Next two years will see step function increase in compute capacity - as we will be building significantly bigger PODs for training. Can’t wait for our new silicon to start delivering optical connectivity for GPUs - multi-rack PODs at one of the largest hyperscaler a reality!!

I am thrilled to share that Exaforce has raised $75M in Series-A funding from @MayfieldFund, @khoslaventures and others. We’re on a mission to 10x the productivity and efficacy of security and operations teams. bit.ly/3RiYHMR Thank you @NavinChaddha, @vkhosla!

🚨 Following up on last week's @LottieFiles npm attack. I wrote a deep dive on preventing npm supply chain attacks. Here's what we learned: 🧵👇

The #1 aspiration for American kids today is to be a YouTuber/Vlogger. The #1 aspiration for kids in China is to be an astronaut. This isn’t our kids’ fault. It’s ours. And we don’t have long to fix it.

Way better choice than any democrat or republic in the running.

After a few days of using @GoogleAI Bard in my day to day work, the results seem much better than what I am getting with Bing Chat and ChatGPT

BOTs will eat the world!

The gov’t has about 48 hours to fix a-soon-to-be-irreversible mistake. By allowing @SVB_Financial to fail without protecting all depositors, the world has woken up to what an uninsured deposit is — an unsecured illiquid claim on a failed bank. Absent @jpmorgan @citi or @BankofAmerica acquiring SVB before the open on Monday, a prospect I believe to be unlikely, or the gov’t guaranteeing all of SVB’s deposits, the giant sucking sound you will hear will be the withdrawal of substantially all uninsured deposits from all but the ‘systemically important banks’ (SIBs). These funds will be transferred to the SIBs, US Treasury (UST) money market funds and short-term UST. There is already pressure to transfer cash to short-term UST and UST money market accounts due to the substantially higher yields available on risk-free UST vs. bank deposits. These withdrawals will drain liquidity from community, regional and other banks and begin the destruction of these important institutions. The increased demand for short-term UST will drive short rates lower complicating the @federalreserve’s efforts to raise rates to slow the economy. Already thousands of the fastest growing, most innovative venture-backed companies in the U.S. will begin to fail to make payroll next week. Had the gov’t stepped in on Friday to guarantee SVB’s deposits (in exchange for penny warrants which would have wiped out the substantial majority of its equity value) this could have been avoided and SVB’s 40-year franchise value could have been preserved and transferred to a new owner in exchange for an equity injection. We would have been open to participating. This approach would have minimized the risk of any gov’t losses, and created the potential for substantial profits from the rescue. Instead, I think it is now unlikely any buyer will emerge to acquire the failed bank. The gov’t’s approach has guaranteed that more risk will be concentrated in the SIBs at the expense of other banks, which itself creates more systemic risk. For those who make the case that depositors be damned as it would create moral hazard to save them, consider the feasibility of a world where each depositor must do their own credit assessment of the bank they choose to bank with. I am a pretty sophisticated financial analyst and I find most banks to be a black box despite the 1,000s of pages of @SECGov filings available on each bank. SVB’s senior management made a basic mistake. They invested short-term deposits in longer-term, fixed-rate assets. Thereafter short-term rates went up and a bank run ensued. Senior management screwed up and they should lose their jobs. The @FDICgov and OCC also screwed up. It is their job to monitor our banking system for risk and SVB should have been high on their watch list with more than $200B of assets and $170B of deposits from business borrowers in effectively the same industry. The FDIC’s and OCC’s failure to do their jobs should not be allowed to cause the destruction of 1,000s of our nation’s highest potential and highest growth businesses (and the resulting losses of 10s of 1,000s of jobs for some of our most talented younger generation) while also permanently impairing our community and regional banks’ access to low-cost deposits. This administration is particularly opposed to concentrations of power. Ironically, its approach to SVB’s failure guarantees duopolistic banking risk concentration in a handful of SIBs. My back-of-the envelope review of SVB’s balance sheet suggests that even in a liquidation, depositors should eventually get back about 98% of their deposits, but eventually is too long when you have payroll to meet next week. So even without assigning any franchise value to SVB, the cost of a gov’t guarantee of SVB deposits would be minimal. On the other hand, the unintended consequences of the gov’t’s failure to guarantee SVB deposits are vast and profound and need to be considered and addressed before Monday. Otherwise, watch out below.

Why AI Won't Cause Unemployment "In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of [running] a business." -- George McGovern Fears about new technology replacing human labor and causing overall unemployment have raged across industrialized societies for hundreds of years, despite a nearly continual rise in both jobs and wages in capitalist economies. The job apocalypse is always right around the corner; just ask the Luddites. We had two such anti-technology jobs moral panics in the last 20 years — “outsourcing” enabled by the Internet in the 2000’s, and “robots” in the 2010’s. The result was the best national and global economy in human history in pre-COVID 2019, with the most jobs at the highest wages ever. Now we’re heading into the third such panic of the new century with AI, coupled with a continuous drumbeat of demand for Communist-inspired Universal Basic Income. “This time is different; AI is different,” they say, but is it? Normally I would make the standard arguments against technologically-driven unemployment. And I will come back and make those arguments soon. But I don’t even think the standand arguments are needed, since another problem will block the progress of AI across most of the economy first. Which is: AI is already illegal for most of the economy, and will be for virtually all of the economy. How do I know that? Because technology is already illegal in most of the economy, and that is becoming steadily more true over time. How do I know that? Because, see the chart. This chart shows price changes, adjusted for inflation, across a dozen major sectors of the economy. As you can see, we actually live in two different economies. The lines in blue are the sectors where technological innovation is allowed to push down prices while increasing quality. The lines in red are the sectors where technological innovation is not permitted to push down prices; in fact, the prices of education, health care, and housing as well as anything provided or controlled by the government are going to the moon, even as those sectors are technologically stagnant. We are heading into a world where a flat screen TV that covers your entire wall costs $100, and a four year college degree costs $1 million, and nobody has anything even resembling a proposal on how to fix this. Why? The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government and by those industries themselves. Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine. Technological innovation in those sectors is virtually forbidden now. Whereas the sectors in blue are less regulated, technology whips through them, pushing down prices and raising quality every year. Note the emotional loading of the interplay of production and consumption here. What do we get mad about? With our consumer hat on, we get mad about price increases — the red sectors. With our producer hat on, we get mad about technological disruption — the blue sectors. Well, pick one; as this chart shows, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Now think about what happens over time. The prices of regulated, non-technological products rise; the prices of less regulated, technologically-powered products fall. Which eats the economy? The regulated sectors continuously grow as a percentage of GDP; the less regulated sectors shrink. At the limit, 99% of the economy will be the regulated, non-technological sectors, which is precisely where we are headed. Therefore AI cannot cause overall unemployment to rise, even if the Luddite arguments are right this time. AI is simply already illegal across most of the economy, soon to be virtually all of the economy.

the bird is fried

The folks who are shitting on Zuck re Oculus should shut up. He is trying to invent something new. Just give him some time to try. Why tear down someone who is actually trying hard?

My car has to make a tough decision today - 2 buck chuck (wine) or a liter of gas?

This is mostly true for the majority of humans.

Very well said @elonmusk - I rarely hired any engineering leader (VP, director, manager or architect) who didn’t code for a living! Any other way and the company will decay slowly..

Thank you for the summary. Well done!!

I read all 40,000 words from Jeff Bezos' Amazon shareholder letters. Here are 9 lessons worth your time:

So that I am sure you are not lying to me, you gotta download, register and tap the truth app on your mobile device. If it gives me haptic feedback on my watch, then I can believe in what you tell me. @TheTruthSocial @randybias @mdkail @sarbjeetjohal @marcoprodrigues

The #SuperBowl #SuperBowlHalftimeShow is up against some serious competition... Check out the lineup for @F5 #F5agility22 Day 1 keynote🙃 @rwhiteley0 @ksprague08 @asingla77 🎙️