While the normies were resting, I was mainlining tech discourse all weekend to bring you the latest trends, rumors, fights, and innovations from the sweatiest corners of the internet. This week: OpenAI clinches the Pentagon contract, the mysterious “Dime” appears in Sightglass, and YC founders hope to find love in a hopeless place.
This is Manic Monday.
One company’s red line is another’s green light
Two days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly refused to allow the so-called Department of War to license Claude models for the deployment of autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of civilians, OpenAI snatched the contract — which Sam Altman insists includes the exact terms set by Amodei. That claim was immediately challenged by people on social media; now, two of the three identical statements Altman made about the DOW contract on X include Community Notes about the inconsistency.
Not Divided (and not yet unemployed)
Soon after Amodei made his statement, a coalition of OpenAI and Google employees released an open letter titled “We Will Not Be Divided,” stating their solidarity with Anthropic and urging their employers not to cave to the Pentagon’s demands. As of today, it has 832 signatures (out of about 200,000 combined employees) — 736 of which came, notably, from Google. One has to wonder, what will happen to the 96 OpenAI dissenters whose names are readily available?
Gotta call ‘em all
Meanwhile, local “tech jester” and recent hire to the secretive OpenAI Labs team (congratulations?) Riley Walz stayed quiet on the whole “my new employer is enabling autonomous weapons and mass surveillance” blah blah blah. Instead, the Wizard of Whimsy spent his weekend creating a scavenger hunt out of California’s last remaining payphones. I’m not saying it’s a psyop designed to distract from the AI-military industrial complex, but I am starting to wonder what exactly they’re doing over there at OpenAI Labs.
Y Combinator’s Lonely Hearts Club Mixer
Single? Tech-pilled? Yearning for the soft touch of a human lover? If you answered yes, yes, and yes, oh, Claude, yes, then sign up for the YC x a16z Speedrun Singles Mixer! Must be part of YC or Speedrun accelerators. No VC. No old fogeys over 30. No networking. Except, forget all that if you’re a straight woman. If you’re a straight woman in tech, just come. Please. Date and location TBD … they’re working on the ratio.
Rise and Dime
Early this morning, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia was spotted at Sightglass in SoMa with the device known as “Dime,” the mysterious silver earbuds and handheld orb that appeared in the apparently leaked and still unclaimed Super Bowl ad featuring Alexander Skarsgård. We still don’t know what the Dime does or where it comes from, but considering the fact that Gebbia is also the chief design officer of the Trump administration’s National Design Studio, I’d bet against the theories that it’s a Huawei product.
The week ahead: Learning so much from your least favorite follow, who’s suddenly an expert on Iranian history.
