It’s Tuesday. Today we played a recursive self-improvement simulator video game on stream, which was a ton of fun. Be sure to monitor with us live on X and YouTube, and follow us on Instagram.
Luiz Beling-Filho (Apeel)
David Turturean (MIT)
Thomas Dohmke (Entire)
Max Nadeau (Coefficient Giving)
Tim Fist (Institute for Progress)
Naomi Bashkansky and Rio Popper (Conduit Intelligence)
Jason Ma (Dyna Robotics)
James Czerniawski (Consumer Choice Center)
SpaceXAI releases Grok Bot in early beta. Grok Bot is an agent swarm product designed for white-collar work tasks, an early preview of what Leopold Aschenbrenner called a “drop-in remote worker”. Bots can learn workflows and improve over time. This is likely part of the joint SpaceXAI-Tesla MACROHARD project, which seeks to eventually emulate entire software companies.
OpenAI VP of Special Projects Brad Lightcap departs the company in order to start something new. Lightcap joined OpenAI in 2018 as CFO and helped build out many of its operations and business teams. He became COO in 2022, and VP of Special Projects (including the OpenAI Deployment Company) in April 2026. Previously, he was an investor at YC (along with Sam Altman) and worked in finance at Dropbox and JPMorgan.
River AI raises $1.1B. The neolab, founded by xAI cofounder Igor Babuschkin, seeks to build powerful personal AI that knows and works for the user, starting with enterprise and moving to individuals over time.
Anthropic is responding to tough investor questions on competition from cheap open-source Chinese models, on the firm’s tense relationship with the Trump administration, and on public backlash against data centers.
Anthropic makes a $9.1B deal with Riot Platforms for compute. Riot is a former Bitcoin mining firm (and also former biotech diagnostic machinery manufacturer) that’s now pivoting to providing AI data center capacity.
UK sovereign AI startup Cosine raises $15M, backed by the UK government and major financial companies. The 30-person startup plans to train LLMs for highly regulated industries that need sovereign AI. $15 million is around 0.005% of the total cumulative funding raised by OpenAI and Anthropic.
Gemini hits 1 billion monthly users, becoming the fastest-growing product in Google’s history. Google now has 14 products (Search, Gmail, Drive, Chrome, Maps, Play Store, Calendar, Photos, Android, Discover, Lens, YouTube, Messages, Gemini) with more than a billion users.
VC firm Accel raises $3.5B to make early-stage AI investments. $1.35B will go to larger rounds and follow-on investments, $800M to US (primarily Silicon Valley) investments, $800M to Europe and Israel, and $550M to India.
Intel raises $20B in a share sale, showing continued demand for AI stocks.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson calls for a data center moratorium amid increasing anti-data center sentiment nationwide.
Dwarkesh Patel@dwarkesh_sp
Had @RyanGreenblatt on to discuss/debate recursive self-improvement. This might be the most important question in the world right now - whether within a year or so of achieving human level intelligence, you slingshot towards having 10s of billions of superintelligences, each of
4:46 PM · Aug 11, 2026 · 134K Views
36 Replies · 84 Reposts · 802 Likes
Justin@justinwangx
understanding progress on RSI is one of the most important things we can do to chart the future. @danrobinson and I made a game and explorer based on economic models of AI research, to make the inputs and constraints that define RSI more intuitive.
paradigm.xyz
RSI Simulator | Paradigm
4:24 PM · Aug 11, 2026 · 43.6K Views
10 Replies · 15 Reposts · 123 Likes
sam@Discoplomacy
In one instance of Claude playing Civ V with a human, Claude deprioritised building a military. The human had to interject their army to create a peacekeeping buffer to stop another faction attacking his ally Claude. open.substack.com/pub/chinatalk/… “Claude really loves science
12:23 PM · Aug 11, 2026 · 46K Views
13 Replies · 38 Reposts · 556 Likes
Ryan Greenblatt@RyanGreenblatt
I talked with @dwarkesh_sp about the potential for (very) fast AI progress and how misaligned AI takeover might happen. Our conversation focused a lot on threat models from "reward-seeking" AIs. If you're interested in reading more about this, my colleague Alex Mallen has
Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp
Had @RyanGreenblatt on to discuss/debate recursive self-improvement. This might be the most important question in the world right now - whether within a year or so of achieving human level intelligence, you slingshot towards having 10s of billions of superintelligences, each of
5:44 PM · Aug 11, 2026 · 16.7K Views
2 Replies · 17 Reposts · 184 Likes
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