Jensen Huang pushed back hard against AI labs calling for tighter regulation and slower AI development, at Dreamforce. "If you are not confident about the safety of the products, and you're not confident in its functionality, capability, or safety, then don't just release it. We don't need any new laws. We don't need new regulations. we just need companies to decide that when it's time to run as fast as they can." safety and speed are not mutually exclusive, and new laws are not required to make AI systems safer. Build fast, test aggressively, and pause only when you are no longer confident the product is safe. --- From "Salesforce" YouTube channel, (full video link in comment)

Very funny that xAI was created to stop Anthropic which was created to stop OpenAI which was created to stop Google which would've actually never developed ASI because it was afraid of cannibalizing its ads revenue from search.

A few weeks ago, a company we invested in shut down. The founder sent a very detailed email to the investor base explaining the situation. I responded with three clear questions: 1. I am very sorry to hear this, are you ok? Losing a company is a very personal loss. I want to make sure that you yourself are okay. 2. Is there anything that I can do in the next steps with the investor base to help? 3. What are your thoughts on your next steps? Is there anything I can do to help facilitate those? This is not the time to discuss lessons or negotiate for cents. This is the moment of peak pain. Be gentle. The way you act in hard times is the way you will be treated in good times. People will always appreciate you for thinking long term and being there for them when it matters.

We’re proud to announce Swish III, a $250M early fund, bringing Swish Ventures to $800M in total AUM. I started this firm to spend my career supporting the artists who build and shape the future. The technology shift underway is unlike anything we’ve seen. We plan to stay true to our colors: few investments a year, real concentration and partnership. Grateful to the founders we get to work with, who inspire so much of how we work, and to our LPs for walking this path with us. We are more locked in than ever. Omri

Everyone remembers what happened when Google tried to give San Francisco free citywide Internet in 2005 or when Mark Zuckerberg gave $75 million to SF General Hospital in 2015 after his wife did her residency there.

Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday. What I should have said: There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this. On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way. On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project. On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns. On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians. On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers. 
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries. On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land. Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged. When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America. I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw. Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.

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