Tariffs up 50%. Stocks down 5%. You know what hasn’t changed? What benching 225 for reps feels like. Time to visit the church of iron boys.

Reminder: You have to refer to RFK Jr. as Dr. Kennedy because he has a Juris Doctor law degree. This precedent was set during the last administration with Dr. Jill Biden, who has a Doctor of Education degree.

Suicide Round: A massive fundraising round that is far too big for where a startup is in terms of financial performance and product market fit. Example: $100m on $1b post with $1m ARR that's entirely based on the founders big tech pedigree.

Everyone is saying “this already exists!” “It’s fine tuning!” “It’s RAG!” “It’s NotebookLM” Wrong. He specifically said he wants to “log in” the data. I’ve never heard anyone pitch a custom LLM that allows you to “log all that in” - the opportunity is still real.

It’s over. Andrej Karpathy popped the AI bubble. It’s time to rotate out of AI stocks and focus on investing in food, water, shelter, and guns. AI is fake, the internet is overhyped, computers are pretty much useless, even the steam engine is mid. We’re going back to sticks and stones. Obviously it’s not actually that bad, but the general tech community is experiencing whiplash right now after the Richard Sutton and Andrej Karpathy appearances on Dwarkesh. Andrej directly called the code produced by today’s frontier models “slop” and estimated that AGI was around 10 years away. Interestingly this lines up nicely with Sam Altman’s “The Intelligence Age” blog post from September 23, 2024, where he said “It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.” I read this timeline to mean a decade, which is what people always say when they’re predicting big technological shifts (see space travel, quantum computing, and nuclear fusion timelines). This is still earlier than Ray Kurzweil’s 2045 singularity prediction, which has always sounded on the extreme edge of sci-fi forecasting, but now looks bearish. There’s a whole chain of AGI-soon bears who feel vindicated by Andrej’s comments and the general vibe shift. Yann LeCun, Tyler Cowen, and many others on the side of “progress will be incremental” look great at this moment in time. This George Hotz quote from a Lex Fridman interview in June of 2023 now feels way ahead of the curve, at the time: “Will GPT-12 be AGI? My answer is no, of course not. Cross-entropy loss is never going to get you there. You probably need reinforcement learning in fancy environments to get something that would be considered AGI-like.” Big tech companies can’t turn on a dime on the basis of the latest Dwarkesh interview though. Oracle is building something like $300 billion in infrastructure over the next five years. If demand plateaus, there will be real financial consequences. The bull case is of course the other side of the Karpathy take. He didn’t just say “the models are slop,” he also said “the models are amazing” and “autocomplete is my sweet spot.” The shape of adoption around “amazing autocomplete” will determine the success or failure of the massive AI buildout. I like that Oracle is taking a big swing here, it’s exciting to see a nearly 50-year-old company go risk-on, but I don’t like how they are messaging their underwriting. In a CNBC interview, co-CEO Clay Magouyrk said, “Look at [OpenAI's] financials, their growth, and what’s being built with this technology. This isn’t a typical company trajectory. They’ve reached nearly a billion users faster than anyone. Everything about this is unprecedented — but in a good way.” He’s correct that this particular growth curve is unprecedented but I would have a lot more confidence if instead the argument was framed around previous technology booms and acknowledging the risk-reward tradeoffs. The dot-com bubble was a disaster, but Google and Amazon both made it through and became multi-trillion dollar enterprises. Vanderbilt became the richest man in America during the railroad boom. Bubbles pop, but fortunes are still made by the shrewdest players. It’s just important to make sure you have your feet on solid ground.

People talk about AI being a “friend” but my real friends would never hesitate to infringe on Disney intellectual property if I needed help designing a birthday card.

Calling it now, the hottest trend of 2026 will be dogged pursuits. Determined, persistent, and stubborn efforts to achieve things, refusing to give up despite difficulties, opposition, or discouragement, much like a dog relentlessly following a scent. Bookmark this.