Brian Armstrong

David Sacks says Brian Armstrong posted, the day before Anthropic's blog, that Coinbase had fine-tuned an open-weight model with 9 billion parameters. In testing it cut fraudulent transactions by about 30 percent, and it was faster and cheaper than Opus 4.5. Nine billion parameters is small. It will not fit in a Roomba, and it will run on a home computer.

Sacks says a lot of enterprise work does not need a frontier model. It needs a small specialist trained on the company's own data, so the company keeps the model. As compute gets tighter, a smaller model squeezes more work from each GPU. His read is that every workload gets its own customized model and uses a fraction of the compute and th

The Wright brothers, two bicycle shop owners, tinkered in Kitty Hawk on maybe a ten or twenty thousand dollar personal budget and no venture capital, while competitors had ten or a hundred times the money. Demonstrations were ignored for years, and around 1904 the U.S. war department said the airplane had no military use, yet forty years later it helped the Allies win World War II.

He skips Slack, other message tools, and X because that is a bad way to start the morning. While stretching and exercising, he listens to podcasts or audiobooks to learn something educational or positive and get his head right for the day.

Knowing when you will die matters more than how, because the deadline creates urgency. Steve Jobs worked on the iPhone on his deathbed, and Hal Finney, who worked on Bitcoin and may be Satoshi Nakamoto, was on his deathbed. When living every day like it is your last is actually true, it focuses the mind.

Sleep need is person dependent. People with a short sleeper gene can sleep three to four hours a night and be totally fine, not just tired all the time. High performers who appear to have it include President Trump, arguably Elon, and Indra Nooyi, who was the CEO of Pepsi.

New Limit was co-founded around cell or epigenetic reprogramming. As cells age, genes that should be on get flipped off or vice versa, so function is lost. The company and other labs have shown you can reprogram cells to restore the function they had when they were younger.

Life expectancy in the U.S. was about thirty-five a hundred years ago and more than doubled through soap and penicillin, then plateaued. The next doubling is the bet behind New Limit: cell or epigenetic reprogramming. A walk and a little more sleep are still the best free longevity tools.

Under the current draft, an auditor has to value every asset, and if they get it wrong they are criminally or personally liable, so every auditor will sandbag the valuation and add a buffer.

He joined Airbnb in 2010 after a college tutoring startup that was only a base hit with a small exit. Airbnb's rule was if you're not a hell yes you're a no, with a high bar for design and engineering. Working beside those people showed they were made of the same stuff, so after reading the Bitcoin white paper he built a Coinbase prototype nights and weekends and took those practices with him.

AI should follow the internet model rather than heavy rules. Google and Meta grew in the US because the internet was largely unregulated and markets could move fast. Frontier labs are competing, and the dangerous hypotheticals people raise have not happened yet.

Economic freedom is foundational to every other freedom. Even if speech is legal in theory, people will not use it if a bank can debank them or the state can seize their assets.