Chamath Palihapitiya

This is an exceptional summary.

Yup

The leading AI has already forked into two options. A: Closed source American that costs $26-56 per 1MM tokens. B: Open weight Chinese that costs $0.50-1 per 1MM tokens. If you force American companies to spend 50-100x more than their competitors abroad here is what will happen: 1. American companies spending 50-100x will at some point become financially impaired and the stock market will crater. This is the equivalent of the US Government saying we can only buy oil at $800/barrel even when the free market sells the same oil for $80/barrel. 2. In the short term, the revenues of the Closed American Labs may remain hi. But then their reven…

There are two problems rn for crypto and, specifically, bitcoin bulls: 1) marginal liquidity would rather speculate in prediction markets and equity markets 2) marginal energy to mine BTC is worth 10-20x if reallocated to serving AI tokens These changes feel structural but I could be wrong…

But what about vibes?! It’s cool to be against climate change so can I still do that?

Enough of the attempted reg capture. The genie is already out of the bottle so let’s just get on with it and compete on the field.

Industry infighting, poor spokesmen and boogeymen have created a real problem for American AI exceptionalism.

On August 2 the EU's AI Act may begin enforcing its transparency rules, with fines reaching three percent of global revenue for the model providers and application developers who cannot show how their systems were built and trained and don’t properly disclose where AI exists. AI used in hiring, lending, medical diagnosis, law enforcement, education, or critical infrastructure faces strict requirements. The reflexive reaction could be that AI may be too risky for regulated industries. But that would be backwards. What a regulator needs is a record: which requirement a system satisfies, what has changed, when and what test proves it still ho…

Some are saying…

Why data?! Why now?! Vibes only pls. Love, The NGO Industrial Complex

Pod!!!!

The future is open source. We need to embrace it and get on with it. Imagine if America closed the door on open source. We would explicitly be forcing American companies to pay $26-56 per 1MM tokens for the same intelligence their adversaries/competitors around the world would pay $0.50-1 for. This is economically unsustainable unless AI is bullshit. If it’s the supposed through line of all future economic activity that we’ve been told it is, we can’t handicap America at such a meaningful cost disadvantage. This can also be viewed thru a military lens and not just a simple economic one as well. Letting our adversaries attack us for $0.5…

An interesting trend in forecasting where the world is going is by looking at SEC filings for the overuse of buzzwords. When buzzwords peak, the value of those terms usually deflate. It is one of the cleanest examples of how corporate America rapidly changes its language in response to shifts in technology, culture and regulation. Right now everyone is glomming onto AI like it’s a life raft. But these same folks have not yet shown repeatable, audited, verifiable ROI even as their CapEx and OpEx are increasing with token costs on all things AI. This has happened before. DEI was the defining investment and disclosure trend from 2020-2022, th…

@Jason It’s 32C outside!

Gavin is right. This is positive for everyone except the closed frontier labs.

From Anthropic’s Fable model on the economic, moral, ethical and legal opinion of distillation of Anthropic’s Fable model: Whether it’s a moral problem is genuinely contested. The labs trained their models on the open internet — copyrighted books, articles, code — largely without permission, and their fair-use defense is essentially “learning from data is transformative.” Distillation is the same argument turned against them: a model learning from another model’s outputs. It’s hard to construct a moral principle that permits the first and forbids the second, which is why critics call the labs’ objections hypocritical rather than principled. …

The math ain’t mathing. What this shows is that you can now spend $0.50 per 1MM leading edge tokens or spend $56 for those same 1MM tokens. 🤔 https://t.co/M04x6XxiX9

Basically.

JCal?

Deep dive: the only tokens that are up in this crypto winter

Over the past year, while every category of crypto token lost value, privacy tokens climbed 127.3%, becoming the best-performing sector in crypto. To understand why privacy coins are surging, we need to explore a core monetary feature that’s missing from the largest monetary network in crypto: Bitcoin. Every transaction on the Bitcoin network is public. Instead of a bank or other trusted intermediary privately verifying payments, thousands of independent computers verify every transaction by checking the same public ledger. That design decentralized verification, but it also made every coin and every wallet traceable. At the coin level, tha…

This.

This is the intellectual version of a COVID Mask. You may think you’re doing something smart but you’re not. https://t.co/Za6ZR84ri5

As usual, Demis is quite well reasoned and his framework is very reasonable. Especially considering that the alternative seems to be the “Pull Up The Ladder Framework” from the other guys, I would suggest we adopt Demis’ version.

This is accurate.

Here is the first case study of what 8090 can do. Working with CMS, our Enterprise team decoded a 50yr, 18M repo of COBOL and Assembly that governs billions in healthcare payments. We documented 100,000+ business rules in plain English using Software Factory, each traced to its exact source line. The people who own Medicare policy can now read how their systems behave and change as they see fit. Full story in the thread below. We can do this for any large enterprise who have big, legacy codebases.

I’m jumping on to cohost @SquawkCNBC now. 7-9am ET Lets goooooo!

When we look back, Alex Karp may have initiated an important preference cascade around AI sovereignty. It’s worth noting what @Benioff and @satyanadella are both saying: Your knowledge, as a company, is your sovereignty. If you lose it to someone else (anyone else) you are hollowing your organization out. There are many ways to accidentally leak intelligence so you need partners and tools who can sign up for the complexity required to give it to you. See Benioff below and see Satya’s essay linked below. Satya’s essay:

Too many people are directionless, giving room for many forms of “ the answer” to their problems. Go to the gym. Don’t go to the gym. Only do compound exercises. Focus on HRV. Only walk but with a vest. Must sleep 8 hours. Must not oversleep. Must not under sleep. No meat. All meat. All veg. All farm to table. Organic is a scam. No alcohol. No sugar. Natural sugar only. No Rx drugs. Yes Rx drugs. Yes peptides. No peptides. No HRT. Yes HRT. At some point, we will all realize that none of these are the answer. You are looking to fill a hole because your current life has made you an NPC playing someone else’s game by their rules. It’s their ga…

We started 8090 a few years ago on the belief this motion would become widespread. We’ve been surprised by how fast it has taken hold. That said, it’s still so early in this game. Software license revenue is $1T annually. Services and T&M consulting around those licenses is $4T annually. All of this will merge into a new $5T super-category and whatever happens from there is anyone’s guess. But I applaud $SBUX for ripping off the bandaid - they clearly see the forest from the trees.

8090 works on production systems for large, often regulated, enterprises. Vibing isn’t tolerated because these are the systems that run western society - banking, power, healthcare, insurance etc. Over the last few quarters, the gains that we got from using frontier models inside of our Software Factory on these systems started to shrink but the costs kept doubling. This makes sense I guess, as in hindsight, we were initially asking the model to do mostly light work (generate basic PRs) and now we were asking it to do more complex work (mitigate dependencies across systems). Unless you grow context massively, be willing to run many A/B tes…