Balaji Srinivasan

Despite their enormous scale, China and the Internet are nevertheless somehow invisible. China because it’s overseas. The Internet because it’s in the cloud. Of course, that’s an outside perspective. China is highly visible to China! But in the West, it’s only perceived through graphs. Even if everything physical is made in China, and everything digital is made on the Internet. The ubiquity was enabled by the invisibility.

Midwit writing used to be woke. Now midwit writing is all AI. “It’s not this, it’s that.” A superintelligence, yet midwit.

0% AI is slow. But 100% AI is slop. So the optimal amount of AI is actually between 0-100%. The exact figure varies by situation, but just the idea that 0% and 100% are both suboptimal is useful. It's the Laffer Curve, but for AI. I think we’ll need new ideas. Deterministic logical reasoning on top of the probabilistic AI models we have today. Otherwise error rates are just too high when you do tasks of any complexity or duration.

An important kind of social network will be one where no bots whatsoever are allowed. The closest thing to this right now (besides IRL, of course) is probably a corporate Slack. But that has limited scale. There’s room for a new kind of app with no AI at all within its walls. No slop, no spam. Like Twitter’s original 140 character limit. But limited to humans. Yes, but then the second layer of defense comes into play: the anti-AIrcraft guns, namely the AI detectors. If it’s easy for a human to flag ChatGPT-generated text, it’s trivial for an algorithm. Yes. But then comes the third level of defense, which is trusted human moderators doi…

Most people live here. https://t.co/NlrkVp6tkX

The Industrial Revolution improved everyone’s life, in the long run. But in the medium run, it caused the rise of communism, the murder of capitalists, and the advent of world war. Technological advance caused political chaos. Then again, would you prefer no electricity? We’re starting to make a comparable list for our era. https://t.co/W0TqbKQN6J https://t.co/QBlmpL4pHH

There were many hackish workarounds for this that required linking AI APIs to Google Scripts. But this is the native version you've always wanted. https://t.co/VBMDpzU7eB https://t.co/bmHHdlzWge One thought btw is that I disagree with Google’s chosen example. AI “personalization” of an outbound email can feel impersonal and spammy. It’s at best a first draft that you completely rewrite. But as a tool for data analysis, this is amazing.

Here’s the Luma page. https://t.co/gOXhP8fjvx

Bitcoin has had 80-90% drawdowns. But the 200 week moving average is up only. https://t.co/87MrH26u0R This graph smooths out the four year cycle. It shows the gradual rise to global reserve. Thanks to @adam3us for posting it. And Bitcoin Magazine for generating it: https://t.co/IXkGi5maGW https://t.co/6l2gyiuZeq

AI is prolix. Smart is now concise. Part of the cost of using AI is verifying AI output. That cost is higher when the AI isn't concise.

Indian founders should not think of themselves as Indian founders, but as Internet founders. When you sit on a Chinese chair, you don't think of it as a culturally Chinese object. It's not like dim sum or red envelopes. It is just a globally competitive chair that happens to be made in China. Similarly, Indian technologists should make globally competitive software that happens to be made by Indians. When you use Google Docs, GitHub, Cursor, Perplexity, Angellist, or Photoshop, you aren't thinking of those as "Indian" products even if the CEO or founder happens to be of Indian origin. Similarly, all the content, code, and smart contracts …

Bitcoin is hitting all-time highs. And the Network State Podcast is back. All new season featuring: - Michael Saylor - Jason Calacanis - Vitalik - Jeremy Howard - Benedict Evans - Claire Lehmann - Coinbase Base - Lightspeed - and Solana Trailer and links to all episodes below. https://t.co/vQJ2FMJsOc Jason and I discuss Network School, startup societies, voting with your feet, and strengthening democratic rights in a digital age. For the full episode with @Jason: 📺YouTube: https://t.co/jtOVoACwrr 🔊 Spotify: https://t.co/d9M6EltoWc 🍎Apple: https://t.co/wSxvd7Oiz2 https://t.co/xnK1RSIrCK @Jason Saylor and I review his digital assets fra…

AI = AN INTERN Prompting an AI agent and then reviewing the code can be slower than just coding it yourself. But when? Do we have simple heuristics for when to use an agent vs code it yourself? Use an agent when it's frontend code (which you can instantly inspect for correctness), or interaction with some API (where you know what to do but not the specific incantations for executing the API calls), or a data analysis, or a prototype. Do it yourself when it's a domain you know very well, or it's highly contextual backend code, or you want to iterate a lot on the result. In these circumstances, writing the prompt takes more time than writing…

@davegpack @windsurf_ai @OpenAI Lina Khan began the FTC attacks, but the new admin hasn't fully reversed it. They are pro-crypto and somewhat sympathetic to Little Tech, but they are still adversarial to Big Tech. After all, Big Tech donated to blues and censored Trump. https://t.co/ntk49gEec4

TLDR: Windsurf employees may well get their exit, if remaining management just executes the dividend. After looking into this, I think the original intent was for that $100M+ cash balance to indeed be used to give employee distributions via a dividend. It corresponds very closely to the unvested equity number. But due to the legal overhead that attends any Big Tech acquisition nowadays, the founder was muzzled and couldn't say this outright. He could only say "dividending out the balance is an option." So: the remaining Windsurf shareholders can take that option, dividend out the $100M to employees, and then choose to shut down the company…

From a well-known investor I know: “Saw some people claiming common doesn’t get paid in the Windsurf acquisition. They are wrong, you are right. I checked with Windsurf investors, everyone is getting paid, including common. The one wrinkle may be employees who aren’t vested. And preferred may be taking a disproportionate tax hit, because it doesn’t qualify for QSBS, just like Scale didn’t qualify.” Caveats: I haven't seen the waterfall myself, and these deals are complicated, and I don't like to get involved in someone else's business. But in the abstract, ideally all Windsurf employees should get paid as if it was a traditional liquidatio…

An important subject. Less theoretical every day. This is a good book on the topic. https://t.co/usj7oSDxUo “What key knowledge would you need to start rebuilding civilisation from scratch? Once you’ve scavenged what you can, how do you begin producing the essentials? How do you grow food, generate power, prepare medicines, or get metal out of rocks?” https://t.co/EEByUUy3VL https://t.co/avM7Tnd273

What @slatestarcodex is saying is of course tongue-in-cheek. But this is real: Egypt leased their Mediterranean peninsula to the UAE in return for $35B. It’s a win/win for both countries. As the sovereign debt crisis gets underway, expect many more deals like this. https://t.co/XbLkjH4ANe Egypt has returned to partial stability since the chaos of the Arab Spring, but it needs money. And the UAE is arguably the best run country in the region. More context: https://t.co/PTrrLoL4nI Initiating violence is very expensive. (In addition to being immoral.) The US spent $5T on war, for nothing. Russia spends >$1B/day on Ukraine. So, war is an …

At the end of the Soviet Union, all the secrets came out. The gulag was real, and the cancelled Solzhenitsyn was vindicated. The USSR really had murdered Poles at Katyn, while blaming it on the Nazis. Millions of innocents truly had been liquidated by Lenin and Stalin. And Chernobyl was indeed a coverup. Everything everyone had darkly suspected to be true was confirmed, and then some. The consequence was the meltdown of a nuclear-armed superpower. It lost its European satellites, and its overseas military bases, and its global influence. The Soviet Union collapsed economically and imploded geographically, shattering into more than a dozen n…

Can I clarify something? Google actually is acquiring Windsurf. But the new mechanism to do this which doesn’t run into bogus “antitrust” objections is to buy the assets rather than the company. Like all these other deals. Investors still get paid and employees still get an exit. For years, tech has been dealing with the incorrect and also malicious argument that “it hurts startups when big companies acquire them.” It’s incorrect because when a big company acquires a startup, it’s often more a surrender than a conquest. It signals that the bigco could not build, so it had to buy. And then the money for that acquisition funds 1000 more sta…

No monarchy. Only cryptography.

cloud vs land code vs kings internet vs china memes vs genes network vs state mobile vs sessile digital vs physical founder vs emperor technology vs politics individual vs collective capitalism vs socialism bottom-up vs top-down decentralized vs centralized internationalism vs nationalism The Origins of Political Order by @FukuyamaFrancis talks about the difference between the Chinese and Indian traditions. To oversimplify, China was state above law and India was law above state. (1) The Chinese took the pragmatic attitude that the emperor was all powerful, so no written law would limit him. But the mountains were high, and the emperor was …

My answer is that we perceive rate of change but not absolute value. For example: there is far more usage of Uber today than 2014, but there was far more coverage of Uber then because it was new. In other words, we perceive the derivative of a sigmoidal happening process, but not the absolute value. Both the 0% and 100% states are perceived as 0%. So: nothing ever happens, because it happens so fast. And then it’s already happened. In most cases: coverage is proportional to the derivative, not the absolute value. Which means a space needs to sustain a high derivative for many years in order to be perceived as a continuous happening. Ube…

First mover advantage into BTC > staying and fighting for USD. Few understand the degree to which currency is identity is sovereignty is territory. Bitcoin has appreciated by >100,000,000X against the dollar since inception. That is a global run on the central bank, a vote of no confidence in the fiat system. And everything it controls.

Bitcoin is hitting all time highs. https://t.co/lc2ETEECDL

AI is perhaps the most competitive field in the most competitive sector in the world. Somehow @elonmusk built and funded the team capable of getting to global #1 while simultaneously running SpaceX, Tesla, X, Boring, and Neuralink. It is superhuman. Amazingly impressive. They crushed many other benchmarks too.

The singularity is happening. Yet also, nothing ever happens.

The blockchain is the basis for global economic union, because it provides uniform monetary policy, payment rails, smart contract enforcement, encrypted messaging, verifiable identity, and capital formation to anyone with an internet connection.

I’m actually pretty sympathetic to the white American conservative. They were subject to countless slings and arrows over the last several decades, from constant insults to racial quotas, with an extraordinary escalation once wokeness really got underway in 2013. Over the course of decades they tried all manner of parley with the left, sending many good guys like Mitt Romney, only to find their outstretched hands repeatedly thrown back in their face. So, eventually they just elected Trump. And then even Trump was constantly impeached and undermined during his first term. After that, and the political prosecutions, and the assassination atte…

Elon is the greatest of all time. We don’t fully appreciate it. The sheer range of what he does. And the difficulty! A few setbacks don’t matter. He’ll figure it out.