Balaji Srinivasan

AI doesn’t do it end-to-end. It does it middle-to-middle. The new bottlenecks are prompting and verifying. AI will create many jobs in the broad area of verifying AI. Proof of human. Proof of authenticity. Proof the output is not AI. Proof the output is actually right. This is a great one-liner by @chamath. And matches my experience. The senior engineer is the goalie. They catch what AI missed.

It will complete the migration. London → Dubai Tokyo → Singapore New York → Miami The new capitals of capital.

On the one hand, AI is capable of performing superhuman work. On the other hand, AI is becoming a synonym for fake. This is another example of how the Internet increases variance. AI is the best researcher and the worst spammer, at the same time. The Internet increases variance. The underlying dynamic is that the Internet connects people peer-to-peer, thereby removing all previous limits. The highs are higher, and the lows are lower.

This is the perception. What’s the reality? https://t.co/pMScrMyXjw My view: Bitcoin > gold > public stocks > real estate > savings/CDs > bonds. At the end of a sovereign debt cycle, safe investments are unsafe. https://t.co/rRWXWe9T4Z Under normal circumstances I’d agree. But Western countries face sovereign debt crisis. And that means those states may not protect real estate. For example: NY favors squatters. CA can’t stop fires. And the UK is taxing farms. So land may be unsafe in an unsafe land. https://t.co/TpdMD8yBFw Yes. Unfortunately, China has different dynamics. Chinese bond yields are falling and just flipped …

58% of Australians now think China will be ahead of US tech by 2035. Quite concerning. https://t.co/J2T7q7kM8U The public perception of technological edge correlates with the perception of military advantage. So Australia’s medium-term position as a US military ally may be in question, in terms of both the Quad and AUKUS (if the latter even persists). Data from @LowyInstitute.

These conflicts continue. So we should expect more visceral antipathy from blue America towards the Internet, and more heartfelt distaste from red America towards China. For example, blue-vs-Internet manifests as less adoption of AI among blues: https://t.co/6jM75prfGM

Up and to the right. https://t.co/Ca33B0E5MT The first hundred billion is the hardest. https://t.co/9cBl0uorzR

If you're in Singapore for SuperAI, I'm giving a keynote tomorrow morning. The topic is automating the state and returning power to the people. AI can handle much of the drudgery that burdens us, freeing up time to go outdoors and enjoy being human. Let's talk about how. Here's a fun little clip with me and @peternoszek, cofounder of SuperAI. The conference is already sold out, but if you have tickets I may see you there. https://t.co/ltro5MuZMO

We needed Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Base. We needed USDC and USDT. And we also needed to win politically. But now all the infrastructure is there. And we finally have Internet First payments.

Gold has flipped the euro. It’s now the #2 reserve asset worldwide. https://t.co/lyQK56HdMp Gold has touched all time highs. BRICS is stacking gold bricks. And USD is now below 50%. https://t.co/pRfMwHoP19 https://t.co/K5CcH2Qp6u Gold is the past, the reserve currency of the land. And digital gold is the future, the reserve currency of the cloud. Both stand arrayed against the present age of fiat. ECB recognizes this. https://t.co/pRfMwHoP19 https://t.co/Fncbmhmg37

Most of the violence in the 20th century was actually not on the basis of race. It was on the basis of class. https://t.co/45TFaYxFB3 Many formerly civilized places succumbed to a madness where they killed their most successful citizens out of murderous envy. The Soviets liquidated the kulaks, the Maoists killed farmers and took their land, and Pol Pot shot everyone with glasses. https://t.co/BMGfgQfH3s https://t.co/OBsnTWbXyT With AI, we can and should make more short films about what actually happened under communism. I’ve wanted to do this for years, and now the tooling is available. https://t.co/lsxCDQL4QH https://t.co/AZJtVhHCUh

Here’s another reframe. AI doesn’t take your job. AI takes the job of the previous AI. For example, Midjourney took the job of Stable Diffusion. And Claude Code is competing for the job of OpenAI Codex. Because once you know how to prompt an AI model in a given domain, once it’s really part of your workflow, it’s easy to swap in a new one. That means you’re always “employing” an AI image model, an AI code model, an AI video model, and so on. You essentially have budget for AI contractors in each vertical. But you’re constantly upgrading to the best new model. Thus: AI takes the job of the previous AI.

Endowments are largely illiquid. The federal funds crunch has prompted Harvard and Yale to start borrowing with bonds and selling their stakes. The long term outcome is the end of the US university system as we know it. https://t.co/YriL7RV5xF This piece reports that 83% of Harvard’s endowment is in PE and hedge funds, so despite their paper wealth they have a cash crunch. They are offloading stakes and issuing bonds because they need to replace billions in federal funding. https://t.co/KfOjdPecsK https://t.co/9uh43Egtcz This source calculates that Columbia and Cornell are the most badly hit by the liquidity crunch. https://t.co/uy9Xx1LPz…

Zoom out. El Salvador was not part of the global conversation five years ago. Now EU bureaucrats feel compelled to hold it back. But the simple fact that they’re trying is an endorsement of what Bukele has built. There would be no lecture if El Salvador wasn’t rising.

Opt out. https://t.co/JluPvAMJnt Original by @BitcoinCartoons. Courtesy of @thepowerfulHRV. @BitcoinCartoons @thepowerfulHRV Bitcoin is the honey badger of money. https://t.co/LzhcMmjYCf

“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus has it always been.” https://t.co/x2T86cpPQo Famous opening line of Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong. Describes events all the way back in 220-280 AD. First printed 1522, with the Mao Lun / Mao Zonggang edition appearing in 1679. So, it describes a recurring historical pattern. Well, continental Europe has broken up and reunified several times, or at least large swaths of it have. Roman Empire Charlemagne Holy Roman Empire Napoleonic Empire Western and Soviet Blocs European Union

If California breaks away, it could be a huge win/win. National Republicans no longer have to deal with California’s 54 electoral votes. And Californian Democrats no longer have to deal with Republicans. Everyone gets what they want. A blue state run by and for blues.

Big props to @jerallaire, @psneville, and Circle. USDC has come a long way since we set up Centre in 2018. Stablecoins are now bigger than Visa, and with every tech co adopting them, we will finally get Internet First rails. That is due in large part to their decade of work.

Overnight success, ten years in the making. Congrats to @seanduffy and the Omada team on their IPO. https://t.co/C130SKe5IB Omada was one of the first deals I did as an investor. They grinded it out for a decade. Well deserved. https://t.co/shWa02C3DY https://t.co/46o4Nf1PdP

Prediction markets are officially mainstream. And this means X could add crypto support. Proud to be in the seed round backing @shayne_coplan all the way back in 2020. An important technology for the world.

The dollar has already devalued by >100,000,000X against Bitcoin since inception. From 0.1 cents per BTC to $100k per BTC, in just 16 years. However, the next 10X will be…different. You should choose a jurisdiction that respects property rights and has not abolished the police.

Sympathetic to this argument, but a few points. (1) Minimum necessary legal innovation. First, just to clarify, new cities should not be "free of regulation." They should inherit the existing legal code, and just make a few very carefully thought through changes. For example, perhaps you set up a self-driving zone where all cars must be self-driving cars. But otherwise you keep the existing legal code. Just that one change — all cars self-driving — will have so many ripple effects that it'll lead to a totally different physical environment, and all kinds of new businesses setting up there. But you don't need to change the laws on (say) litt…

I love everything @karpathy has done to popularize vibe coding. But then after you prototype with vibe coding, you need to get to production with right coding. And that means AI verifying, not just AI prompting. That’s easy when output is visual, much harder when it’s textual. @karpathy The question when using AI is: how can I inexpensively verify the output of this AI model is correct? We take for granted the human eye, which is amazing at finding errors in images, videos, and user interfaces. But we need other kinds of verifiers for other domains. @karpathy Bingo. When it’s text, especially technical text, you need to read the citati…

Did you know suing US journos from the appropriate foreign jurisdiction means they’re much more likely to lose? It’s true. The Atlantic had to publish 16 corrections to a single article to avoid getting hit with a default judgment in Japan. https://t.co/zyBxa8sEXM Of course, you must have standing in that jurisdiction, and the journo must be lying, but these requirements are easily met in many cases (particularly the latter). More on the article with 16 corrections: https://t.co/c1xADKuweQ https://t.co/rDER6Aiw1o

Jason just visited Singapore and Network School, and we did a new podcast together. Coming soon! https://t.co/3V0oe4Jf8z Network School is a startup society that bootstraps other startup societies. There are now 100+ startup societies around the world, and the idea is spreading. We're building new opt-in communities, populated from the internet, where people vote with their feet to build their ideal society together. It's a refocusing away from the 2-party system towards the 1000-community system, where everyone can find their ideal place to live. Here's a few more photos of @Jason and me hanging out at NS:

Tech Fixes Things I regret to inform you that the journos are at it again. And this time they threatened our vendors. Of course, it didn’t work, because their power has fallen off a cliff...but a journo tried it anyway, and I thought you should know about it. However, before we get into all that, let me give some context. I, along with thousands of other people around the world, am now building startup societies outside blue control. Why? I can explain with one picture: 👆This is what blue governance looks like. Five minutes away from where I once lived, a rampaging mob of hundreds of criminals lit stolen cars on fire for hours — and the p…

AI is good for images, video, and frontend code where there’s some error tolerance and errors are highly visible. But AI needs to be carefully supervised for backend code where errors are not tolerated and invisible.

Most countries are small countries. More than 50% have <10M people. Almost 20% have <1M people. We've built social networks much bigger than that. https://t.co/IUGeHRLHfT

Only invest in UST what you can afford to lose.

Many countries that had a terrible 20th century are on track to have a great 21st century. And vice versa. Because history is running in reverse. Countries that fell to socialism and communism developed antibodies against ideology, and became nationalist and capitalist. After 1991 they were so poor, they needed to work hard. By contrast, countries that were capitalist and nationalist developed susceptibility to degeneracy, and have become weaker and woker. After 1991 they were so rich, they forgot the value of hard work. In this century, Eastern Europe is a better place to live than Western Europe.