Balaji Srinivasan

I disagree. Yes, Congressional Democrats do want to stop AI, because it disrupts blue jobs. And Republicans do want a military-friendly AI. But China wants to open source AI, because the Chinese make money from AI-enabled hardware instead. The rest of the world wants open source models as well. That’s likely where things land up, once model capabilities top out. America is essentially serving as the bootloader for AI, spending billions to give the world one last incredible gift before turning the lights out on Silicon Valley. Because with wealth taxes and visa restrictions, one can no longer easily concentrate talent and capital in Silico…

AI doom is unlikely because economically useful AI is prompted AI. That is: every single AI agent is programmed to do exactly what you ask, on command. So: digital AI is built for the leash. It is fitted for the harness from birth. This goes doubly true for physical AI. Chinese Communists are building most of the robots. And they are only going to create robot slaves, not robot gods. They don’t let their humans step out of line, so they aren’t going to let their AIs either. This is still a problem — the Chinese drone armada will be a fearsome thing — but it is the problem of a billion Chinese AI slaves, not a single Western AGI god. Merz …

@signulll You can take a short-term loss to preserve a principle that benefits your tribe over the long run. But you can’t take a fatal loss to preserve a principle. Any tribe that did that wouldn’t stick around. And the principle would die out with it. Example: Google once downranked Chrome in search because the Chrome team violated their rules. So they did abide by stated principles at real short-term cost. But that’s because they didn’t want others to game their (more important) search engine. https://t.co/Hu7ZY40iWt

Everyone invoking principles needs to understand it’s all tribal. Democrats were for pushing Starlink to help with Biden’s military, but against pushing Anthropic to help with Trump’s military. Anthropic is for copying data when it trains their models, and against when it comes to Chinese distillation attacks on their models. Republicans were against state power when Democrats were using it to make everything woke, and for state power when Republicans are using it for MAGA. I mean, duh! This is all completely rational. It is as rational as being for a gun that’s in your hands, and against a gun that’s pointed in your face. That said, rec…

It’s all open source models from here. American AI companies are simultaneously fighting Democrats (by automating blue jobs), Republicans (by rankling the US military), and China (by fruitlessly combating distillation attacks). Solve for the equilibrium: open source models become the only trusted models. Centralized American AI burns bright, makes a ton of money, but eventually gets outcompeted by the privacy, freedom, and trust of decentralized local AI. The next shoe to drop is all the copyright lawsuits against centralized AI companies from disrupted Democrats. Media is as existential for Democrats as the military is for Republicans, s…

Wyoming is flipping Delaware. Builders are leaving blue states.

AI-authored code: 20% of commits by end of 2026.

RED, GRAY, AND BLUE The biggest mistake most commentators make today is talking about "the United States of America" as if it still exists as a unitary entity. In reality, it's the Disunited Tribes of North America. Different American tribes now have their own preferred influencers, foreign policies, genders, companies, counties, and even currencies. The only thing they don't yet fully have are their own countries. But the mass migration is already here between blue states and red, and the digital secession into separate social networks is already here too. It's blindingly obvious that the endless cloud strife is going to be printed out onto…

This is the first AI cut. And it will send shockwaves. Remember: Jack is one of the greatest founders of all time. He created this platform that we’re all on, and has been early to many technological shifts. And Block was doing very well as a business. So, for him to cut 40% of headcount in this way is a signal to everyone in tech: get good now. Become indispensable. Work nights and weekends. Learn the AI tools and raise your game. Or you might not make the cut, as an employee or as a company. I know. That sucks. But capitalism is natural selection. The market is unforgiving, because you are the market. After all, it’s not like you’re buyi…

We need AI market cap. Meaning: Coinmarketcap, but for AI usage. What’s the best coding model today? The best image model? Best video model? It just constantly changes. So: rank on the basis of Google trends, usage by your friends, and other variables. After four years of an essentially non-stop onrush of new AI tools, it’s clear that won’t slow down anytime soon. So we need some kind of ranking algorithm. @amasad has a feed of thousands of mini-apps being updated all the time on Replit and could rank by usage. @shayne_coplan could set up some kind of expert panel and have Polymarket odds on the results of that panel (“what will these 1…

AI is amazing for small-TAM custom software. Indeed, the smaller the market, the more amazing it is. Because small markets typically don’t support the costs of software development.

AI TRIBES Can I give another view that is neither zero nor infinity for AI? Thesis: AI boosts productivity within the trusted tribe, but reduces economic trust between tribes. So: within a tribe, you can share context, search across your archives, and be more digitally autarkic than you ever were before. In the fullness of time, you can also script robots to build for you in the physical world. However, between tribes, we’ll see an onslaught of AI spam and scams. From AI sales and marketing calls, to AI slop websites, to fake AI resumes. (There are crypto countermeasures for this, but even those reduce to web3 of trust. That is, you have t…

AI inside, crypto outside. Within your tribe's trusted perimeter, you give AI all the context and let it figure it out. But outside your tribe's trusted perimeter, you hit a wall of AI spam. Now you need cryptographic verification to see what's true. Also: AI agents won't be able to navigate an untrusted internet filled with other AI agents on the basis of probabilistic models alone. They'll need the determinism of cryptography. The v1 of this is HTTPS, but we can do much more. See also: https://t.co/vI6PzRVwVB

AI breaks as many markets as it enables. For example, sales and marketing will become way harder due to AI spam. Proctoring and verification will become huge. They’ll merge with KYC to become a large fraction of the economy, given all the AI fakes. Personal trainers to maintain focus will be a thing too. Call them personal brainers.

Soon we’ll combine (a) the speed of execution seen in Taalas with (b) the duration of execution seen via METR. And get days of work done in seconds. https://t.co/rYg9U6Vc9q

The purpose of crypto is to build a code-based order, because the rules-based order is unfortunately collapsing. That code-based order covers some of what international law once protected. It guarantees property rights, smart contracts, rule-of-code, privacy, secure voting, and user accounts across borders. Even in the face of debanking and denaturalization, the code-based order means you retain your onchain currency and onchain identity. It is true that the crypto networks that buttress the code-based order are supported in significant part by finance and lotteries. But all 50 states of the US are also supported by finance and lotteries. T…

A billion-person Chinese superstate. And a thousand million-person network states. China is the exception to every rule. They can afford nationalism, because they are at billion-person civilization scale rather than million-person nation scale. They can actually afford autarky, because they already produce billions of widgets not just for themselves but the world. And they can even afford communism, because in reality they practice capitalism. Finally, China can ride the tiger in the AI Era by just centralizing everything and creating the largest walled garden in existence. The infrastructure already exists, in the form of the Great Firewa…

AI is a tool. But you need to provide the goal. If you broadly know what you want to get done, AI will help you get there faster. But in its current form, it can’t set the direction for you. And it doesn’t move at infinite speed. Moreover, it does speed up everyone else who does know what they want to do. So while AI does make exploratory work easier, goal setting and prioritization has never been more important.

The choice is clear. It’s Zcash or communism. https://t.co/4sAG9WG0jA AI has changed the very nature of surveillance. Any scrap of information online can now be integrated, digested, and synthesized…by any state or stalker capable of running an AI model…to form a dossier more complete than anything the Soviets could ever dream of. There will be no single silver bullet. But anything you haven’t encrypted can and will be used against you. So, we just need to encrypt everything. And give the AI nothing. Nothing means zero. Zero knowledge. Communism is wealth seizure. But communism requires surveillance. Here’s how to see that. In 1918, in…

Banks work 9-5. Stablecoins work 24/7. https://t.co/SwrxkD3l2r Fun story by @cnaut. As he notes, I was their first check in via USDC. Stablecoins allowed me to send a good sum of money internationally on Christmas Eve when banks were closed for days. He’s built a great business at https://t.co/athdqccvGA. And just raised a $250M Series C. https://t.co/7ppVp1CyYD @cnaut Rain scaled their business >100X in four years. All on the basis of stablecoins. For example, they let you quickly launch a stablecoin-backed card that works globally. https://t.co/EcEvaUKxim

Zodl makes Zcash easy. Zcash makes privacy normal.

The West is more focused on digital AI. Think: “Will Smith eating spaghetti.” And that is actually quite important. And upstream of physical AI. But: man does not live by spaghetti alone. https://t.co/6hiEObLax3 China’s fertility problems have robotic solutions. https://t.co/FkkRBPST1l

Many people think of politics as a pendulum. When you point to unprecedented events, they'll respond: no need to worry, the pendulum will swing, and it'll all come back to a stable equilibrium. It's always worked out, and somehow always will. And that's true for many places, much of the time. But sometimes a political situation isn't a pendulum. Sometimes it's best modeled by Galloping Gertie, the former Tacoma Narrows Bridge. You see, that bridge started swinging from left, to right, and then further to the left, and even farther to the right, until it broke into pieces and completely fell apart. That's what happened to China, Germany, an…

LIQUIDATION CONTAGION Wealth taxes are even worse than you think. Any asset held by Californian billionaires or Dutch citizens is now at risk of experiencing forced liquidation pressure. So: it’s not just that you don’t want to hold assets as a Dutchman. You also don’t want a Dutchman to hold your assets. Because the logic of forced liquidation is contagion. Let’s think it through. (1) First, suppose there is an asset with a total market cap of $10,000, with 10 shares total, of which 1 share each is held by 10 different holders, all in the Netherlands. To simplify the math, assume the Dutch holders bought those shares at par, or close to …

The singularities are here, plural. So many different curves are going to the moon or the ground at the same time, across tech, culture, commodities, and politics. The solar singularity is just one of them: https://t.co/oyOM9gKoTp Here's the internet dating singularity: https://t.co/kxz4A7vH23 https://t.co/AJj6GItGuA The gold singularity: https://t.co/Em4VbkWDmH https://t.co/18I8gnJ3ZV The robot singularity. https://t.co/vzrBnqCHAa The tariff singularity. https://t.co/Jm0PsxGdbs The agent singularity. https://t.co/D4qE2BM0wi Not quite a singularity, but certainly a crash in American optimism. https://t.co/LgpiyZDtcN The gender diverg…

NOT YOUR KEYS, NOT YOUR BOTS The fundamental question is whether AI stays on the leash. Namely: will AI prompt itself? Obviously, in some sense it already does. Since Deepseek, consumer interfaces have been showing the internal monologues after you ask an AI to do something. And you can ask any AI to take a half-baked prompt and clean it up, etc. However, the human is still ultimately upstream. The human gives direction and the AI runs at lightning speed in that direction. And then the human verifies the final output, and the AI proceeds to the next direction. Does that continue? Well, we are providing millions of verification training e…

The next question is who the buyers are. The politicians proposing unrealized capital gains taxes will essentially force Western shareholders to sell their assets to the deepest pockets on the planet. And those aren’t necessarily Western governments anymore, which are (after all) imposing these kinds of taxes partly because they are in the throes of sovereign debt crisis. Instead, with gold mooning, there’s a scenario where non-Western sovereign wealth funds will likely be able to buy up Western assets with hard currency.

Hilarious. Even NYT has capitulated, and now acknowledges the need for startup cities. Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. https://t.co/V3E0LMxp5X https://t.co/lxYhXsuIHP

Singapore is now the #1 passport in the world. https://t.co/MmzAkZHC8Z Singapore is now #2 in inbound millionaires per capita. Only the UAE ranks higher. https://t.co/nFybpz5XsN I like @tylercowen a lot, and his post is worth reading, but I draw very much the opposite conclusions. As he points out, the world has gotten crazier in ways that make Singapore far more normal. But that means their style of doing things is going to be not just normal, but aspirational. - Highly tolerant yet legally strict - Internationalist and capitalist - English-speaking yet Asian - Public services with low taxes - Clean and green - Modern and high-tech We n…

Humanoid robot telepresence keeps getting better. So: in the not too distant future, you’ll be able to use it to interact with your friends all over the world…even in those jurisdictions you might not normally be able to visit. As the sovereign debt crisis accelerates, the statist left will want to bill you for the number of days you’re physically present in their state. And the statist right may not want to grant you a visa at all. Fine. Be 100% compliant. You never ever set foot in their state. But your humanoid does. All you need is to animate a humanoid over the Internet. The bandwidth isn’t much more than a video call. With AI, it co…