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The Computomatix Times

All the posts fit to save — curated from @computomatix's bookmarks & likes on X

Edition of Monday, April 6, 2026

4 stories

AI9/10

New Yorker Investigation Details Board Concerns Over Sam Altman

New Yorker Investigation Details Board Concerns Over Sam Altman▶

A thread summarizes a New Yorker investigation into Sam Altman based on interviews, memos compiled by Ilya Sutskever and private notes from Dario Amodei. It describes alleged patterns of dishonesty that preceded Altman's firing and reinstatement at OpenAI.

Original post · 3 min read
The New Yorker just dropped a massive investigation into Sam Altman, based on over 100 interviews, the previously undisclosed "Ilya Memos," and Dario Amodei's 200+ pages of private notes. It's the most detailed account yet of the pattern of behavior that led to Sam's firing and rapid reinstatement at OpenAI. Here's the breakdown:

> Ilya compiled ~70 pages of Slack messages, HR documents, and photos taken on personal phones to avoid detection on company devices. He sent them to board members as disappearing messages. The first memo begins with a list headed "Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of . . ." The first item is "Lying."

> Dario kept detailed private notes for years under the heading "My Experience with OpenAI" (subheading: "Private: Do Not Share"), totaling 200+ pages. His conclusion: "The problem with OpenAI is Sam himself."

> Sam reportedly told Mira his allies were "going all out" and "finding bad things" to damage her reputation after the firing. Thrive put its planned $86B investment on hold and implied it would only close if Sam returned, giving employees financial incentive to back him.

> Sam texted Satya Nadella directly to propose the new board composition: "bret, larry summers, adam as the board and me as ceo and then bret handles the investigation." The two new members selected to oversee an independent inquiry into Sam were chosen after close conversations with Sam himself.

> Before OpenAI, senior employees at Loopt asked the board to fire Sam as CEO on two separate occasions over concerns about leadership and transparency. At Y Combinator, partners complained to Paul Graham about Sam's behavior, and Graham privately told colleagues "Sam had been lying to us all the time."

> OpenAI's superalignment team was promised 20% of the company's compute. Four people who worked on or with the team said actual resources were 1-2%, mostly on the oldest cluster with the worst chips. The team was dissolved without completing its mission.

> Sam told the board that safety features in GPT-4 had been approved by a safety panel. Helen Toner requested documentation and found the most controversial features had not been approved. Sam also never mentioned to the board that Microsoft released an early ChatGPT version in India without completing a required safety review.

> Sam made a secret pact with Greg and Ilya where he agreed to resign if they both deemed it necessary, essentially appointing his own shadow board. The actual board was alarmed when they learned about it.

> Sam struck a deal with Greg to become CEO while simultaneously telling researchers that Greg's authority would be diminished, and telling Greg something different.

> A board member described Sam as having "two traits almost never seen in the same person: a strong desire to please people in any given interaction, and almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences of deceiving someone." Multiple sources independently used the word "sociopathic."

> OpenAI is reportedly preparing for an IPO at a potential $1 trillion valuation while securing government contracts spanning immigration enforcement, domestic surveillance, and autonomous weaponry in war zones.
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AI8/10

Anthropic Growth Head Says Claude Now Automates Growth Experiments

Lenny Rachitsky summarizes an interview with Anthropic Head of Growth Amol Avasare, covering how Claude handles growth work, the shrinking PM-to-engineer ratio, and the continued need for PMs to align stakeholders. Anthropic's ARR reportedly grew from $1B to $19B in a year.

Original post · 4 min read
My biggest takeaways from @AnthropicAI's Head of Growth Amol Avasare:

1. Engineering is getting the most AI leverage—and it’s squeezing PMs and designers. With Claude Code, a five-engineer team now produces the output of 15 to 20 engineers. But PM and design productivity haven’t scaled proportionally. The result is a compressed ratio where one PM is effectively managing the output of a much larger engineering team. Anthropic's growth team is responding in two ways: hiring even more PMs (!), and formally deputizing product-minded engineers to act as mini-PMs for any project with less than two weeks of engineering time.

2. Anthropic is using Claude to automate its own growth. The internal initiative is called CASH (Claude Accelerates Sustainable Hypergrowth). It works across four stages: identifying opportunities, building features, testing quality, and analyzing results. Right now it handles copy changes and minor UI tweaks. The win rate is comparable to a junior PM with two to three years of experience, and improving rapidly.

3. The one part of PM work that AI can’t automate yet: getting six people in a room to agree. Amol and his head of design joke that even with AGI, it’ll still be impossible to align six stakeholders. Cross-functional coordination—managing opinions, navigating politics, mediating tradeoffs—remains the bottleneck that AI doesn’t touch for larger projects. This is why Amol believes PM roles aren’t going away, and may actually grow.

4. 60-80% of Anthropic’s growth team's projects have no PRD. For smaller work, kickoffs happen on Slack—messages back and forth with product-minded engineers who can push back and ask the right questions. For larger projects, Amol believes in a proper 30-minute cross-functional kickoff (legal, safeguards, stakeholders) to surface concerns early.

5. Adding friction to onboarding drives growth—if the friction helps users understand why the product is for them. His work Mercury, MasterClass, Calm, and now Anthropic, adding steps to onboarding flows consistently improved conversion. The key: cut annoying friction that doesn’t add value, but add friction that helps users understand why the product is for them.

6. AI companies need to focus on bigger bets, not better A/B tests. Amol’s argument: if your core product value is driven by AI, then the future value is orders of magnitude higher than today’s value, because model capabilities grow exponentially. In that world, micro-optimizations capture a shrinking share of a growing pie. Traditional growth teams do 60% to 70% small optimizations and 20% to 30% big swings. At Anthropic, they flip this ratio.

7. Amol built a weekly AI agent that scans Slack for cross-functional misalignment. Using Cowork with the Slack MCP, he has a scheduled task that looks across his projects and conversations and surfaces areas where teams are about to do overlapping work or pull in different directions. A colleague on the enterprise team already caught major misalignment that would have caused weeks of wasted effort.

8. A traumatic brain injury taught Amol the principle that now drives his work: freedom through constraints. In early 2022, a kick to the head during a Muay Thai sparring session caused a traumatic brain injury. Amol spent nine months off work and months relearning to walk, unable to look at screens or listen to music for more than 20 seconds. He was re-injured a month after joining Mercury and had to take two more months off. He’s still not fully healed. But the constraints—no alcohol, no caffeine, mandatory breaks, daily meditation—have become the habits that let him operate at the intensity Anthropic demands. “The true freedom in life is learning how to be content when you don’t get what you want.”
Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan
Anthropic is on an unprecedented growth run.

Just in the past year they grew from $1B to $19B ARR. They added $6B in ARR just in *February*. Companies like Palantir and Atlassian took 15-20 years to reach ~$5B ARR. Anthropic is adding that every month.

Amol Avasare is head of growth at Anthropic, and one of the most impressive people I've had on the podcast.

In his first ever public interview, Amol shares:
🔸 How Anthropic is automating growth experiments with Claude (their internal tool called “CASH”)
🔸 Why activation is the single highest-leverage growth problem in AI
🔸 Why Amol is hiri…
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AI7/10

NVIDIA Releases PersonaPlex 7B, an Open Full-Duplex Voice Model

NVIDIA Releases PersonaPlex 7B, an Open Full-Duplex Voice Model▶

Linus Ekenstam highlights NVIDIA's PersonaPlex 7B, an open-source real-time speech model that listens and speaks simultaneously and can interrupt mid-sentence. He claims it beats Gemini Live on dialog naturalness and runs locally without API costs.

Original post · 1 min read
NVIDIA just killed the awkward pause in voice AI 😱

PersonaPlex 7B is a real-time conversational model that listens AND speaks simultaneously. Like actually interrupts you mid-sentence like a human.

Beat Gemini Live on dialog naturalness. 18x faster interruptions.

100% open source. Run it locally. No API bill. No latency.
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VC Ryan Sarver Details Building an AI Chief of Staff on OpenClaw

How I built a chief of staff on OpenClaw that's better than any human I've hired

Venture investor Ryan Sarver writes up how he built an AI chief of staff on OpenClaw with a markdown-based memory layer and a continuous improvement loop. He offers to open source the system if there is enough interest.

Original post · 12 min read
X ArticleHow I built a chief of staff on OpenClaw that's better than any human I've hired
I'm a VC in the middle of a fundraise, sitting on boards, helping portfolio companies, and angel investing on the side. I've worked with great human EAs and chiefs of staff over the years, so I know what high-leverage support actually looks like. When the first AI APIs came out, I tried to build an AI version of that as a product and couldn't make it work.
When OpenClaw launched I went deep immediately and haven't stopped. I have helped a number of friends set it up and each of them have asked what I have done to configure it and super power it. @ryancarson's post (link in the comments) about how he built his OpenClaw assistant was also great to see, and the response to it convinced me to finally write up what I've been building.
What I have now is more capable than any human chief of staff I've ever worked with. It never forgets a commitment, it handles the small stuff without being asked, flags the important stuff without being told, and it gets better every week. Plus it never sleeps and it never tires. There are still some bumps, but less and less each week.
If any of this is interesting, let me know. If there's enough interest I'll package the whole system up and open source it.
What makes a great chief of staff?
Before I walk through what I've built, it's worth thinking about what a great chief of staff actually does. Not the job description, the real leverage. The best ones I've worked with filtered the noise so only the right things reached me, made sure I walked into every meeting prepared and that nothing fell through after, kept the full picture of what was in flight and flagged what was slipping, tracked relationships and knew where things stood with every important person, and created the daily and weekly rhythm that kept everything moving.
Her name is Stella. She handles all of these, and I'll walk through each one below. But the two things that make my setup genuinely different from other OpenClaw builds are the memory layer underneath it all and the continuous improvement loop that makes the system get better every week. I want to start there because they're what make everything else compound.
Memory: the foundation
Session memory is a lie. Any assistant that treats conversation history as its working context will fail you at the most frustrating moments.
I built two layers. The first is daily notes: one markdown file per day (memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md) serving as a raw log of everything that happened. Meetings attended, decisions made, tasks added and completed, context that came up in conversation. A script called pulls from my sessions throughout the day and writes these automatically.
The second is long-term memory in MEMORY.md, curated by Stella herself. Key people, active projects, lessons learned, decisions made. She periodically synthesizes this from the daily notes, and it's what she reads on startup to orient herself on what matters right now.
Every meeting processed, every email triaged, and every task tracked feeds back into this picture continuously. Without this layer you have a capable assistant with amnesia. With it you have something closer to a person who's been working alongside you for months and never forgets anything.
I've also come to really value that all of this lives in flat markdown files rather than a database. I can open any memory file, read it, edit it if something's wrong, and understand exactly what the assistant knows. I can back the whole thing up to git and restore anything instantly. There's no abstraction layer between me and the assistant's understanding of my world, which means I trust it more and fix things faster when they're off.
Here's where the layers really come together. I'm managing a fundraise involving 100+ LP contacts across multiple countries. Stella tracks the full pipeline, keeps context on each LP and contact, and knows where every relationship stands. For first meetings, I've created a rule that she researches the fund and any recent content they or their partners have published, then preps me with what she found, how it maps to our thesis, and tailored talking points as part of the pre-meeting brief. For ongoing relationships, she knows exactly where they are in the pipeline, what was discussed and committed in our last meeting, and what the key issues are. You can't automate something as critical as a fundraise, but having this kind of structure underneath it means I'm spending my time on the conversations themselves rather than managing the process around them.
Kaizen: the system improves itself
This might be my favorite part, and the thing that makes it feel genuinely different from any assistant I've worked with, human or AI.
Every Friday, a cron job runs research. Stella scans the OpenClaw community, checks for new patterns, looks at what other builders are doing, and saves findings to `memory/kaizen-research-YYYY-MM-DD.md`. On Sunday morning we review it together. She summarizes the week's research, surfaces the top ideas worth tryi… continue on X ↗
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