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Generalist Intelligence: The Off Switch

2026-06-19 21:43:06

Friends,

Welcome to another edition of Generalist Intelligence, the weekly intelligence briefing designed to deliver situational awareness and help you see around corners. All in 30 minutes or less.

To learn more about our process and vision for Generalist Intelligence, read our introductory piece. To unlock the full briefing, join as a member.

This is a new initiative, so we’d love to hear what you think. Reply anytime to tell us what's working and what you'd like us to cover more deeply. Our goal is for this to become the highest signal-to-noise newsletter you receive each week, and one worth setting aside the time for.

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Dario has been having one of those weeks. Just days after releasing Fable — a supposedly guard-railed version of its “too powerful to be safely released” Mythos model — Anthropic got a call from the US government. Amazon had found a way to bypass some of the safety features. The fear was that bad actors (read: China) would find the same exploit and use the power for nefarious purposes. Anthropic was apparently given 90 minutes (last thing on a Friday afternoon) to comply with export controls that denied access to foreigners, even if they worked for Anthropic. The only practical option was to deny everyone, Americans included.

Whatever you think of the relevant parties (some at Generalist Towers describe themselves, unashamedly, as “Anthropic-pilled”), this sucks for the Claude-maker, is bad for America, and is revealing about the future.

What if it’s actually a good thing?

Nice try. There are people arguing that getting knocked around by Donald Trump (again) might be “good for business,” pointing to an uptick in Claude receipts after the president previously declared Anthropic a “supply-chain risk.” Others, rather gamely, suggest that being officially branded “too powerful” creates an aura that attracts customers. Both are wrong. Anthropic already declared Mythos too powerful, then spent two months building guardrails that have, one way or another, landed it in this mess. Either the guardrails aren’t good enough, which is embarrassing, or the US government (and, for some reason, Anthropic’s closely intertwined partner Amazon) has decided to try and slow them down. Both are major red flags to anyone thinking of buying from Anthropic.

I thought Anthropic wanted AI to be regulated?

Yes, there’s an irony in Dario, having made so much noise about the dangers of the AI he’s building and the need for government to constrain his almighty power, looking quite so hurt when they take him at his word. But what Anthropic actually wants is something like the Federal Aviation Administration: an arms-length regulator that keeps passengers safe without dragooning business. Not whatever this is.

What does it mean for America?

Seems bad, basically. It’s great having world-beating AI firms, but you do rather rely on the rest of the world buying their stuff to get the full benefit. The next few years look crucial in the development of AI, and for those next few years, Trump will be president. That means Anthropic, and in theory, every US model-maker, lives or dies by Caesar’s thumb. If you’re an international company buying AI tools, that’s a lot of risk.

Where else are they going to go?

Read more

Introducing Generalist Intelligence

2026-06-13 00:14:13

Friends,

For several years, I’ve wanted to launch a weekly intelligence briefing. While there are exceptional private intelligence groups covering the financial markets and geopolitics, and many great tech publications, I nevertheless found myself wanting something a little different from what I was able to find.

Something that delivered an elegant, insightful analysis of the hidden shifts and fresh opportunities bubbling up in our industry. Something high-signal, low-fluff, and with, perhaps, a dash of wit. Something that provides a little greater situational awareness in thirty minutes or less.

But doing it right would require taste and craft, as well as real time. For an intelligence product to succeed, it must find fresh angles on known stories and the non-obvious ones just bubbling beneath the surface. That takes scrounging and scouring.

Earlier this year, we were able to unlock both. Most important was convincing one of my favorite writers, an old hand at this kind of work, to jump aboard and lead the charge. By leveraging frontier models, we’ve been able to build an extensive signal-gathering apparatus that would not have been possible to conduct without a very large team, spanning news, industry outlets, social media, academic research, government and regulatory filings, code repositories, model-adoption aggregators, fundraising data, prediction markets, website monitoring, open-source intelligence sources, and talent flows. We also monitor a select group we refer to as “super signalers” across various verticals, selected by us, who we believe are frequently ahead of the curve. Not all of these approaches are bearing fruit yet, but we expect them to improve as we build and fine-tune. Already, we’ve seen the benefits of a process that searches so expansively. Not only does it surface tidbits a human might have missed, but it spots echoes or juxtapositions that are revealed only with capacious context.

However, the story selection and writing are done by us, the humans. The system hunts ceaselessly, bringing up a furious exhaust of data, noise, and signal, all in one. It is up to the human to think, judge, analyze, and write.

Generalist Intelligence is the result of this marriage, a weekly intelligence briefing designed for tech’s most discerning professionals. It will arrive Friday mornings. Our hope is that it opens you up to perspectives you hadn’t considered and offers a look at fresh pockets of the future you might have missed. I’ve been reading internal versions of this as we tuned the format over the past couple of months, and have found myself looking forward to it every week.

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We’re in the very early stages of getting this right, and there’s a long way to go. We’d love to know what you think, especially what you’d like to see more of, as it comes up. Our goal is for this to become the highest signal-to-noise newsletter you receive each week, and one worth setting aside the time for.

Now, onto the briefing.

— Mario

With SpaceX blasting into the public markets and Anthropic and OpenAI straightening their ties to follow suit, the bajillion-dollar question is, obviously: are they worth it? Anyone claiming to know the answer very likely has a bridge to sell you. Nevertheless, we can’t stop thinking about it.

SpaceX feels like a special case. Public markets are being asked to price in total interstellar domination at IPO, with a good trillion of the $1.77 trillion price tag – at which the loss-making company would trade at over 90x last year’s revenue – based on a series of highly speculative goals including repeat business on Mars, data centers in orbit, and making a key contribution to the development of AI. On the other hand, it’s Elon. So, you know.

What’s really got our chins wagging at Generalist Towers this week is a more existential question. Anthropic and OpenAI haven’t filed public prospectuses, but they look likely to be priced as though they are in, effectively, a two-horse race for control of the future (ok, maybe Google too). Some of us think that’s right – that it’s only a matter of time before one of the model labs cracks recursive self-improvement, and then it’s a short hop to AGI and either Sam or Dario as World King.

But a couple of things have landed in the past week that have got us thinking seriously about the other side. So we thought it would be fun to take the contrarian stance, and make the bear case for AI.

AI, huh, what is it good for?

LLMs are incredibly good at coding. At the end of last week, Anthropic dropped an essay titled When AI builds itself, in which the Claude-maker claimed that more than 80% of the code it merges into its codebase was written by Claude, and that its engineers were shipping “8x as much code per quarter” compared to their relatively flat productivity between 2021 and 2025. (When I asked Claude about this, it raised an eyebrow at the figures, pointing out they were “self-reported by a company currently raising money on exactly this story.”) And to be fair, rather gallantly, the good folks at Anthropic point out that the 8x figure is likely an overstatement as it measures “quantity over quality.” But the direction is clear: Claude is incredible at writing code. Presumably, this is translating into giant gains for all?

Well, no.

A new study of more than 100,000 GitHub developers found that Claude Code allowed coders to create or edit almost 300% more files. But that uplift was halved to 150% by the time they got to submitting pieces of work for review, and that in turn shrunk a further 5x by the time it got to shipping. In other words, coders using the latest agentic AI tools released just 30% more software, compared to those raw-dogging it. The researchers attribute that remaining 30% to what they call “strong complementarities” between the agents and the coders, meaning the agent very much needs the coder. They also noted that while there was a marked uptick in new apps being made this way, there was “no increase” in overall demand. This doesn’t mean agents are bad at code, but it does mean they might not be nearly as good as you thought at the thing they’re best at.

So what happens to the model makers?

Read more

Saplings: The Childhoods of Exceptional Entrepreneurs

2026-06-04 23:23:05

“I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.” — Kurt Vonnegut.

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What America Is Missing Between Sanctions and Nuclear War (Bryon Hargis, Co-Founder & CEO of Castelion)

2026-06-02 20:04:31

“Warfare is always just adapting to whatever the other side is doing. And the person that wins is whoever adapts faster. And at this point in time, American aerospace is uniquely poorly suited to do that.” —Bryon Hargis, Co-Founder & CEO of Castelion

Listen or watch now on
YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts

Bryon Hargis is the co-founder and CEO of Castelion, a defense startup building low-cost hypersonic missiles designed to be manufactured at scale. Before founding Castelion, Bryon spent more than a decade at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and nearly six years at SpaceX, where he worked on national security space programs and saw firsthand how iterative engineering and manufacturing speed could reshape aerospace. Castelion’s first missile, Blackbeard, is slated for integration on the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornet in roughly a year.

In our conversation, we explore:

  • Why Bryon believes building missiles is paradoxically essential to maintaining peace

  • The game theory behind warfare and why tit-for-tat strategies require credible middle-ground responses

  • How China’s 2021 hypersonic test revealed not just a capability gap but a manufacturing and cost advantage

  • Why traditional aerospace processes—optimized for low risk and high cost—can’t compete with rapid iteration

  • What Bryon learned in his first week at SpaceX (after 12 years in traditional aerospace)

  • Why building a carrier-based, air-launched hypersonic missile as a first product was the hard but right choice

  • How focusing on manufacturability and cost over maximum capability can produce more effective deterrence

  • Why the person who adapts faster in warfare always wins, and how that shapes Castelion’s philosophy

Thank you to the partners who make this possible

.tech domains: An identity for builders at their core.

Ahrefs Brand Radar: Find your brand in AI results.

Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case.

Explore the episode

Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(04:01) Why America needs hypersonic missiles

(07:13) China’s edge in hypersonics

(12:05) The missing middle ground in deterrence

(18:05) Preventing warhead ambiguity

(19:40) How hypersonics differ from ballistic missiles

(25:05) The economics of defensive vs. offensive systems

(28:21) How SpaceX differs from traditional aerospace

(37:40) Why Bryon chose to build in defense over space

(42:42) Key factors that drove Castelion’s success

(48:28) Designing Blackbeard, Castelion’s first hypersonic missile

(1:01:06) The importance of lower costs and quicker manufacturing

(1:10:04) Book recommendations

Follow Bryon Hargis

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hargsb

X: https://x.com/hargsb

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People

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Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

“Our Goal Is to Build an Electrical Engineer.” (Davide Asnaghi, Co-Founder & CEO of Diode)

2026-05-19 20:01:48

"China can do it because the labor is cheap. That's not true anymore. They are incredible at automating things and automating them in a way that makes them cost competitive." —Davide Asnaghi

Listen or watch now on
YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts

Davide Asnaghi is the co-founder and CEO of Diode, a Brooklyn-based startup using AI to design and manufacture circuit boards in the United States.

Before Diode, Davide worked on Apple’s Special Projects Group and spent time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen studying Asia’s electronics manufacturing ecosystem. That experience convinced him that PCB design, despite powering everything from smartphones and satellites to medical devices and autonomous systems, remained one of the most overlooked layers of the tech stack.

Since its founding just two years ago, Diode has landed Physical Intelligence and Saronic as customers and partnered with Anthropic to help Claude become a better electrical engineer. The company’s ultimate ambition: to make hardware as nimble as software.

In our conversation, we explore:

  1. Why the West outsourced PCB manufacturing to Asia in the 2000s and why bringing it back matters for American competitiveness

  2. What Shenzhen’s manufacturing culture does better than Silicon Valley (and what the U.S. can learn from it)

  3. How Diode’s models can one-shot much of schematic design and compress hardware timelines from months to weeks

  4. The three-week YC pivot that transformed Diode from a design validation tool into a full-stack manufacturer

  5. Why circuit boards are the “forgotten middle child” between silicon and software

  6. How Diode partners with Anthropic to make LLMs better electrical engineers

  7. What it takes to build a hardware company in 2025—and why the talent bar must stay incredibly high

  8. How Italian, American, and Chinese cultures shaped Davide’s approach to entrepreneurship and manufacturing

Thank you to the partners who make this possible

.tech domains: An identity for builders at their core.

Guru: The AI source of truth for work.

Brex: The intelligent finance platform.

Explore the episode

Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(04:15) Why Davide calls himself a copper merchant

(05:53) Diode’s mission to rebuild PCB manufacturing in the U.S.

(07:58) What success looks like

(09:00) Growing up in northern Italy and spending a year in Minnesota

(13:14) Why Italy produces fewer venture-backed founders

(15:30) Why Hong Kong accelerated Davide’s learning

(19:09) Silicon Valley vs. Shenzhen

(22:05) What Davide learned in Apple’s Special Projects Team

(24:11) Why Davide left Apple after two years

(26:54) Meeting his co-founder, Lenny

(29:32) How Davide uncovered the need for better PCB design and manufacturing

(33:23) PCB manufacturing in Asia, and Diode’s approach

(41:29) The YC pivot that changed Diode’s business

(44:39) Inside Diode’s customer journey

(48:10) Where the value is in electronics manufacturing, and Davide’s AGI thesis

(51:30) What separates a working board from a great one

(55:32) Where Diode fits in the electronics stack

(59:55) Diode’s early near-death moment and long-term vision

(1:02:30) Diode’s exceptionally high bar for hiring

(1:04:48) Where Davide gets his best ideas

(1:07:00) Final meditations

Follow Davide Asnaghi

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/d-asnaghi

X: https://x.com/davideasnaghi

GitHub: https://hexdae.github.io

Resources and episode mentions

Books

People

Other resources

Subscribe to the show

I’d love it if you’d subscribe and share the show. Your support makes all the difference as we try to bring more curious minds into the conversation.

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Apple

Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Investing Like A Mystic: How Cyan Banister Finds Outliers (Co-Founder of Long Journey Ventures)

2026-05-05 20:03:43

“AI is going to be the age of the polymath. If you have the ability to think about different systems and how they might work together, you’re going to be able to come up with outcomes that were previously impossible because those disciplines didn’t work well together.” — Cyan Banister, Co-Founder of Long Journey Ventures

Listen or watch now on
YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts

Cyan Banister has built one of the most distinctive early-stage track records of the last fifteen years, with early bets on companies like Uber, SpaceX, DeepMind, Niantic, and Postmates. Today, she is co-founder and general partner at Long Journey Ventures, where she backs what she calls “magical weirdos.” Banister describes herself as a professional daydreamer, running constant thought experiments and paying close attention to signals others ignore. In this episode, she explains how that mindset translates into investing, and why many of her best opportunities have come from observation, curiosity, and a willingness to look in unlikely places.

In our conversation, we explore:

  • Cyan’s philosophy of treating life as a series of experiments

  • The strange, profound experiences that led her to question and ultimately move beyond her atheism

  • How scanning Wi-Fi networks in a Four Seasons café led her to Flock Safety, last valued at $8.4 billion

  • Long Journey Ventures’ “Biz, Tizz, and Rizz” framework for identifying exceptional founders and why the trifecta is rare

  • How AI will enable the age of the polymath

  • Why she believes brain-computer interfaces are closer than most people think

  • Why she says Pokémon Go was “the closest we ever came to world peace”

  • Why she lives part-time in a retirement community and her vision for a more connected future

Thank you to the partners who make this possible

.tech domains: An identity for builders at their core.

Brex: The intelligent finance platform.

Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case.

Explore the episode

Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(03:51) Never playing the game you appear to be playing

(07:18) Practicing childlike wonder as a daily discipline

(10:08) Questioning belief after her stroke

(13:30) Cyan’s metaphysical experiments

(23:24) Non-local consciousness and creativity

(27:22) Investing with extreme openness to signals

(29:05) The importance of timing in investing

(32:26) Meeting Travis Kalanick

(34:19) Finding Flock Safety through a chance encounter

(38:23) The summer of Pokémon Go (what worked and what didn’t)

(39:55) Human nature and what makes something “stick”

(42:15) Brain-computer interfaces and AI’s accelerating effect

(52:53) “Biz, Tiz, Riz:” her framework for evaluating founders

(59:20) Why Cyan lives in a retirement community part-time

(1:03:50) A unique way of finding books that speak to you

(1:08:44) Final meditations

Follow Cyan Banister:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cyanb

X: https://x.com/cyantist

Newsletter: https://uglyduckling.substack.com

Website: https://cyanbanister.com

Resources and episode mentions

Books

People

Other resources

Subscribe to the show

I’d love it if you’d subscribe and share the show. Your support makes all the difference as we try to bring more curious minds into the conversation.

YouTube

Spotify

Apple

Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].