sometime in the last few months GC quietly edited their 2019 "Investing in Defense" post to remove Katherine Boyle's name.
remarkable to rewrite the original attribution once Anduril became an obvious winner. utterly shameless and low integrity behavior from HT as expected
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I will never sit at a table that feasts on the pain of others
genuinely disgusting the number of VCs sitting on maybe 1x, mostly 0.75x non-mark-to-market, 2021 books spending today tweeting dismissively about one of the most interesting runs in recent asset mgmt history.
try playing in the big leagues buddy, i'm sure you could do it.
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correct and early
spiritually, it feels inevitable that AGI is born in California as a uneconomic carnival gizmo, and then dragged to New York, caged and put to work by men in grey tall towers that poke and prod it until it spills trillions out filtering through PDFs
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Dean seems to not understand that the FCC issuing a published rule under statutory authority with a waiver process and judicial review is different than a thinly veiled suggestion regulators carry out an extra-legal whisper campaign to protect the interests of his employer.
The robotics companies need not be nationalized until they also ask for public infrastructure, preemption, federal backstop of their debt, and a swept market just because they called themselves "national institutions". When they do, send them my essay.
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Do we think the Silicon Valley leaders who were so up in arms about using Chinese LLMs last week will be similarly outraged about the U.S. government’s decision to ban import of all “advanced robotics” from all foreign countries? Is Manidis going to write an essay about how the U.S. robot companies need to be nationalized in exchange for this policy favor?
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Double QT, but it’s very interesting how rapidly Silicon Valley’s marketing knowledge has just been completely destroyed. Men like Jobs were absolute brilliant once-in-a-generation marketers, early Google was making some of the undisputed best ads ever. Now you get this kind of self-referential slop and Grubhub bizarre lovecraftian dancing ad.
this kind of thing in particular is egregious - it displays a complete lack of “bring to market” desire because it shows the people running the ad have no care for their value proposition. A $50 flight discount is a compelling offer already and there are a number of funny/clever ways to communicate it; but instead of doing that they engage in self-referential subculturism.
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not for anything but it’s structurally incoherent to believe scaling laws hold without also believing we are about to enter a period where infrastructure attacks on hyperscale compute and its factor inputs (power, chips) are incredibly common
distillation is not the frontier
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staggeringly few of you have situational awareness at this point
women hand weaving memory for the early computers used on apollo lunar missions
another great loss that came along the deprofessionalization of secretary work is the disappearing of corporate gifting
so many of histories great deal guys were first great gift givers, always unprompted, but now counter parties so rarely know home addresses (no ea to ask)
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for an group to function well there is a whole level of "knowing" that sits below "principals consciously know a fact and act as if they do", this is the spirit of the organization. the disenfranchising/deprofessionalization of secretaries destroyed a lot of how orgs "function"
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it’s a great failure of imagination that none of the newly wealthy finance set have paid to produce “margin call” as a stage production
people in san francisco love black tie now specifically bc it implies sophistication without involving an exercise of judgement which could provoke anxieties
1/ The world's songbirds sing in just 8 basic sounds. And where a bird lives decides which ones it uses.
My first PhD paper is out now in @ScienceMagazine ( Here is what we found:
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In which I claim the Pope is wrong about AI
Obvious point, but: people see these graphs and assume the AI itself must have become radically more intelligent.
In fact, the labs decide they want to hillclimb *this* particular metric and procure + train on whatever data will help them do that. Which is a bit different.
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For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.
AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.
Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.
The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.
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some papers / books I enjoyed this month:
Very good book on how heavy RL optimization pressure can cause models to abandon their model spec and act purely to gain reward:
travis comes out in support of the "false flag escape" theory
