Alexander Grieve

Now live on polimon.zak.co Polimon: policy monsters Battle your way through think tanks, subcommittees, and lobbying firms across DC as you try to stop the evil Team Moat and their regulatory capture Have fun

The CME Group is currently conducting retail market research about perpetuals. Source: my inbox

Swarm riders and Swarm-native companies AI-use even among highly AI-native people is power-law distributed. There seems to be a new class of people — call them “swarm riders” — who are capable of consistently commanding large swarms of agents to productive ends. This is a new kind of managerial skill, analogous to the skill it takes to manage large organizations of people, but wholly different in nature and of course more technical. Based on the swarm riders we know (including many at @Tempo and @Paradigm), these people are capable of productive token spend that is 1000x-10000x higher than median software engineers, and 100x higher than top 5% Claude Code users. The art of swarm riding is different from software engineering and more akin to machine learning, where practitioners grapple with black box systems: defining reward functions and evals, transmuting non-verifiable problems into verifiable problems, running experiments, etc. Swarm-native companies are a new class of company founded by and populated by swarm riders. These companies are organized around swarms in a way that conventional companies will struggle to replicate, as the cost of internal human coordination is sand in the gears of an effective swarm. Effective swarm-native companies will define the right reward functions and evals, remove functional and bureaucratic barriers, and then let the swarms cook. We’ve gotten to see a few swarm-native companies up close — reshaping financial rails @Tempo, building a new gaming platform @Spawn, cyber swarms at Cathedral Systems — and it’s clear these teams wield a significant advantage over pre-AI teams. Some questions I’ve been wondering about: 1) How fast will swarm riding diffuse through the economy? The implications for token spend could be significant. 2) Can swarms be effectively adopted by existing companies or will it generally track the formation of new swarm-native companies? 3) What becomes scarce as swarm capabilities themselves commoditize (through frontier models becoming better at swarming, swarm capabilities built into harnesses, etc)? Cultures and teams that can define reward functions well and otherwise get out of the way?

The next phase of the AI race will be won or lost in the physical world. America’s frontier researchers are regularly working miracles, but they’re limited by atoms and electrons. That’s why we founded Mavria. We're turning bespoke construction projects into repeatable infrastructure products that can be manufactured at scale, like cars, computers and even rockets are today. Our first product is Terrain, a factory-built data center engineered for speed and simplicity of deployment. With standardized 5 MW blocks, it integrates power, cooling, controls and infrastructure needed for AI compute. Terrain 01 is in production in Houston today. Instead of sourcing and integrating a series of disjointed modules, customers get an integrated, factory-tested product. It’s the difference between building your own PC vs. buying a MacBook. We’ve raised $130M, including a new $100M round led by @paradigm at a $1B valuation. We’re also backed by @amppbc, Critical Frontier, @Liquid2V, @DreamVenturesVC, and others. We're putting that capital to work securing critical supply chains, scaling manufacturing, and expanding our team.

Alaska and Plural just launched InvestNorth, a new platform for financing infrastructure in Alaska. Bloomberg (@business) has the exclusive: bloomberg.com/news/articles/… (Third-party reporting; statements and figures are Bloomberg’s own.) Securities offered through Plural Brokerage LLC, member FINRA/SIPC.

Introducing Arete-27B: Qwen3.8-27B, post-trained to reinforce Western values. Chinese open models are currently the strongest available, but they ship with state-aligned behavior in the weights. We built an 803-prompt eval across seven value categories, including freedom of expression, democracy, and privacy, and measured how often a model adopts China’s party line. After fine-tuning on roughly 53 million tokens, Arete-27B's propaganda rate fell from 22% to 1%, in line with the Western models we tested. Its Hermes Bench score shows no significant performance tradeoffs. The values in an open model are one fine-tune away. Our eval, weights, and training data are available now along with the full blog post: nousresearch.com/arete

A Forecast of the Near Future: As we close out this remarkable week, discussions are shifting to the impacts of the election on the lame duck, the new committees, and the topics of early bills and funding fights. I want to pan up out of the day to day business and offer some predictions on more macro aspects of politics. - The new Democratic Majorities that take power in January will not be divided primarily by ideology, whether someone is on the left or in the center. They will instead be divided by seniority. The chairs and their staffs will want to use this moment to achieve long held goals, such as root and branch oversight of corporate America, assuming the freshman will go along. This large freshman class will, like the freshman class after Watergate, realize they have their own different views and will resist being told what to do. In the end, the Chairs probably end up generals without an army. - There are few deals with the Trump Admin. The Trump WH is not cowed by the results and decides the midterms were a function of the MAGA base being betrayed. While blame is shifted early on (rightfully) to the Iran War as a cause, hardliners inside the WH successfully argue that the base was let down by the lack of more deportations. The WH is disinterested in doing deals with Democrats generally and there are multiple shutdowns. The public sees Washington again as broken. - The 2028 campaign for President starts early, with the first candidate to declare on the Dem side announcing an exploratory committee before Christmas. The Dems have a massive field, including one statewide elected official who only is sworn into office in January 2027. But unlike 2019, there is a clear S tier of just 3-4 people. The primary is less toxic and contentious than in 2019, as many in the party now realize the policy bidding war was a mistake and need infighting. The absence of Bernie, Biden, and Warren or clear successors to any of them makes the race less about the past and more about the future. On the GOP side, VP Vance chooses not to run but former Secretary of State Rubio does. He does a surprising challenge from the right on both the war and inadequate commitment to hardline immigration policy. The primary is short for the Dems and long for the GOP. - The next two years of politics are defined, after a short burst of focus on broad oversight, by AI, which continues to pick up speed. The need to have technical knowledge of the subject to do effective oversight and legislation on it favors younger members with less seniority in both parties, reducing the power of the Chairs and Rankers. Technical staff grow in value versus lawyers for the first time in a generation, and surprising “gangs” emerge in the Senate to tackle aspects of the topic for the first real time in a decade. 2028 is the AI election, marked by at least one spectacular hack of major infrastructure during the last 90 days. - When folks look back on our politics in 2030, it is clear to all that the Trump era, the Long 2016, ended on November 3, 2026, which also marked the end of the Dems long 2016 primary. 2029 also is the first year of an administration in which Dems do not feel compelled to fight over the choices of 2008-2009, whether they win or lose the election, marking the end also of the Long 2009. Trump is gone to Mar a Lago and seen like all former presidents as an artifact of a prior time. - The Administration that takes office in 2029 experiences a ChatGPT like moment in robotics in its first 9 months. It is a surprise to all in DC.

ok this is just ridiculous

The Capital Markets Alliance (CMA), whose members include Cboe, Citadel Securities and Healthy Markets, has filed a lawsuit challenging the CFTC’s approval of perpetual futures on individual U.S. stocks. The group argues the products fall under the SEC’s exclusive jurisdiction and is asking a federal court to overturn the approvals.

Today, equity perps can begin trading for the first time on @CFTC registered exchanges. This move reflects my commitment to ensuring that America’s markets remain the most innovative, liquid, and well-regulated in the world. Instead of being forced to turn to offshore, unregulated venues to access equity perpetual futures, Americans may now access equity perps on CFTC-regulated markets subject to robust safeguards. I appreciate the continued partnership of @SECGov and @SECPaulSAtkins as we work to further harmonize our agencies' regulatory initiatives.

SOLAR: 100x FASTER SOLIDITY Solar is the future of Solidity and the EVM. It's >100x faster than Solc. It has faster bytecode than Solady with no assembly. Its bytecode is faster to interpret by the EVM. Solar fixes Stack Too Deep! foundryup forge --use solar Blog below.

The OCC wants community banks to help shape the future of payments and is encouraging the development of payment stablecoin capabilities within the community banking sector. Interested community banks are encouraged to consider applying to become, or for a subsidiary to become, a permitted payment stablecoin issuer, as applicable. These opportunities complement the OCC’s Community Bank Comeback initiatives to right-size regulation and tailor supervision so community banks can grow, compete, and continue serving their communities. OCC.gov/GENIUS

SITUATION DETECTED: Warhound launched from stealth today with a $200M seed at a $1.2B valuation. Ben Lamm and Palmer Luckey are cloning gene-edited bio-enhanced dogs and equipping them with custom Anduril vests, goggles, and sensors for the military and law enforcement.

The Air and Space Museum unveils its newest addition today: an F-117 Stealth Fighter.

Elon Musk today on a potential merger between SpaceX and Tesla: "Both Tesla and SpaceX have formed special committees at the request of shareholders. Because I'm a conflicted party I can't be in on these discussions. I don't think we should assume that a merger is a certainty. Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes. But at the end of the day, shareholders have to be supportive of this. The special committees have not reached an agreement on any transaction, and it doesn't mean they will, but there is a lot of be gained from cooperating on SI, chip design, robots, mass or orbit, connectivity. I think it would be a good idea."

What a lede from @TheEconomist

At the @USOCC, we have worked diligently and expeditiously to deliver the GENIUS Act final rule ahead of schedule to support President Trump's vision and @SecScottBessent's leadership to grow the economy and lead the global digital currency revolution. Today marks the birth of a new industry having a federal framework for payment stablecoins in the digital age. It also brings us back to our original mission when the OCC was charged with the responsibility for organizing and administering a system of nationally chartered banks and a uniform national currency.