Nhỏ mà có võ

This week was unforgettable.

1. Monday morning, we had five client calls and closed three deals on the spot.

2. We also met Dave Aitel, of Immunity fame, now at OpenAI. He said he loved Calif because our team had a lot of panache. Somehow I heard “bananas,” which I assumed meant crazy in a fun way. I thought it was hilarious, so in the next meeting I confidently told someone Calif had “a lot of bananas.” If Bruce hadn’t corrected me, I probably would’ve kept using it for the rest of my life 😂. Still, panache really does capture our style!

3. Bruce landed at SFO that afternoon, and we spent the night getting ready for the big day ahead.

4. On Tuesday, we had a meeting at Apple Park in Cupertino. While there, we handed Apple a physical copy of our latest vulnerability research report: the first public macOS kernel memory corruption exploit on M5 silicon. This is our strongest work yet. It’s really dope.

5. That evening, we had dinner with Quoc Le. He’s a Google Fellow. Only 12 people have ever reached this title at Google. If I really try, I can probably get it in my next life.

I’ve known Quoc for a long time. We play football on the same team (which probably has the highest concentration of Vietnamese IOI and IMO medalists in the world).

What I didn’t know was that Dario from Anthropic once reported to Quoc at Google. Another Anthropic cofounder was Quoc’s intern too. Quoc couldn’t even remember his name at first and had to look him up 😂. The founders of Perplexity and Kimi AI were also his interns. Absolutely bananas.

We’ll have more news about Quoc and Calif!

6. We got home and stayed up way too late finishing a report about the macOS exploit and our field trip to Apple Park. Wednesday, we went to meet Anthropic Research at their HQ. This is literally the epic center of AI. Their entire office was a beautiful chaos. We found a quiet corner, grabbed a few chairs, and chatted for hours about the next big things in AI security.

7. Thursday morning, the Wall Street Journal released our Apple story, and it went viral. We ended up back on the Hacker News homepage again.

Many, many other things happened too. But here’s one small anecdote my Vietnamese readers will love.

Apple Park is shaped like a giant spaceship. It is every bit as breathtaking as people say. It has a lot of apple trees, obviously. We wanted to check out the infamous Infinite Loop too, but were afraid it might take a little too long.

Our hosts mentioned that Apple spent $5 billion building this “office,” then asked about ours. We said, well, ours definitely cost less than $1 billion.

But this is the fun part about AI. Small teams can suddenly do things that used to require entire organizations. With the right strategy and the right people, even a tiny company can become mighty enough that the world’s largest companies start asking for its help.

In Vietnamese, we say: nhỏ mà có võ.