@obrien
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Journalist in Paris publishing The French Tech Journal newsletter 🇺🇲🇫🇷. Launching: The France AI Radar: https://nitter.cf/t.co/eqHvUDYmB8
Paris, France
Joined December 2007
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Chris O'Brien retweeted
Meet my new company, North (@RunOnNorth): Claude, engineered into your law firm 🧭
6 months ago @ClarkValberg (@InVisionApp co-founder) called me out of the blue with "I have something we could build together."
It was law firms 👇
Chris O'Brien retweeted
After leaving @Dreamforce last week, I was inspired to revisit a question I hadn't fully addressed before: What happens when companies start building their processes and procedures into the weights of the models they use?
We're starting to see evidence of this with three recent product announcements:
@Salesforce’s Koa
@Harvey's Tenet
Recent @Shopify ML team experiments
With these specialist models, a software company can take a capable open-weight model, train it for a defined job, and lower the cost of delivering intelligence inside its product. Weights become another way to package and deploy expertise.
In that sense, weights are the new code.
And yet, if we play out this trend and specialist models become easier to build, lasting advantage may depend less on the weights themselves than on the process that improves them: the environment in which they practice, the judgment of what counts as success, and access to real outcomes with permission to learn from them.
So, to assess a company's position, one should ask: How much defined, repeated work can software companies take into their own hands? And does doing so create a lasting advantage?
I explore this in the latest edition of Decoding Discontinuity: decodingdiscontinuity.com/p/…
Uh-oh: The Brits ranked Paris as Europe's No. 1 AI hub.
Cue the hot takes served over a dish of cold baked beans on white toast, with a greasy fried egg, two sad pale sausages, black pudding, and a massacred grilled half-tomato.
observer.co.uk/news/technolo…
There are so so so many dumb takes on Mistral AI, alas, But if nothing else, at least ask: What does winning the frontier cost?
This is what it costs. Shoveling cash into a pit of fire. FOREVER.
And what do you get? Your ass eaten by Chinese models. And not in a good way.
This is not to say Mistral will succeed. Who knows? But I'd bet just as much on OpenAI being acquired by Bending Spoons next year.
I was curious about this because I have mixed feelings about @pangram. I had built a Pangram Claude skill via the API for other projects that provides a bit more detail.
But I ran Chapter 1 through and got a similar result:
Avez-vous entendu parler de ce roman ? C’est le « phénomène de la rentrée littéraire ». Il est lauréat du Prix Fnac, du Prix Méduse, du Prix Première Plume, fortement pressenti pour le Prix Renaudot, et il est en lice pour les prix Goncourt, Femina, Médicis et Décembre. Ah oui, il est aussi en cours de traduction dans 20 langues.
Eh bien selon Pangram, ce roman est rédigé presque intégralement par une Intelligence Artificielle. Nous avons testé plusieurs passages, à divers endroits du manuscrit, pour presque toujours le même résultat : 100% IA (cf les deux premiers chapitre dans le tweet ci-dessous).
Rappelons que Pangram est de loin le détecteur d’IA le plus fiable : son taux de faux positifs est de 0,0041%, soit environ un texte humain sur 24 400. Sur 996 273 textes antérieurs à 2022, Pangram en classe uniquement 14 (0,0014%) comme étant partiellement écrits par l’IA.
La probabilité que vingt passages d’un même livre (et il y a bien plus de 20 signalements dans le roman) soient identifiés à tort par Pangram comme étant produits par une IA s’élève donc à 0,0041% puissance 20, soit 0,1802 × 10⁻⁸⁵ %, c’est à-dire 0 suivi de 85 zéros après la virgule.
N’aurait-il pas été plus honnête que l’auteur crédite son co-auteur ?
Other big caveat: "If you know this text was written by a human, Pangram's explanation for false positives is stylistic convergence: a writer who has absorbed the cadence of generated prose, or who was heavily edited toward it."
Full breakdown is here:
frenchtechjournal.com/cetait…
The bros at a16z have some advice for Euro founders:
Think Smaller!
Noted...
sifted.eu/articles/a16z-andr…
The question in the end: is the book good or no? The rest is just Puratanism. – at Saint-Ouen, France
Avez-vous entendu parler de ce roman ? C’est le « phénomène de la rentrée littéraire ». Il est lauréat du Prix Fnac, du Prix Méduse, du Prix Première Plume, fortement pressenti pour le Prix Renaudot, et il est en lice pour les prix Goncourt, Femina, Médicis et Décembre. Ah oui, il est aussi en cours de traduction dans 20 langues.
Eh bien selon Pangram, ce roman est rédigé presque intégralement par une Intelligence Artificielle. Nous avons testé plusieurs passages, à divers endroits du manuscrit, pour presque toujours le même résultat : 100% IA (cf les deux premiers chapitre dans le tweet ci-dessous).
Rappelons que Pangram est de loin le détecteur d’IA le plus fiable : son taux de faux positifs est de 0,0041%, soit environ un texte humain sur 24 400. Sur 996 273 textes antérieurs à 2022, Pangram en classe uniquement 14 (0,0014%) comme étant partiellement écrits par l’IA.
La probabilité que vingt passages d’un même livre (et il y a bien plus de 20 signalements dans le roman) soient identifiés à tort par Pangram comme étant produits par une IA s’élève donc à 0,0041% puissance 20, soit 0,1802 × 10⁻⁸⁵ %, c’est à-dire 0 suivi de 85 zéros après la virgule.
N’aurait-il pas été plus honnête que l’auteur crédite son co-auteur ?
If I can't use Facebook agents to shop for SHEIN and Temu from Malaysian third-party hustlers on Amazon, is life even worth living?
The US is cooked...
🦔SoftBank is raising over $11 billion in junk bonds to fund its next OpenAI investment. One of the largest junk bond deals ever. The company has committed $65 billion to OpenAI total and is now the largest junk-rated borrower in bond markets in 2026. SoftBank's bond yield has climbed to 8.2% from 6.7% in January. The cost to insure its debt against default is at a three-year high.
My Take
Masayoshi Son bet $65 billion on OpenAI and is borrowing $11 billion more at junk rates to keep it going. He's borrowing at 8.2% to fund an investment in a company that isn't profitable and just pushed its IPO to 2027. The bond market is already pricing in the risk. The cost to insure SoftBank's debt against default is at a three-year high.
Son has been here before. He lost $70 billion in the dot-com crash because the future he funded didn't arrive on the timeline he paid for. He put billions into WeWork. The AI bet is the same structure at a larger scale. CoreWeave raised $3 billion in convertible notes last week. Oracle has $125 billion in liabilities. OpenAI spent $34 billion last year. Every dollar of this is borrowed at rates that assume AI demand holds at this pace for years. The Fed just raised rates and the 10-year is above 5%. Borrowing $11 billion at 8.2% to fund a company that burns cash, in this rate environment, is either the trade of the decade or the most expensive lesson Son has learned twice.
Hedgie🤗
A lot needs to be done to address liquidity in Europe. But obsessing about the US and IPOs is super weird. The IPO is an artifact. It's dead, except for a rare few IPOs, and most come to regret it...
Even Europe's best startups often end up legally incorporated in Delaware.
@SimonSchaefer, co-initiator of @euinc_petition, is pushing to fix that.
It means founders could go public without having to leave Europe first.
