CTO @ Farmers Business Network (FBN) - Building the Amazon for Agriculture, powered by geospatial data and AI.
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Joined December 2011
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Kit Barron retweeted
When researchers analyzed how Pegasus spyware infected iPhones without the user tapping anything, they found something wild. The attackers sent an iMessage with a fake GIF that targeted Apple's image decompression engine. The decompression math was so flexible that the exploit chained arithmetic operations together to construct a literal, functioning software CPU using over 70,000 segment commands that defined logical bit operations (AND, OR, XOR, XNOR, etc.) entirely inside the image parser. This created a small computer architecture with registers, a full 64-bit adder, and a comparator, running raw code before the phone even buzzed with a notification
Kit Barron retweeted
I've always had substantially longer timelines than my friends at Anthropic ā I've been concerned that they're in an echo chamber and believing the hype about their own models too much, and that they're underestimating bottlenecks and unknown unknowns. And there have definitely been specific occasions when they have overstated how much uplift they were getting from their models. Nonetheless, if METR is correct here (and I think they are among the most trustworthy sources on this topic), then my Anthropic friends have been much more right about timelines than me.
This report is also some evidence that a software-only singularity is plausible. I now think that we are more than 50% likely to have full blown superintelligence in the next 18 months, absent a slowdown. I need to call my family.
Kit Barron retweeted
Anthropic found vaults in bacteriophages, bacteria and archaea. This has to make vaults a foundational feature of life, on par with ribosomes. There arenāt many things that are shared so deeply. We still have no idea what vaults do. Preprint has cryoEM, site directed mutagenesis. Will probably be a Nature paper. Full dive into wet biology, buckle down guys.
Kit Barron retweeted
We at AIFP are spooked by this information. IF (big IF) Anthropic really is imminently about to meet the RSP threshold of 2x acceleration over baseline, then it seems timelines to full RSI and superintelligence may be very short indeed. For example if we naively optimize the AIFM parameters to achieve 2x acceleration over baseline progress in Jan 2027, we get superintelligence sooner than depicted in AI 2027. We are thinking harder and longer about this now and will hopefully have a lengthier update on our thinking to share in the next week.
Anthropic updated its S1 this morning. Notable additions re automated AI R&D and human oversight of it:
"[...] our internal estimates and our expectations regarding future models, rather than our current models, indicate that we may imminently meet our Responsible Scaling Policyās definition of 'dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI.' We have not designated any of our current models as exceeding this threshold, and we continue to assess the underlying data. We are also evaluating the implications of meeting the AI research and development capability threshold and will release further reports in the future as we set forth in our Responsible Scaling Policy."
"We are also considering additional measures, including updates to our Responsible Scaling Policy, to require human review and approval of certain decisions in our research and development processes as our models perform an increasing share of that work."
"We believe our investments in safety techniques will enable us to manage these risks and responsibly realize substantially more leverage from Claude than we do today in developing AI models. However, we do not anticipate being able to safely use Claude to fully autonomously design and build successive generations of frontier models without meaningful human supervision or understanding, if and when that becomes technically possible. Accordingly, we are considering updates to our Responsible Scaling Policy to keep humans in control of frontier model development at Anthropic."
sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/ā¦
Kit Barron retweeted
It's still such an adorable moment when the agent casually clicks the "I am not a robot" checkbox
Kit Barron retweeted
i've spent an unhealthy amount of time on agentic video editing, here's everything i learned:
video editing is 100% solved. we're pushing out hundreds of videos a day with agents and have replaced almost all of our editors
drop every limiting belief you have about agentic editing, any style of creative is possible
here are the best models for video editing right now:
1. GPT 6 Astra (best taste by far, but also the most expensive)
2. Opus 5.5
3. Gemini 4 Argon
the best all around model is Opus 5.5
and don't waste your time on editing app MCPs like CapCut or DaVinci Resolve. they're slow and burn a ton of tokens compared to a custom workflow built for your specific use case
all editing is moving to the terminal + organized file systems
the most valuable (and most time consuming) part is having your best editors train your harness so it learns from its mistakes and can one-shot creatives
your best editor becomes 100x more leveraged once you teach them how to use Opus 5.5 in their workflow and build skills around their process
in 6 months most teams will be 1 creative engineer managing everything with agents
what a time to be alive..
A few thoughts on agentic video editing Iāve had over the last few days:
1. 99% of ads should be edited agentically now. If your editors are still editing in the timeline, theyāre falling behind. I got a message from my senior VE saying that heās putting out 5x edits/day now at the same quality he was before.
2. The conversation with video editors will be uncomfortable because the timeline is all theyāve ever known. Some will be hesitant and some will be fearful for their job. I think the best way to address this is head on. The tech is inevitable, but having taste is still going to be incredibly valuable to train and give feedback to agents. Those who have this will become more valuable, those who donāt will struggle.
3. Opus 5.5 can natively edit all of your ads without needing any MCPs or plugins. Iāve tried the alternatives and couldnāt find anything that was significantly better than doing everything inside of Claude.
4. Have your senior editor(s) build skills for each style of edit (e.g. mashups, UGC, AI animationsā¦). You can build these by feeding 4-5 inspo edits to Claude and tell it to make a skill out of it. I prefer building lots of mini-skills to one big video editing skill, so that the context stays as relevant as possible.
5. Once you have a base skill (e.g. ugly ads edits), the best way to train it is through feedback loops. Have the skill re-edit the last 25 ads each senior edited then put them in an artifact, and have the senior VE give feedback on each. Keep doing this until the skill is refined and it understands what a good edit is.
6. If you do this, thereās no reason why you shouldnāt be able to make edits that need little/no feedback. Most of ours are approved after v1 or v2, sometimes v3.
7. Only A-player editors should be training the skills.
8. Re adoption in the team, the AI champion builds the v1. Then get out of the way. Iām not the best editor on my team, so my job is to build the harness that lets the best editors train the skills, not build the skills myself.
9. If you want to supercharge this process, have your top editors record their screen as they edit. Turn on Gmeet or loom and get them to narrate the reasoning behind their process. E.g. why they chose this cut, pacing or b-roll clipā¦this is all context that gets fed into your skills.
10. It takes time to build, train and refine these skills. You have to go through the dip to get out the other side. Budget time in for senior VEs to work on this - otherwise youāll end up with skills that put out subpar edits and donāt save you much/any time.
11. Operate under the assumption that this is the worst video editing is ever going to be. Opus 5.5 can do most of our editing todayā¦what will Opus 6/Fable 6 be able to do? The editing skills you build are only going to become more valuable as the tech evolves.
I still donāt think people realise how big video editing being unblocked is. Things that I thought were 3-6 months away are now on the table.
Will continue to share more as I learn. CRAZY, crazy times.
Kit Barron retweeted
my samsungs TV power led might not be entirely accurate.
code exists to artificially change the state of your TVs power LED.
interestingly, the samsung voice-client which handles recording far-field voice audio contains a debug pointer to this.
the voice service is an odd place to set a power LED state. i wonder why.
Kit Barron retweeted
More private keys by the Indian certificate authority have been discovered. These are all small numbers.
People are suspecting that they interpreted 384 bit keys to mean that they should pick numbers from 1-384 to use as their private keys.
Kit Barron retweeted
people are starting to realize.
there *are* no moats left. the only true moat in existence was intelligence, and now that's out of the equation.
