share more.
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You don’t realize how much time you have until you get off social media. Days start feeling twice as long. As a college student I’m the anomaly for not spending hours every day on Instagram reels. It’s absurd how easy it is to win nowadays.
It's never been easier to make money than it is today. But the reason people don't is because it's also never been easier to be distracted than it is today.
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So if Opus 5.5 is better on all fronts AND cheaper than Fable, why is it not discontinued?
Replying to @claudeai
Opus 5.5 is a major step up from Opus 5, leading on agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work.
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Anthony Elert retweeted
Maybe you have recently become aware of the AI safety debate and the arguments swirling around it. If you want to understand them, you need to understand a couple things that almost everyone gets wrong: There are TWO distinct classes of AI dangers, and it's VERY important to think about them separately, and not let one confuse you about the other. Many many people (including many quite intelligent, clear-thinking people) do not effectively understand the fundamental differences between these two classes of dangers. The first one has to do with the theory that an AI far superior to human intelligence (Artificial SuperIntelligence, or ASI) will inevitably wipe out the human race. The second one has to do with the idea that powerful AI will result in very harmful things happening to many human beings, possibly all human beings. Those two sound VERY similar, don't they? They are DIFFERENT. Understanding how they are different is crucial if you want to think about or contribute usefully to any conversation about AI safety or AI harm. You might feel like you are Making Very Good Points or Asking Incisive Questions, but if you aren't clear on the differences between the two, you aren't. So, I'm going to tell you what the difference is so that you can talk more usefully. The first one concerns itself with a very specific thing, which is ASI (Artificial Superintelligence) that is more intelligent than any human being. When I say that, I am not referring to a thing like how Einstein is smarter than you, we are talking more about something like how a human being is more intelligent than any mouse. In our regular lives, we meet other people who we can tell are smarter than us, vs some who are less smart. The line is fuzzy, because intelligence has a lot of dimensions. I'm better at a "rotating shapes" kind of intelligence than my wife, and she is better at "words-making" kind of intelligence than I am. But every human is better in almost every dimension of intelligence than every single mouse. That's the level we're talking about: an artificial superintelligence - made up of a computer or a network of computers - that is more intelligent than any human. And more intelligent by a long shot, by a wide margin, in an indisputable way like how humans are above mice. That is the first thing. The theory says that if you have an AI that is vastly smarter than all humans - in the way that a human is smarter than mice - that superintelligent AI will inevitably, eventually, sooner or later, wipe out every human on the planet. We will refer to this as "existential risk." The common follow-up question "well, how exactly is it going to do that?" is NOT the important question, and one of the most important elements of understanding this theory is first getting why that particular question is not important. A couple analogies: Analogy 1: You are playing chess against a grandmaster. My theory predicts the grandmaster is going to beat you. You can ask "Well, how exactly is he going to do that?" I don't know, because I'm not a grandmaster, I just know that a chess grandmaster is almost always going to beat a normal player like you. And I'd be right. So the question "how is he going to do that" is not important, and doesn't affect the final outcome. He's going to figure out a way because he's way better than you. Analogy 2: Humans are smarter than all other animals, comprehensively, by a wide margin. We have driven numerous species to extinction, not because we hated them or hunted them. Many of them have died out without most humans even ever thinking about them. All we did was expand our civilization, use up resources, encroach on habitats, and pretty soon the resources needed by those species went away and they died out. We figured out a way to get what we wanted because we're way smarter than them, and often we didn't even notice they died as a result. A lesser animal asking, "how are the humans going to wipe us out?" is not asking a relevant question. We don't know, but we do know that any time humans and lesser species compete for any kind of resources, the humans will win. The fact that we know who is going to win beforehand - and that it is due to the vastly different levels of intelligence - is the key concept here. A vastly more intelligent AI is likely to care about things that are incomprehensible to us, the way animals can't understand human goals. It's going to need resources to pursue those goals and it's going to be far more effective at gaining control of them and excluding us from them - in the same way that we are far more effective than other lower species. A much more intelligent AI will not care about our interests, it will care about its interests, and to whatever small degree we happen to escape total annihilation from losing access to all our resources, any remaining humans will likely be enslaved into a system that serves the AI's own purposes. That is the first thing. (Remember how I said at the beginning of this post that there was a first thing, and then a second thing?) The first thing is the most difficult to understand, because you have to extrapolate how a vastly superior intelligence would act, and you can only use analogies like "how do humans treat lesser creatures," and the analogies are messy. But now let's move on to the second thing. The second thing is "everything else you've ever heard that AI might do that's harmful." That's a little inaccurate. It's actually "everything else you've ever heard that humans might use AI to do that's harmful." This is the critical difference. The first one talks about the inevitable outcome of what happens when two vastly different levels of intelligence collide, e.g. ASI vs humans, or human vs mice. The second one has to do with what happens when humans possess AI as a powerful tool. This second thing is much easier to understand, because we have many more concrete notions: Like: - the military uses AI to make hyper-efficient killer drones and missiles - your capitalist overlords use AI to replace you and everyone loses their jobs - authoritarian government uses AI to surveil everybody and control the entire population - hackers use AI to break into secure networks and hold companies and governments hostage - students use AI to cheat on homework and show up to college knowing nothing - AI slop saturates the internet and makes it impossible for artists and writers to make a living - terrorists use AI to make biological or nuclear weapons or even things like - the military hands control to an AI and it misinterprets something and launches nuclear attacks and kills millions All of those sound pretty familiar, right? Yeah, you've heard them before. We call this second thing "risks from misuse." These problems are not the first class of problem! This second class of problems exists while AI is a tool that can be controlled by humans, and humans use it to do evil or careless things to each other. The problems may sound exotic or dystopian or novel, but they are fundamentally problems having to do with flawed human nature. Given a powerful tool, some humans will likely use it to control or otherwise harm others. This is a very familiar problem. I am not condemning or condoning this. I'm just describing it. That is a fundamentally different danger from the first thing, which is that when a human is far superior to a mouse, the mouse is likely to come to harm because the human cares about doing human things, and the mouse is not gonna make it once the humans get going. ===== Hopefully from the above, you have understood the difference between the first thing and the second thing. I will list them again - see if you now understand how they are different: The first one has to do with the idea that an AI superior to human intelligence (Artificial SuperIntelligence, or ASI) will inevitably wipe out the human race. The second one has to do with the idea that powerful AI will result in very harmful things happening to many human beings, possibly all human beings. Can you tell how they are different now? If not, re-read the stuff from earlier until you understand. We call the first one "existential risk" and we call the second one "risks from misuse." Once you understand, here is the CRUX of the problem: SOLUTIONS TO THE SECOND THING DO NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH SOLUTIONS TO THE FIRST THING. In fact, it's worse: Solutions to the second thing (misuse) look roughly like "give powerful AI to as many people as you can, so they can fight the other people using powerful AI." But the general solution to the first one (existential risk) is basically "don't let anyone have powerful AI, no one can control super-intelligent AI." Throughout history, harms from technological misuse typically arise because a small group has control of it and can use it to dominate or harm others. Once everyone has it, things tend to stabilize: you can hurt me, I can hurt you, maybe we test each other (ouch 💥), and then we agree not to hurt each other. But the first one (existential risk) pretty much just arises if anyone (good or bad!) creates a superintelligence. Because they aren't going to be able to control it, the superintelligence will decide it has other priorities, and then we will be at great risk of being wiped out. And the solutions that generally work to solve problems like the second thing are EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of the ones likely to solve the first thing. THIS is why lots of arguments about "AI risk" or "AI safety" go nowhere. Because someone will be thinking about the risk from the first thing, and another person will be thinking about the risk from the second thing. Both are plausible risks but fundamentally they arise from different things - and so the solutions are not just "bad" or "flawed" - they are likely to be very nearly exact opposites.
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
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Anthony Elert retweeted
There are two ways AI progress could go very badly and that we must avoid. First, we could lose control of the future to AI. This is unacceptable; we are unapologetically on Team Humanity, and AI must always serve people. To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities. Second, we could end up in a world with too much concentration of power. If an extraordinarily powerful AI is used by one person or company to impress their worldview onto everyone else, the results could be extremely dystopian. Avoiding these two threats requires walking a narrow middle path; for example, one country could gain too much power. Another example is one lab ending up with too much power.
The world deserves confidence that American companies developing increasingly capable AI will act responsibly, especially as the trajectory of progress has steepened. Every frontier lab must deliver on this, and there is no reason any of us should come to work if we cannot. We welcome a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI. But we do not believe we need to wait for an anti-trust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence. Consistent rules to manage frontier risk so that we can maximize the benefits are a good idea (and we are excited by ideas like independent auditors). Years ago, companies like ours developed things like Responsible Scaling Policies and Preparedness Frameworks. Those were good for that moment, and focused primarily on the deployment of completed models, not what happens during their development process. Today's shift to focusing on safe development and evaluation will need new tools. For example, at OpenAI we now formulate explicit safety cases in advance of frontier reinforcement learning runs we expect to significantly increase capability, in addition to the safety work we have long done in advance of model releases. We hope that other companies will learn from our approaches and propose their own; we think shared standards for misalignment, monitoring, and safety will lead to better outcomes. We look forward to collaborating with our colleagues across the industry to formulate the best version of these. When we talk about “pacing”, we do not mean “stopping”. Progress has been rapid and will continue to be. But it should be slower than it otherwise could be; interventions like safety cases and monitoring have significant costs. Pacing will be well worth this cost; no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring. Where we will need the help of our government is for international coordination. But first we should do what we can ourselves.
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I’m willing to bet that 90% of the haters didn’t even read the full article. I think it was presented incredibly well and I agree with his concerns and plan for action. The threat of AI attacking the internet worldwide is real, and having third party validators ensuring compliance is essential, not only in the US, but worldwide. The real problem will be making sure that other countries (cough, china) will comply on the same level.
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training. You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
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America’s AI doomerism is becoming a national liability. We’re obsessing over the downsides of data centers while ignoring the MUCH bigger picture: Leading the world in AI may be THE MOST IMPORTANT thing America can do this century. If we want to remain the world’s economic and military leader, being at the frontier of AI isn’t optional. It’s a NECESSITY. This is bigger than politicians and billionaires getting richer. It’s about American competitiveness, national security, and expanding prosperity for the entire country. We should be building MORE data centers. Producing MORE energy. Investing MORE into AI. America has the opportunity to lead the most important technological revolution of our lifetime. We should be doing everything we can to make sure we do.
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October 28, 2026: The first AI-driven global cybersecurity crisis. It starts with one person running an unrestricted AI cyber agent locally. The agent discovers a critical vulnerability in widely used infrastructure and gives one individual capabilities that previously required a nation-state cyber team. Within hours, the exploit spreads across thousands of organizations. Financial systems freeze. Sensitive corporate and government data is compromised. Critical services are taken offline to contain the damage. The attack lasts days. Recovery takes months. It becomes the world’s wake-up call: one person with AI can now wield the cyber capabilities of an entire organization. Governments respond with sweeping changes to AI security, cybersecurity, and access to frontier models. Bookmark this. I may not get the date completely right, but it will happen, and sooner than we expect.
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This blows my mind every day The people who get ahead over the next few years will be the ones using AI for almost everything in their lives. At this point, there are very few things too complex for AI to meaningfully help with.
Imagine telling someone 50 years ago you'd have a machine that could explain any concept in human history, write code, diagnose disease, and reason through problems with you for $20/month They would literally think you were describing god This exists. You have access to it. Yet most of you are using it to summarize emails The arbitrage between people who actually use AI and people who "use AI" is the widest it will ever be That window is open right now and it will close faster than most people think Tldr; start using AI for more than just mundane tasks
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As an American learning Japanese, man I hate kanji. Do Japanese people feel the same way?
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