"The level of abstraction you work with AI will normalize at the level of abstraction you work with your peers." On why to build your own tools right now. Not because it's easy (it is) but because it's the fastest way to accelerate yourself.

1. if transacting with superintelligent models outside of the boundaries of a lab becomes difficult due to national security / ai safety concerns and so on, it will mean the Coasean boundaries of the labs will grow to encompass all interesting industry, creating a truly cyberpunk chaebol-capitalism type of future, where the goverment sort of runs them but they also sort of run the government 2. as if there weren't already enough reasons to break up your family, leave your home, the Zone of Thought will increase the attractiveness of migrating to try and have your child on american soil, so they can have 1000x the effective brain power of people born elsewhere 3. every country should probably try and either work towards a new ai security pact with the americans immediately or pool every ounce of national resources to try and create their own ASI labs lest you become complete intellectual, economic, and moral vassals to the united states of america and the output byproducts its ASIs (you wont even get to talk to them). if they succeeded (big if) this will imply a more global race and more risk factors than was previously implied by the formerly only "beating china" narrative -- but many will prefer it to the superintelligent monopolar value lock-in 4. the other alternative is to keep the tension between safety and concentration of power at the top of mind and for the government/labs to push for solving it, rather than instrumentalizing all other values to be subservient to minimizing ai harms. insofar as safety means defending properties of the fragile world we like, the diffuse nature of power is one of those properties 5. historically the americans have been really quite Benign about their global public goods hegemony despite the ability to extract significantly more rents than they do, and it makes it easy for people of all stripes to fight for america rather than under it. we probably don't have to, but i hope america overall works towards export promotion of american models rather than export control

Half certain the USG thinks they have Ant in a corner and Ant thinks they have the USG in a corner

Very good take from Tyler, as usual

every other day these days!

The lesson I take from the SpaceX IPO is that the only thing stopping us from solving arbitrarily difficult problems is extreme creativity in business models. No amount of tax and spend programs got us reusable rockets and great electric cars. Customer delight is a necessary precondition for success. There seems to be some discussion around whether successful entrepreneurs should give up control of their companies so they can subsidize some philanthropic venture that otherwise has no value prop sufficient to run it as a business where customers voluntarily exchange money for goods and services at a competitive and reasonable price. This misses the point. Transformational products deliver tangible value at 1000x the rate of charities whose value cannot be tested in the market place. Think about the undeniable value of the smart phone, satellite Internet, electric consumer devices, etc etc. I think the transformational moment for SpaceX was when Elon stepped away from the philanthropic Mars greenhouse concept and fixed his resolve on unlocking radically better rockets for humanity. The greenhouse would have been, at best, a neat trick. Falcon and Starship give humanity a durable economic engine to maintain and improve access to space, forever.

we might get to see a counter-factual to the existence of Section 230 vis-a-vis social media

God bless America.

We take community notes for granted now but I can’t emphasize enough how hard it is to pull off an entirely new social mechanic - build trust, acceptance, etc. So many ways it could have gone wrong, like social features often do. Kudos to the team.

unreasonably excited to be shaking my fist at the sky soon

this will be a hard strategy to scale for a payments app :)

Ooof.

So fine tuning startups are back? All it took was Uber declaring token bankruptcy?

"the future is here, just not evenly distributed" has never been more true. almost every person i talk to these days is living some temporal distance away from me, either ahead or behind. if you think the difference is largely between SF / bay area / tech vs non-tech, you won't believe how wide the temporal spread is even within SF or people in tech.

Do what you said you’ll do. Say what you are going to do. It’s just that simple.

few things can shake the hold of the incumbent political parties, but this will

sentiment on AI in India amongst the builders there is pretty low right now

Is this going to displace human travel agents or is it going to make human travel agents even more desirable, more premium? Both, I think.

BREAKING NEWS: Anthropic's latest model will NOT help you if it thinks your ML research/ML engineering is interesting, and/or will secretly degrade its IQ so that the average engineer won't notice. We are already seeing Anthropic's latest model's moderation filters our GPU inference research and programming 😭