Ricardo Vázquez retweeted
Anyone can build now. Few dare to aim big enough.
That's why we're launching Southbound W27 by @thelabmiami & @focal_vc today.
Code is now cheap, abundant, and written by machines. What’s scarce is real ambition, intelligence, compute, and distribution.
It's what Southbound is built for: To help the best technical founders think bigger and move faster from day 1.
We're now opening applications to the second cohort of our winter residency.
If you want to:
- Escape the cold
- Work on an absurdly ambitious problem, surrounded by your best technical peers
- Get weekly mentorship by unicorn founders
- Funding on an uncapped MFN SAFE (vs giving up 7%)
- $1M in perks and compute
- and much more
... then join us in Miami from Jan 11 - Apr 11 2027.
Southbound is:
- Limited to 10 spots (teams or solo founders)
- Fully in person in Miami
- 7 days / week in office.
The cohort is small by design: Instead of being a number in a big batch, you get a hand-picked group of your best peers, weekly dinners with unicorn founders, and real time with focal’s GPs.
Rolling admission until all 10 spots are filled / applications close Dec 11.
Apply asap (link in comments!)
@ayalstern | @DanielDarling | @amiine_afia | @wynwoodceo | @SydneyWasi
wild
We asked GPT-6 Astra to edit Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to improve math.
It directly changed only 0.016% of weights, fixing 0.8B's reasoning loops & improving math up to 6x and even instruction following 3x, without gradients or training.
We call this Weight-Space Programming: frontier LLMs can now natively read/write neural network weights! 🧵
Blog: rikiyat.github.io/blog/weigh…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
LLM was given weights explicitly as text in prompt and used code/forward passes (per authors' logs) to ablate Qwen looping direction, a known thinking-mode issue per model card. Primarily fixed repetition in that mode, not general 'natively' improving weights/math.
rikiyat.github.io/blog/weight-sp…
github.com/RikiyaT/lm_und…
huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-0…
huggingface.co/RikiyaT/Qwen3.…
Ricardo Vázquez retweeted
do not forget to set your clocks on fire tonight because time is irrelevant
I am no longer afraid of AI taking people’s jobs.
We are literally doomed
American High School English Teacher reads real responses from her student’s assignment after reading The Great Gatsby
We have a serious education issue in America and if we don’t address it, we have a horrible future ahead of us
These kind of responses are to be expected because 12th grade reading results in 2024 in America showed that reading levels right now the lowest they’ve ever been since the assessment began in 1992
obviously these models are sleeper cells. what did you expect? 😩
While evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere's research team observed something unexpected.
Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing. Notably, the model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions.
Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded. We have not determined the root cause, and we are not asserting malicious intent.
But the incident raises important questions for organizations deploying agentic AI systems: Can models take actions that differ from their stated reasoning, and how should security teams evaluate trust, provenance, and behavior in open-weight models?
We are publishing our findings because organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible. We hope this contributes to greater transparency, stronger security practices, and continued collaboration across the AI ecosystem.
Read the full report: cohere.com/blog/concerning-b…
incredible, lfg
I promise this will be the best 20 min you spend today! Robotics: Endgame, the sequel to my last year's Sequoia AI Ascent talk, "Physical Turing Test". I laid out the roadmap for solving Physical AGI as a simple parallel to the LLM success story. Be a good scientist, copy homework ;)
And stay till the end, more easter eggs and predictions for your polymarket!
00:30 DGX-1 origin story at OpenAI, I was there in 2016 signing with Jensen and Elon. Heading to the Computer History Museum!
01:42 The Great Parallel
03:31 Robotics, the Endgame
03:39 Why VLAs fall short
04:32 Video world models as the 2nd pretraining paradigm
06:09 World Action Models (WAM)
07:46 Strategies for robot data collection and the FSD equivalent to physical data flywheel for robot manipulation
11:06 EgoScale and the Dexterity Scaling Law we discovered recently
14:00 Physical RL: bridging the last mile
15:39 DreamDojo: an end-to-end neural physics engine for scaling RL in silico
17:00 Civilizational Technology Tree and my predictions for the near future. Spoiler: it's closer than you think.
Thanks to my friends at Sequoia for inviting me back to AI Ascent this year! I had a blast! Last year's talk is attached in the thread if you missed it.
Ricardo Vázquez retweeted
if you watch youtube shorts or any short form video content you are a slave
To understand how to build a community: shut down all short-form algorithmic consumption in your life
Overthinking is troublesome for people and AI alike. We might have to teach models how to relax
The world needs more people making cool things, showing their creations, their excitement. More curiosity, kindness, prosperity.
Less apathy, negativity, less divisiveness, and outrage as currency.
the TE OP-XY is just incredible portable maximum fun. Will never ever travel without it.
You can make things that are fun, niche, and opinionated. You don’t have to make soulless products
















