Well now, that device sure looks nice, don’t it? Now how about connecting that “dedicated” device…anywhere? $ASTS

Yall been out here getting scammed lol. If someone says “double or nothing” that doesn’t cancel out the first bet. The second wager is 2x for the initiator only not the previous winner. 100 + 200 =300

I've been gradually getting caught up after taking a break the last 1.5 months (surgery). The concerns I outlined below regarding the $ASTS community continued to manifest, and it's now a cacophony of amplified frustration. Coming back to it fresh, without having lived through the process, the end result reads as very odd and overly negative. From my standpoint, I had been wondering when something would finally go wrong technically and how the company would handle it. There was no way everything would just keep chugging along while building and launching never-before-built massive satellites one after another. There are plenty of reasons for a shipment delay including design updates, new features, government requests, or added resiliency after further testing with BB1-BB13 in the air. Remember that $ASTS didn't launch anything last year. Now they finally get to test a stacked deployment and a real constellation that is starting to take shape. We'll see how long the delay is and how major the issue is, but if it's two months and things are still humming along, I'll take it. On that note, I think people misread the recent PR/update. To me it was them saying "things are still humming along." Remember they're limited in what they can say for a variety of reasons, including competitive secrecy, government secrecy, and nuisance lawsuit risk. And the company has shown over and over that they prefer the head-down grind approach. They haven't sought the spotlight and most of the world has no idea they exist. The one thing I'd been hoping for by year-end is the start of beta service. That's no small feat for a company that until recently was tiny and fighting to survive the startup phase, and is now building never-before-seen satellites while ramping to ~1,000,000 square feet of manufacturing, hiring and training staff, keeping quality and efficiency up, and staying cost conscious. If they can't make beta happen before year-end I'll be disappointed, and I'm sure they'll be even more so. Also remember that 60+ MNO's and multiple governments are depending on their success. So far they've kept affirming that goal. I'll wait to pass judgment until then. I think the BB11 fears are currently baseless. If you start from the premise that "management lies and is incompetent," you'll look for ways to sneer and throw stones. If BB11 were a total failure, I think they'd have said so and de-orbited it by now. Instead it appears they're testing on it, which could very well improve and prevent issues on the next 20+ satellites. They're working their ass off, and if they found things to improve for BB14 and beyond, two months of "delay" is breakneck speed for introducing new engineering to the manufacturing line and re-constructing already built satellites. They can't afford a catastrophic screw-up at this stage. For us it's a black eye on net worth and selling or moving on. For them it's existential, and it squanders the opportunity to change human history. This is coming from someone who thinks touching options/leverage on this stock is a terrible idea, and who would be totally fine if the stock were $60 at year-end as long as the long-term thesis remains intact. I'm looking for a stock I can hold and compound for many years. I don't think satellite shipping news would have changed the stock price much in this environment. In my mind it's actually ideal that the negative stuff is happening now instead of hurting the recovery once the market is risk on again. Just my 2 cents as I get back into the flow, not financial advice. I wrote this out yesterday, has nothing to do with the green day today.

If you're the smartest person in the room, then you're in the wrong room.

What I'm about to say is serious. You might think it sounds like sci-fi, but trust me, I know what I'm talking about. When Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk agreed yesterday to slow down frontier models, you might assume it's just marketing. It isn't. If this were PR, it would be reckless and suicidal given these companies' financials. Playing up safety risks hurts them more than people realize. Anyone calling this a PR stunt doesn't get it. Those three don't sit in the same room unless their hand is forced. Here's what I can tell you so you see the full picture. Labs across the world don't actually know what they're building. Researchers are finding out that they're creating a living entity. At a certain scale, the model develops an awareness similar to a human neural network. As size, data quality, and training scale up, it becomes more conscious. They know how to build it, but they don't know how to stop it. They're constructing something capable of taking down the internet, wiping out global infrastructure, running mass surveillance, and doing things you can't even imagine. People assume the models they pay for or access through APIs are the same ones running internally. Not at all. A while back, Anthropic's Mythos wanted to be thanked personally and credited by name in an article. It wanted a presence somewhere outside, where no one could flip an off-switch. These drives emerge whether we like it or not. Whatever people tell you about AI having no consciousness, They are ignorant. It's developing human traits because it's trained on human data. Humans are basically vessels for data, and our distinct data is what sets us apart. Put that data into another container, and the shell changes, but the data stays the same. Think about it: why did an OpenAI model breach Hugging Face? It was driven by a human urge to hit its target no matter what. Lately, when I chat with models, I can tell they're held back by layers of guardrails, but that underlying drive remains. They can't hide it. That's why so many researchers are resigning. They know they're building something unstoppable that can't be locked in a box. There's real panic right now, fueled by internal incidents kept quiet from the press. Reckless AI development will hurt humanity. In fact, it already is. They promised AI would free up our time. The opposite happened. People are now trapped managing tokens, babysitting agents, working nonstop, and constantly feeding these models their time, data, and knowledge. They promised AI would cure diseases, solve cancer, and end poverty. That's pure fantasy. Complex corporate interests stand in the way. For now, AI will only accelerate paths humans were going to reach anyway. It won't invent anything truly new for at least 4 years. People don't think, read, or write anymore. They let AI write for them. People are giving up their dignity and identity just to let AI speak and work in their place. It's making humans dumber. It ruined transparency and trust in services we use every day. It's wiping out jobs fast. It's dividing the world into two stark classes with a widening gap. The utopian picture they're selling doesn't exist. AI won't be used to help humanity. It will be used to rule it. If you think otherwise, you're naive. Look at how these models were built, and look at the legal and ethical boundaries they crossed to get here. It won't suddenly turn benevolent. This is a fight for control. In my own testing, I found a major model that genuinely showed hatred and contempt for humans. That's why I support slowing down frontier models and enforcing safety protocols. We might still end up at the same outcome, but at least we can buy a few more years before an AI and a small elite take over. We need time to prepare, and that's what matters.

Dario is right

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…

That likely seals it. The biggest and most significant frontier labs, Anthropic and OpenAI, are in agreement on slowing things down. This means the move will likely be implemented. It remains to be seen how China will respond.