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Mike Abbott has led products from inception as well as scaled products and infrastructure…
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michael abbott reposted thismichael abbott reposted thisToday was the first day of class for CS153 @ Stanford, a course I began teaching with michael abbott 4 yrs ago. Its our largest edition, with 500 students on campus and about 2K following along in our Discord server This year, we are teaching Frontier Systems, with guest lectures by Andrej Karpathy Jensen Huang Sam Altman Ben Horowitz Satya Nadella Ashok Elluswamy David Baszucki Brendan Iribe David Holz Garry Tan Diana Hu William (Liam) Fedus Ekin Dogus Cubuk Mati Staniszewski Matthew Prince Michael Intrator and others to be announced Its time to scale the frontier
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michael abbott shared thisalways fun to learn from the speakers and the studentsn - such a privilege to instruct! especially, right now during such a dynamic time.michael abbott shared thisThis class from Stanford University is just epic !!!Just look at the class project description 🤯 Previous year(Infra at scale) was great as well with prolific speakers : You can find recordings of previous year here : https://lnkd.in/gvsYbuz7
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michael abbott reposted thismichael abbott reposted thisLooking to put mission at the heart of your work? Check out our open roles at Thorn - we’re hiring in our engineering, research and business development teams! https://lnkd.in/g8342EY
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michael abbott reposted thismichael abbott reposted thisThe crisis of AI-generated child sexual abuse material (AIG-CSAM) is only becoming more urgent as the technology advances. The people trying to stop it need appropriate legal protections to stay ahead of perpetrators Thorn has recently been featured in Tech Policy Press on the legal roadblocks slowing down efforts to make AI safer for kids. Many big tech companies have committed to following our Safety by Design principles, which include red teaming for AIG-CSAM. We believe red teaming is one of the most important tools developers have to prevent harm. But without clear legal protections, the teams doing this work are operating under a cloud of risk. Even the solution involves some challenging navigation. Read the article to see what’s at stake: https://lnkd.in/dQBEa6FXHow Congress Could Stifle The Onslaught of AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material | TechPolicy.PressHow Congress Could Stifle The Onslaught of AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material | TechPolicy.Press
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michael abbott shared thisamazing to see what you have built from your initial cs153 final project!!! congrats on the raise and a privilege to supporting both of you as you build your companymichael abbott shared thisWe've all used AI for work, school ... but for fun? Every time a new model drops, it feels like Christmas. Suddenly I can create something I couldn’t the day before. That sense of magic is what inspired Oasiz We’ve spent the past few months building a platform that lets anyone, not just developers, experience that same creative superpower. You and your friends can come together to create, remix, and share playable content. Imagine game nights with friends but you create the games. Inside jokes become interactive experiences. Moments you can play instead of just scroll. This week, we’re opening up more spots on our beta. Jump into the Discord to be among the first to create the next wave. 👉🏾👉🏾 https://lnkd.in/gvn8qt-b Special thank you to Marco DeMiroz, Carson Demiroz, Tipatat Chennavasin, Joshua Lu and the a16z speedrun team, Tabish Ahmed, and michael abbott for the amazing support, we couldn't have asked for better partners in our mission! https://lnkd.in/g2uRy3waOasiz raises $2.5M seed round for viral playable contentOasiz raises $2.5M seed round for viral playable content
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michael abbott reposted thismichael abbott reposted thisFor the first time, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) is breaking tradition—releasing mid-year data instead of waiting until year’s end. Why? Because the data is too alarming to delay. In just the first six months of 2025, when compared that of 2024, reports to their CyberTipline show: - Online enticement jumped from 292,951 to 518,720. - AI-generated child sexual exploitation exploded from 6,835 to 440,419. These are not small increases. We’re seeing massive jumps in new and evolving crimes targeting children. Offenders are weaponizing technologies at unprecedented speed, and the risks to kids are escalating. Protecting children online is a shared responsibility. Parents, educators, platforms, and policymakers all play a role. Thorn is committed to building the technology that scales child protection efforts, but addressing this crisis will take awareness and action from everyone. See why this news is a wake-up call: https://lnkd.in/ewixJ7bGSpike in online crimes against children a “wake-up call”Spike in online crimes against children a “wake-up call”
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michael abbott reposted thismichael abbott reposted thisIn tech, everyone talks about innovation and hustle. But you know what actually changes careers? One simple thing: Asking for help. Mike Abbott, Co-Founder of Open Athena, says he's never ignored a single LinkedIn message when someone reached out for advice. That's the real magic behind the Valley's "pay-it-forward" mindset. In the first episode of the Signal to Noise Podcast, Mike joins us to share his insights on tech leadership. Check out the full episode now. 👇 👉 Apple - https://bit.ly/4g0BU41 👉 Spotify - https://bit.ly/4fLi0K2 👉 YouTube - https://bit.ly/45CDBzL #SignalToNoisePodcast #TechLeadership #ScalingOrganizations #ExecutiveSearch #StartupLeadership
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michael abbott reposted thismichael abbott reposted thisGreat post by Kent Beck about the tactics required to survive runaway success. Flashbacks to when I joined Twitter, seeing the engineers trying to bend the curves as fast as they could. But it wasn't all short-term. Mike Abbott, Raffi Krikorian and other leaders built a "scalability portfolio" with a mix of short, medium, and long-term solutions that ensured we didn't get stuck at the top of a hill with nowhere to go. And eventually the Fail Whale was gone. https://lnkd.in/gYtQ9r6R
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michael abbott shared thisawesome to see this work that was started years ago coming out to the broader oss world! congrats to everyone on the team for getting this out!michael abbott shared thisMy team has been very busy, and I couldn't be more proud to be able to launch this project at WWDC with such a great group. This is a starting point, and I can't wait to see where we go with containerization! Checkout https://lnkd.in/gPHxb83p, and checkout Michael's technical session @ WWDC: https://lnkd.in/gztxGsgFGitHub - apple/containerization: Containerization is a Swift package for running Linux containers on macOS.GitHub - apple/containerization: Containerization is a Swift package for running Linux containers on macOS.
michael abbott commented on a post
7mo
thanks for having me - enjoyed the discussion and, as always, i learn from Ali Behnam! hope y'all enjoy
michael abbott commented on a post
7mo
thank you Riviera Partners for having me share some of my learnings - from failures to more successful endeavors. having known your team for now over 20 years, it is a real privilege to support your efforts
michael abbott replied to a comment
8mo
Raffi Krikorian thanks to you, David Loftesness and many others we were able to stabilize the service after decomposing the challenges into manageable efforts. Team did an incredible job executing on so many levels - those were the days!
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michael abbott liked thismichael abbott liked thisToday was the first day of class for CS153 @ Stanford, a course I began teaching with michael abbott 4 yrs ago. Its our largest edition, with 500 students on campus and about 2K following along in our Discord server This year, we are teaching Frontier Systems, with guest lectures by Andrej Karpathy Jensen Huang Sam Altman Ben Horowitz Satya Nadella Ashok Elluswamy David Baszucki Brendan Iribe David Holz Garry Tan Diana Hu William (Liam) Fedus Ekin Dogus Cubuk Mati Staniszewski Matthew Prince Michael Intrator and others to be announced Its time to scale the frontier
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michael abbott liked thismichael abbott liked thisIn 2019, The Audacious Project and the Audacious donor community made a bold philanthropic commitment to Thorn to help us scale solutions to address the rise in technology-facilitated child sexual abuse. That investment and the support we received over the last six years has been catalytic - allowing us to scale our solutions to more than 40 countries and nearly 100 top tech platforms - helping law enforcement remove thousands of children from harm, helping tech companies identify and take down millions of pieces of suspected CSAM and helping us do the research and outreach needed to drive safety by design and create safer online environments for kids. And yet there is so much more work to do! That's why I'm excited to share the news today that the Audacious community has chosen to make a five-year reinvestment commitment to Thorn to help us move faster and scale even further to create a digital safety net for all children. Thank you to The Audacious Project and donor community for believing in this mission and in Thorn. Anna Verghese Lucien Chan Betsy Haley Doyle. And, congratulations to the 2025 Audacious Cohort Arc Institute, Braven, Destination: Home, Imagine Worldwide, Ipas Development Foundation, The Ocean Cleanup, Plastic Solutions Fund, Pure Earth, Solutions for Our Climate, Tiko and our fellow Reinvestment grantees Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and Last Mile Health . I am in awe of each of your visions for a better world and the truly tangible impact you are having.
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michael abbott liked thismichael abbott liked thisOur Board of Directors plays a critical role in shaping Thorn’s strategy and expanding our impact across the child safety ecosystem. When we welcome a new member, it marks an important step forward in our work to protect children in the digital age. Please join us in welcoming Jennifer Johnson to the Thorn Board of Directors. Jennifer is a Partner at Covington & Burling LLP and Co-Chair of the firm’s Technology Industry Group and multi-disciplinary Artificial Intelligence Group. With three decades of experience advising clients in the communications, media, and technology sectors, she brings deep expertise at the intersection of innovation, regulation, and responsible technology development. She also serves on the Board of Editors of The Journal of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence & Law and is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School. As advanced AI technologies reshape our digital world, Jennifer’s expertise and insight will help guide Thorn’s efforts to ensure child protection remains central to innovation and governance. We’re honored to welcome her to the Thorn team.
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michael abbott liked thismichael abbott liked thisOur team has spent years working on a bet: that diffusion could unlock fundamentally faster language generation than autoregressive models allow. Today we're launching Mercury 2, the fastest reasoning LLM and first reasoning dLLM, proving that bet was worth making. Mercury 2 delivers 5x faster performance than leading speed-optimized LLMs, achieving >1,000 tokens per second throughput. That speed unlocks what’s been missing in production reasoning: Multi-step agents without delays. Interactive search and voice assistants with tight latency budgets. Long-form vibe coding with instant results. The key is diffusion-based generation. Instead of committing one token at a time like a typewriter, Mercury 2 generates like an editor: parallel, iterative refinement. It can catch its own errors during generation, maintain better control, and do it all with dramatically lower inference cost. Huge thanks to our whole team at Inception, who turned years of research into reality, and to our partners who believed in this vision when it was just equations on a whiteboard
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michael abbott liked thismichael abbott liked thisToday, on #SaferInternetDay, Thorn is joining child safety organizations worldwide in calling for the prohibition of nudifying tools. These AI-powered tools generate nude images from clothed photos. Though often marketed for adults, they are increasingly weaponized against children, creating new child sexual abuse material from innocent photos. Our research shows that 1 in 8 teens knows someone targeted by deepfake nudes. 1 in 17 has been a direct victim. And while 62% of non-victims say they would tell a parent if this happened to them, only 34% of victims actually did. We're proud to stand with Safe Online, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), INHOPE, Child Helpline International, WeProtect Global Alliance, and many others in demanding action from governments, technology companies, and communities. At Thorn, we believe in working with the tech ecosystem to build safety into products from the start. But we believe nudifying tools call for a different approach. Technology built with the purpose of creating nonconsensual intimate imagery should not exist. Join the call to say no to nudifying tools here: https://lnkd.in/dyzjxsaM Read our full statement on our blog: https://lnkd.in/gz2FCwd9
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michael abbott liked thisLooking forward to joining OpenAI and Chelsea for this conversation on February 11. Protecting children online takes a broad community - come learn how we partner across industry, law enforcement, NGOs and beyond to deploy the most advanced technology to help create safer environments for children. I hope to see you there! Register here https://lnkd.in/eFG-9bEFmichael abbott liked thisProtecting children online requires new tools. It also requires real collaboration. Join us on February 11 for an important conversation in the OpenAI Forum with Julie Cordua, CEO of Thorn. Together, we’ll explore how AI is being used to detect harmful content, support investigators, and respond to emerging threats—including financial sextortion and the misuse of generative AI. For more than a decade, Thorn has been a leader in advancing technology and partnerships to combat online child sexual exploitation. This discussion will look at what’s working today, what’s changing quickly, and where continued coordination can help raise the bar for child safety online. We hope you’ll join us. 👉 https://lnkd.in/eFG-9bEF Please note: This event will cover sensitive topics related to online child safety, including child sexual abuse and exploitation, which may be difficult for some audiences.
Experience & Education
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Stealth Startup
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Volunteer Experience
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Board Member
The Tech Museum of Innovation
- 2 years 10 months
Science and Technology
Patents
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Fitness based routing
Issued USPTO 07961711
See patentThe present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for fitness based routing. Embodiments of the invention significantly improve the likelihood that routing nodes contained in routing table have adequate (or even relatively increased) ability to transfer and process messages in an overlay network. Thus, when the node is to make a routing decision for a message, the node has some assurances that any selected routing node is adequate (or is at least the best…
The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for fitness based routing. Embodiments of the invention significantly improve the likelihood that routing nodes contained in routing table have adequate (or even relatively increased) ability to transfer and process messages in an overlay network. Thus, when the node is to make a routing decision for a message, the node has some assurances that any selected routing node is adequate (or is at least the best currently available). Further, a sending node can take preference to routing nodes with higher fitness values when sending a message. Preference to higher fitness metric values further insures that messages are adequately transferred and processed. Accordingly, embodiments of the invention can be used to route messages in a manner that optimizes bandwidth and provides efficient routing capability.
Projects
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Teaching Cloud Infrastructure and Scalable Application Deployment in an Undergraduate Computer Science Program
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https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01032
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CVPR 2018 - Workshop - Joint Detection, Tracking, and Prediction in the Wild
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https://cvpr2018.thecvf.com/files/CVPR_2018_Pocket_Guide_Workshops_Tutorials_Final_merged_.pdf
Honors & Awards
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Alumni Award for School of Science and Math
Cal Poly
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Honored Alumnus in Science and Mathematics
Cal Poly - SLO
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Jocelyn Goldfein
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Zetta Venture Partners is named after the zettabyte (a trillion gigabytes!) Founded in 2013, we were the first AI-focused fund and we've been backing AI and infrastructure entrepreneurs since long before it was cool.<br><br>We are keenly interested in cloud and data infrastructure (like MotherDuck or Domo), tools and platforms for developers and data scientists building with AI (like Kaggle, Domino, Weaviate or Fixie) and applications powered by ML (like Tractable, Lilt, Skan, and too many more to name). <br><br>We lead or co-lead $1-5M rounds for pre-product-market-fit startups with B2B business models. We believe in verticals like financial services, insure tech, life sciences, health care, sustainability, cloud infra, devops, cybersecurity, manufacturing, supply chain and logistics. <br><br>More about us: https://zettavp.com<br><br>Before venture, I spent my career as an engineer and engineering leader. I led engineering teams in the high growth early years of VMware and Facebook (as well as a few startups including one of my own). I've worked across systems from OS'es to LAMP and mobile apps, to shrink-wrapped native software to developer tools and of course ML. The one "constant" has been high-growth and industry transformation. I'm passionate about scaling products, teams, and companies, and I care deeply about STEM education.
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