MTS @ OpenAI

San Francisco, CA
Joined July 2014
I like regulation. Pausing makes no sense and relies on every nation and militia to never progress on capabilities. Seems dubious.
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Ryan Jiang retweeted
Yes, there are risks. Yes, we must work to address them. But I'll be very disappointed in humanity if what happens to AI is what happened to nuclear energy. Take France, for example. It has historically generated about 70% of its electricity from nuclear, has less than one-third the per capita CO2 emissions of the US, and has had no radiation deaths from a nuclear power accident. The whole world had this potential. We're on the cusp of similar incredible benefits from AI. I hope we can navigate the risks and opportunities better than we did for nuclear energy.
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Ryan Jiang retweeted
human extinction is not easy. none of the "respectable" ai risk factors people normally mention in the RSP / preparedness reports would get even close i think, like nuclear or pandemics. it has to be the grey goo. the parallel family of self-replicators
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Ryan Jiang retweeted
It’s very interesting how the narrative of “AI gonna kill all of us” took off so quickly without anyone explaining exactly how.
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Ryan Jiang retweeted
if you're worried about existential risk from AI and trying to persuade skeptics, don't say "existential risk." say the scenario. like: an AI good enough at cybersecurity to silence monitoring alerts could coordinate bioweapon production across enough sites that nobody notices
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Distributing liability is fundamentally an economies of scale problem, will be around until we have a way to make machines liable.
When will lawyering be like data entry? Will we always want a human in an oversight role?
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Ryan Jiang retweeted
America unilaterally making it harder to build AI infrastructure will simply hand the advantage to China, whose authoritarian leaders can put data centres wherever they choose economist.com/leaders/2026/0…
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The highly promising results from El Salvador’s first PISA for Schools assessment show what education reform can achieve when student learning is placed at the center—and change reaches the classroom. What is at stake is more than a score. It is a generation’s future and its prospects in the labor market. These preliminary findings, drawn from a group of schools, point to a path worth pursuing. The World Bank Group is proud to support El Salvador’s efforts to strengthen education and expand opportunities for generations to come. More on the assessment: bit.ly/4x7q1zQ
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Think we have a government spending efficiency problem, not a tax revenue problem. I'm anti-wealth tax. But will always pay my CA + federal taxes. Many sf/nyc "dems" discuss ways to shelter in NH/TX over drinks, then try to convince me of progressive tax policies. 😂
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Ryan Jiang retweeted
Today we’re announcing SPC Fund IV: $575M to help founders find their life’s work. A decade of guiding founders through -1 to 0 brings @SPC to $2B in AUM and, more importantly, a 1200 member community of the world’s most talented technologists. We strongly believe that: → The person comes before the idea. At -1, generational founders are often busy reading, prototyping, discarding, and earning the right to their own conviction. → Ambition is social. The people you surround yourself with in the early days play a big part in inflecting your ambition. → Patience compounds. It is better to work on something you have deep conviction in rather than simply sprint at the first idea. The quiet months we protect at the beginning have produced three funds in the top 10% of their vintages, and companies like @baseten, @GammaApp, @render, @GoodfireAI, @LumaLabsAI, and @profound. We are proud to have worked with all these founders in their -1 phase and beyond. While we defined -1 to 0, we're no longer bound by it. Fund IV allows us to partner with companies well beyond launch. We're doing this now because we've never seen a wider gap between what's possible and what's being attempted. Intelligence is abundant. The cost of trying ideas keeps falling, and problems that seemed insurmountable a few years ago are quickly becoming solvable. To our members, to the founders who trusted us before anyone else did, and to the LPs who had conviction in our own -1 journey: thank you. This milestone belongs to you as much as to us. To the builders looking to find your life’s work: let’s get started.
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AI has helped resolve an important question in statistics. In the area of multiple hypothesis testing, the goal of controlling the false discovery rate (FDR) has been introduced in a seminal paper by Benjamini and Hochberg (1995). They also introduced a method (the Benjamini-Hochberg or BH method) and proved it controls the FDR. This method has been widely adopted in modern high-throughput science, including in genomics, astronomy, economics, etc. The paper has has garnered more than 130,000 citations to date. However Benjamini and Hochberg showed FDR control only when the data for the individual tests are *independent*. In practice, these data are often dependent; a good example is data on genetic variants due to linkage disequilibrium. Later work has focused on extending the validity of the BH procedure, e.g., to a form of positive dependence by Benjamini and Yekutieli (2001). The question of when the BH procedure controls the FDR has remained open. Over the last twenty years, many authors, including Reiner-Benaim (2007), Kim and van de Wiel (2008), Benjamini (2010), Sarkar (2023), Sarkar and Zhang (2025), have conjectured that the BH procedure controls the FDR for two-sided tests using any correlated Gaussian data. These authors have presented both theoretical and empirical evidence supporting, but not directly showing, the conjecture. With the help of AI (specifically GPT-5.6 Sol Pro), I have settled the question in the negative: The Benjamini-Hochberg procedure does *not* generally control the false discovery rate at the desired level for correlated two-sided Gaussian tests. This was done by exhibiting a Gaussian factor model for which, at a nominal level alpha=0.01, the false discovery rate is proved to be FDR>0.0104. There is a lot of interesting commentary to be made: 1. This result should be of interest to everybody in the field of statistics. Emmanuel Candes of Stanford University once called the false discovery rate and the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure "one of the two most important developments in statistics after 1950" (the other being James-Stein shrinkage). The present conjecture is probably the most central question about FDR/BH that was unresolved to date. 2. GPT-5.6 one-shot the problem after 90 minutes of reasoning, whereas with 5.5 I was not able to solve it even after iterating with multiple parallel agents for perhaps 20 hours. So the capability improvement is quite real. Exciting times to live in! 3. The argument is not especially surprising, but it does combine an asymptotic approach (standard for FDR analysis, see e.g., Genovese and Wasserman, Efron, etc) with a numerical certificate in a way that would be pretty non-standard in the field. Once we have the specific example, then straightforward simulations also support that the false discovery rate is indeed higher than the nominal value (see attached fig). 4. The current degree of violation over the nominal level is relatively small (0.104 vs 0.1). So the importance of this result is mainly conceptual. The practical implications remain to be determined. Overall, an exciting development! Preprint is available here (faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp…) and will be on arxiv tonight; supporting code is here (github.com/dobriban/BH).
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claude code is fucking insane i know literally NOTHING about coding. ZERO. and i just built a fully functioning web app in minutes http://localhost:3000/ check it out
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Ryan Jiang retweeted
Every @Sequoia founder journey begins differently: - @matanSF of @FactoryAI cold emailed us - We cold emailed @oegerikus of @Xbow - @DevinBhushan of @SquintAI is someone we had known for a decade - @_anish_agarwal of @traversal_ai got on our radar via his Arc application Arc is our bi-annual call for outlier pre-seed and seed stage founders to share their company story with us. The open call closes on August 17th. We’d love to hear from you! sequoiacap.com/arc
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We’re excited to announce Sunflower Capital Funds I and II. Sunflower is a $250m fund that partners at the earliest stage with companies building foundations for modern enterprises, critical industries, and the physical world.
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Worked incredibly closely with @jamiecuffe over the years and can't speak highly enough about his passion and ability to ship. 🍾
Excited to share a big update — I’ve started a new company! 🚀 It’s been an incredible 4 years at @retool — 7 new products from Workflows to Retool AI, 100s of Retools, and 1,000,000s of apps. Thank you to @dvdhsu for taking the chance on acquiring our startup all those years ago and even more so for the opportunity to be part of Retool’s mission. Much more to come on the new company — we’re already processing 1000s of mission-critical operations across our first partners and have a lot to build to meet demand. Now we’re growing the early engineering team. If you’re excited to win in a $300B vertical primed for AI transformation, reach out. Referrals appreciated 🙏
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so I had to look at that ugly banner for weeks and the end result is flex-direction: row justify-content: space-between 💀
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Tried Waymo last night and someone walked up to the car at a red light on Van Ness and started smashing the window with a rock. Glass everywhere.
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I keep hearing how hosting Next.js yourself as a nodejs application is a huge pain, and I have no idea where this is coming from. What's difficult? Containerizing it? Creating a deploy pipeline? If you said yes to either, then you likely have trouble hosting *any* app yourself.
I get asked about this a lot (especially since the launch of Epic Web), so I've written it down. Here's why I won't use Next.js: epicweb.dev/why-i-wont-use-n…
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One of the best reads in my life was this article from NYT in 2018. As a teenager, grappling with climate change threw me into depression. This article singlehandedly changed my life trajectory and worldview. nytimes.com/interactive/2018…
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This isn't a hiring thread (I'm getting a haircut and started writing), just a collection of thoughts. There are so many awesome companies working in this space (and happy to intro to other founders I've met).
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Finally, a zero-sum mindset shouldn't apply to emerging markets in climate. The pie will not be big enough for anyone if we don't all try to fix it. Wasting time and energy fighting over a shrinking slice is pointless.
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