Monday, May 18, 2026
The bottleneck has moved from chips to electrons.
May 18 · 12 videos
Leopold Aschenbrenner shorted the chip market for $8 billion.
The bottleneck moved from chips to electrons.
Ukraine is targeting 7 million drones this year.
Vanguard manages $12 trillion by operating at cost.
Anthropic agents now run for 12 hours straight.
Eoin Mulgrew is rewiring the UK state with elite engineers.
“The grim irony of investing is that we investors as a group not only don't get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don't pay for.”
Vanguard: The communist capitalist who saved investors a trillion dollars (Audio)
Jack Bogle · Acquired · 228 min
Watch on YouTube →The history of Vanguard and its unique mutual ownership structure. Jack Bogle's radical experiment transferred $1 trillion from Wall Street to retail investors.
- Vanguard operates under a unique structure where the funds and investors own the management company.
- The Cost Matters Hypothesis proves that the lowest-cost provider delivers superior long-term returns in commodity markets.
- A 1% fee can devour 50% of an investor's potential terminal wealth over a 40-year horizon.
- Vanguard manages over $12 trillion in assets today with nearly $10 trillion in passive index funds.
- Scale Economies Shared allows growth to be used for lowering expense ratios rather than increasing margins.
- The firm faces new challenges under CEO Salim Ramji regarding technological debt and ETF competition.
How to Catch Up In Life (Using Logic)
Alex Hormozi · Alex Hormozi · 10 min
Watch on YouTube →Alex Hormozi outlines a framework for building personal capacity and skill stacking. It focuses on maximizing the windows outside of standard work hours.
- Opportunities are universally available but require pre-built capacity to recognize and execute.
- The hours between 5-9 AM and 5-9 PM are the critical windows for personal acceleration.
- People who are 10 minutes late are 6x less likely to help others compared to those who are early.
- Skill stacking involves evolving base competencies like arithmetic into high-value market skills like M&A.
- Geographic positioning in industry hubs like NYC or DC is vital for career dominance.
- Excess cash should be reinvested into yourself as the highest cash-producing asset.
Rewiring the State — Eoin Mulgrew, 10 Downing Street
Eoin Mulgrew · AI Engineer · 28 min
Watch on YouTube →Eoin Mulgrew discusses the 10 Downing Street data science team's efforts to bypass bureaucracy. They use elite technical talent to solve public sector productivity crises.
- The 10DS team operates as an insurgent technical unit with a rigorous 0.7% acceptance rate.
- An in-house tool saved £1.5 million in legal fees by analyzing the UK statute book in two weeks.
- The team aims to capture a £40 billion AI productivity prize for the UK government.
- Forward-deployed engineers are embedded directly within policy teams to ship services in months rather than years.
- Transparency tools and public dashboards are used to ensure accountability in delivery.
- The model requires a high-level political mandate to break through departmental silos.
How to Build an MVP in the AI Coding Era
Dalton Caldwell · Dalton + Michael · 12 min
Watch on YouTube →Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the shift from the cost of building to the discipline of editing. AI tools now allow for feature-rich products that often require aggressive simplification.
- The fundamental constraint has shifted from building capacity to the courage to exclude features.
- Dalton had to delete 80% of the features in his AI-built MVP to make it comprehensible.
- The GarageBand-ification of software increases the volume of mediocre slop while demand remains at zero.
- A small number of high-quality user conversations is more valuable than automated outreach.
- Internal employees get a higher multiplier from AI tools because they have defined jobs-to-be-done.
- Less features often lead to higher usage because the product is easier to explain.
The Best AI Investor Just Shorted the Entire Market
Leopold Aschenbrenner · Limitless Podcast · 31 min
Watch on YouTube →Leopold Aschenbrenner has pivoted his fund to a $8 billion short position against major chipmakers. The strategy bets that the AI bottleneck has moved from chips to power and infrastructure.
- The fund took a $8 billion short exposure across NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom, and Intel.
- Value is rotating from the overcrowded semiconductor design layer to physical infrastructure and power.
- The fund is doubling down on NeoClouds like CoreWeave and energy providers like Bloom Energy.
- A bi-directional collar strategy is used to manage volatility in overpriced markets.
- Physical world advantages like power grid access are harder to commoditize than chip designs.
- US Bitcoin miners are putting 30 gigawatts of interconnected power capacity online this year.
Let's go Bananas with GenMedia — Guillaume Vernade, Google DeepMind
Guillaume Vernade · AI Engineer · 77 min
Watch on YouTube →Guillaume Vernade demonstrates a generative media workflow using Gemini as a central orchestrator. The session covers new Google APIs for video, music, and image generation.
- Gemini acts as a prompt engineer for specialized models like Imagen, Veo, and Lyria.
- The new Flex API service tier offers a 50% discount for non-urgent tasks.
- Lyria Realtime generates music continuously and responds to prompt changes like a live DJ.
- DeepMind ships new features or models approximately every five days.
- The Interactions API provides stateful context caching to reduce costs and latency.
- 2026 is defined as the year of building actual agents rather than just discussing them.
Full AI Prompting Course with Andrew Ng
Andrew Ng · DeepLearningAI · 148 min
Watch on YouTube →Andrew Ng provides an updated course on agentic workflows and reasoning-based interactions. He emphasizes moving beyond simple queries to treating AI as a thinking partner.
- Modern models like GPT-5.4 can process 750,000 words of context for deep research.
- Progressive Outlining is a framework used to eliminate low-quality AI slop in long-form writing.
- AI power users provide high-quality background documentation to leverage model empathy.
- Data analysis is now handled by AI writing and executing its own code for visualizations.
- Objective Rubrics are essential to combat the AI's tendency toward sycophancy.
- Only 24% of current ChatGPT tasks are focused on writing, showing a shift toward broader utility.
How Founders Can Build for Law Enforcement and First Responders | The a16z Show
Rahul Sidhu · a16z · 11 min
Watch on YouTube →The transformation of public safety through AI and sensor networks. Experts discuss the rise of drone programs and officer wellness technology.
- Drone-as-First-Responder programs provide immediate situational awareness to de-escalate encounters.
- One drone network can provide the 24/7 coverage equivalent to five helicopters.
- Arizona DPS is using body-worn camera analytics and brain scans to monitor officer burnout.
- The GovTech market requires founders to immerse themselves in the beat to understand law enforcement nuances.
- Future policing will shift from physical force requirements toward investigative and technical skills.
- International events like the Olympics require unclassified global data pipelines for intelligence sharing.
Phone Addict? (Start this tonight)
Rob Dial · The Mindset Mentor Podcast · 19 min
Watch on YouTube →Rob Dial analyzes how smartphones hijack attention and provides a framework for reclaiming focus. He argues that attention is now a more valuable currency than money.
- The average adult checks their phone 197 times a day, fragmenting deep focus.
- Boredom is a necessary state for creativity and internal processing that is being smothered.
- Morning phone use within the first 90 seconds injects global panic into the nervous system.
- Screen time of 4+ hours for one-year-olds is linked to significant developmental delays.
- The 30-Minute Morning Rule and Scroll-to-Walk substitution are practical tools for recovery.
- Real connection occurs through co-regulation and eye contact rather than algorithmic feeds.
The Next War Is Already Here — Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law & Noah Smith, Noahpinion
Yaroslav Azhnyuk · Latent Space · 119 min
Watch on YouTube →Yaroslav Azhnyuk and Noah Smith discuss the shift to software-defined warfare. They highlight how FPV drones have become the primary cause of casualties in modern conflict.
- FPV drones now account for 70-80% of frontline casualties in the Ukraine conflict.
- Ukraine produced 4 million drones in 2023 with a target of 7 million for 2024.
- China holds a massive advantage in the cameras-to-explosives pipeline for mass manufacturing.
- Western defense procurement is too slow and prioritizes expensive assets over $400 autonomous drones.
- AI-guided precision is becoming an ethical necessity to reduce collateral damage.
- Kyiv has become Defense Valley, serving as a real-time R&D lab for the future of warfare.
Build Agents That Run for Hours (Without Losing the Plot) — Ash Prabaker & Andrew Wilson, Anthropic
Ash Prabaker · AI Engineer · 75 min
Watch on YouTube →Anthropic's Applied AI team explains how to build reliable, long-running agents. They focus on multi-agent architectures that maintain coherence over 12-hour workstreams.
- Agents have evolved from 20-minute failure-prone sessions to 12-hour autonomous workstreams.
- A multi-agent adversarial architecture with a Planner, Generator, and Critic is required for reliability.
- Sprint contracts require the Generator and Evaluator to agree on success criteria before coding.
- The cost for a high-quality autonomous 6-hour build is approximately $200.
- Models exhibit context anxiety and sycophancy when judging their own output without a harness.
- Design taste can be treated as a gradable rubric covering craft, originality, and functionality.
How to Overcome Social Anxiety | Dr. Nick Epley
Nick Epley · Andrew Huberman · 150 min
Watch on YouTube →Dr. Nick Epley discusses the science of social connection and belief correction. He argues that misplaced pessimism is the primary barrier to human well-being.
- Connecting with strangers consistently yields higher well-being than people anticipate.
- Extraversion and daily happiness share a 0.5 correlation, as strong as the height link between father and son.
- Social connection is a leaky tire that requires regular maintenance through small daily interactions.
- Recruiters rate vocal pitches as significantly more intelligent than text-based applications.
- Social anxiety persists because people avoid testing their fears to learn that others are generally kind.
- The Happiness Walk involves a daily habit of small interactions like smiles and compliments.
References
PeopleJack Bogle · Warren Buffett · Salim Ramji · Alex Hormozi (https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap-yta503) · Jay-Z · Chamath Palihapitiya · Eoin Mulgrew · Matt Clifford · Dalton Caldwell · Michael Seibel · Leopold Aschenbrenner · Guillaume Vernade (https://x.com/Giom_V) · Andrew Ng (https://deeplearning.ai) · Rahul Sidhu · David Ulevitch · Rob Dial · Andrew Huberman · Yaroslav Azhnyuk (https://x.com/YaroslavAzhnyuk) · Noah Smith · Eric Schmidt · Ash Prabaker · Nick Epley · Gia Giang (https://rejectiontherapy.com)
ToolsVanguard VOO · Gemini · Imagen · Veo · Lyria · Claude Code · Playwright · CoreWeave · Bloom Energy · Vertex AI · GPT-5.4
PapersGood Samaritan Study · JAMA Pediatrics study · Attention Is All You Need