Fernando Cao

The CEO of Boom Supersonic would like startups to stop calling themselves Foundry or Forge unless they actually cast or forge metal. He's allowed. Boom builds gas turbines for AI data centers now, and on October 22 it announced plans for an all-digital foundry that casts single-crystal turbine blades. First blades are due in 2027.

Apple just made a touchscreen Mac. In 2010, Steve Jobs explained why it wouldn't. Touchscreens on laptops give a great demo, he said, but "after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off." He called the idea ergonomically terrible. 16 years later, the new MacBook Pro: → Touch built into the OLED panel itself, not layered on top → A new hinge so the screen doesn't wobble when you tap it → Dynamic Island instead of the notch → 2,000 nits peak HDR brightness → 14-inch: 3.0 lb, down from 3.5. 16-inch: 4.0 lb, down from 4.7 → From $2,899 for the 14-inch and $3,399 for the 16-inch, available November 6 Still Touch ID. No Face ID. Apple's last try at touch on a MacBook was the Touch Bar in 2016, which it eventually dropped. This time it's the whole screen.

Sam Altman says OpenAI is going to point its robotics program at building data centers. "We made a chip... We are learning how to build our own data centers. We have a robotics program that we're going to point at making lots of data centers." Everyone talks about AI that does AI research. His point is that almost nobody talks about self-replicating data centers: AI controlling robots that run fabs, build turbines and solar panels, and build more data centers. "I think we have that within grasp." John Collison pushed back: data centers aren't short of labor, they're short of permits and components. Altman: "We could make more components with robots." On why compute is still so expensive: → Memory makers used to spend $20B in capex to make $19B → Now they're each about to make "like $100 billion of free cash flow in a year" → They still won't overbuild fabs, because they remember nearly going bankrupt the last time → "I think the invisible hand is failing right now." From @collision's Cheeky Pint with @sama.

Sam Altman told a story about the day Codex went down inside OpenAI. "There was a crazy moment at OpenAI where we had a SEV... And Codex went down." John Collison: "And everyone had forgotten how to code." Altman: "I mean, not all the way. But, it was like a 'Whoa, what if you couldn't?'" Then he went back to his student days, meeting "the really old guys" who would pull out a giant Xerox Alto disk, line-by-line assembly, or their punch cards. "It is incredible to me that you all bootstrapped us to this point. Doing it this way." Right before that, he said kids can now make "a full, 3D video game" in 10 minutes, and they'll never be impressed by it, because that's just what they expect computers to do. From @collision's Cheeky Pint with @sama.

Sam Altman doesn't want one superintelligence. "I would much rather have a trillion AIs of slightly superhuman intelligence join society than one AI of 1 trillion IQ join society." His reasoning: society holds up because lots of people keep each other in check. Teams of AI agents can work the same way. A single giant brain loses that. From @collision's Cheeky Pint with @sama.

Stupidly underrated asset hiding in most companies: the boring docs. > SOPs > support ticket workflows > CRM data > the playbook you rewrote after every hard lesson @micro1_ai pays companies to license data like this 🧵