I spend way too much time testing AI tools. The good ones, the bad ones, the prompts that save time, and the workflows that actually help creators and founders build faster. Follow for practical AI without the hype.

Trump renaming “AI” to “SI” already sounded bizarre. Now there’s a much stranger story behind it. Researcher Adam Cochran says he found roughly 12,000 AI- or MAGA-related .si domains that were newly registered or changed hands before Trump’s announcement. .si is Slovenia’s country-code domain. (Rattibha) Historically, .si registrations averaged around 55 per day. Then activity suddenly jumped: more than 400 registrations on June 24, followed by over 7,000 new domains in July. At the same time, AI-related .si domains started appearing on the aftermarket for tens of thousands of dollars, with some later relisted for millions. Build.si, for example, was listed for more than $14 million. (Protos) Then came the policy change. On September 29, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “Artificial Intelligence / AI” with “Super Intelligence / SI” across official communications, websites and policy documents. (The White House) Cochran’s allegation is that people with advance knowledge may have accumulated valuable .si domains before the terminology became government policy. That’s a serious accusation, but the public evidence cited so far does not establish who owned those domains or prove a connection to Trump or his inner circle. Much of the relevant WHOIS data is private. (Rattibha) So the interesting question isn’t whether the allegation has already been proven. It’s who bought those 12,000 domains, when they bought them, and whether any of them knew “SI” was coming before everyone else did.

Elon Musk was asked what America needs to do to win. He paused for three seconds. “China’s electricity generation is three times that of the United States.” That answer says a lot. In Jensen Huang’s “five-layer cake” of AI, energy sits at the very bottom. Chips, models and applications all depend on it. China: 10,583 TWh US: 4,520 TWh China alone generates more electricity than the US, EU and India combined. And the scale of what comes next is enormous: 1 GW of power can support roughly $60 billion in GDP. AI may look like a race for better chips and smarter models. But none of those chips run without power. Compute begins with electricity.

The greatest thing about Japanese companies is that they somehow turned terrible software and insanely complicated workflows into a survival advantage. New IT? No thanks. They’ll happily repeat the same manual process, every day, every year, for decades. If AI ever hacks every server on Earth, Japanese companies might be the last ones standing. You can’t wipe out their backend data if half the backend never existed. Worst case, they just create another 10,000 Excel files and rebuild the company. ✌️

Trump spots Elon hiding in the back: "Elon, I didn’t see you back there. What are you doing so far back there?" Elon: "I think it’s worth highlighting the positive benefits of AI... SI, pardon me." Trump: "Thank you." taps his arm The instant AI → SI self-correction is comedy gold 😭

Trump somehow turned a White House AI gathering into a comedy bit. Introducing Google CEO Sundar Pichai: "This guy is a monster, and nobody knows him." Then: "All you have to know is Sundar. Sundar is his name." Pichai’s response was even better: "Hopefully a better tagline than I’m a monster!" 😂

POV outside the White House: Trump calls Dario Amodei forward. Dario steps up, Trump hits him with a casual "Be careful," and Dario laughs before giving a short answer about U.S. leadership and AI safety. Then he quietly slips back into the crowd. The whole clip has the energy of getting cold-called in class by the President of the United States 😂

The wild part about the $200 plan: Opus 5.5 usage is basically unlimited.

My Uber driver this morning was in his 50s and used to be a mid-level tech executive. He was laid off from Intuit five years ago. After sending out thousands of resumes, he eventually stopped trying. His view was simple: why keep applying when companies could hire H-1B workers for far less? He has four kids. His 25-year marriage is over. Now he drives Uber. One conversation is not a labor-market study. But it is a reminder that a lot of the anger people in Washington talk about in abstract terms is very real to the people living through it.

Government websites are where good design matters most. If millions of people have to use it, “good enough” shouldn’t be the standard.

Exactly. Once plugin discovery is native to ChatGPT, distribution stops being the bottleneck. Open ecosystems compound fast.

This is the kind of work that actually makes domestic AI hardware usable. Not slogans, not demos. Kernels, communication, attention, and the whole software stack. DeepSeek just did the hard part.

Elon just escalated this all the way. After Delta rejected Starlink and CEO Ed Bastian took shots at him, Musk’s response was simple: "He will lose his job over this." That is about as direct as it gets. If Delta really chose politics and data monetization over giving passengers better internet, people have every right to vote with their wallets. Boycott Delta.

Delta’s Starlink decision looks worse the more you hear about it. Ed Bastian was reportedly caught trashing Elon Musk internally while defending the airline’s decision to reject Starlink. But Delta had already tested Starlink. The sticking point? Elon reportedly refused to let Delta put passengers behind an ad-tracking portal designed to collect and monetize their data. SpaceX wanted the experience to work like home Wi-Fi: connect instantly, no captive portal, no data harvesting. So Delta walked away. Then it signed with Amazon’s satellite network, which hasn’t even been deployed across the fleet and isn’t expected to be until 2028. Meanwhile, United passengers are getting Starlink speeds around 300 Mbps. Delta passengers get slower internet and a data funnel. That tells you what the priority was.

This is a much bigger milestone for Grok than another benchmark win. Getting used to answer questions from official U.S. government sources is real adoption.

Exactly. Hard work can exhaust you, but meaningless work is what really empties you out.

This might be one of the wildest tax classifications I’ve seen. According to The New York Times, $META classified Mark Zuckerberg as a "researcher" so it could claim a $355 million tax deduction tied to roughly $4 billion in compensation in 2013. Now the IRS wants that $355 million back. Apparently, when the tax bill gets large enough, even the CEO can become R&D.

The political image is impossible to miss: President Trump gathered several of the world’s richest tech executives in one place. Forbes’ recent estimates put Elon Musk at roughly $886–912B, Jeff Bezos around $368B, Mark Zuckerberg around $229B, and Jensen Huang around $187B — about $1.67 trillion combined. Critics see that scene as a symbol of concentrated wealth and access to power. Supporters see it as the White House bringing the people who control some of America’s most important technology companies into the room. Either way, the contrast is the story.

A point release is not supposed to move the curve like this. In our internal CFO.ai eval, Opus 5.5 was already about 2x more efficient than GPT-6 Sol. So I expected 6.1 Sol to close some of that gap. Instead, it flipped the table: 6.1 Sol is now ~3x more efficient than Opus 5.5 and ~2.5x ahead of Sonnet 5.5. On the same eval, that’s roughly a 6x swing versus the original Sol. For a .1 release, that is completely insane.

My current conspiracy theory: Opus 5.5 was so good that even OpenAI had a problem. Then Astra 6.1 never shipped under that name because of "safety issues." Instead, we got Sol 6.1. And Sol 6.1 doesn't look like a model that was meant to fight Opus 5.5 head-on. So OpenAI may have changed the game instead of winning the benchmark war: make it dramatically cheaper, price it around 30x below the top tier, and tighten subscription usage to protect the economics. If that's even close to what happened, the interesting part isn't that OpenAI "lost." It's that Anthropic may have forced OpenAI to compete on price before OpenAI wanted to.

For about 20 seconds, the White House turned into a comedy club. Trump roasted Sundar on the spot. Sundar didn't even hesitate before roasting him right back 😂 That exchange alone was worth the whole event.