The way to profit from being first in AGI is in the financial markets There is no other place where millions of PhD+ level brains with keyboards can exploit an immediate advantage over humans in a way that makes their parent company very rich Any first sign of AGI will be there

Life is about leaving information. DNA, ideas, books, films, art. Conformity leaves short-lived information. Originality is immortality.

Emmett Shear I always have a feeling that alignment is ill defined and unachievable just like incompleteness of math

You get interesting results when you try to measure the unmeasurable. This is a mistake I’ve made many many times.

Generic advice is black or white. Reality is shades of gray. Apply wisdom, not rules. Only you know your context.

When elite universities uploaded all of their courses online for public consumption, we collectively realized that the limiting reagent for global intelligence is not access to information, it's motivation.

Your family is broken, but you have to save the world.

The CEO of Spotify once said their #1 competitor isn’t Apple or Google, it’s silence… and I think about that every time I am forced to listen to someone else’s algorithmic scroll slop in public.

Back in 2011, the Indonesian startup scene looked to the US for inspiration. Turned out this was unrealistic. 5-6 years later, we turned to China. Turned out that was unrealistic too. I think the right place to look for inspiration is actually India..

“You can’t compete with someone who is having fun.” — Tiago Forte

The twin mandates of the academy are the pursuit of truth and its distribution. Failure to pursue truth turns the academy into the Church (a seminary for activists), failure to distribute it turns into the Ivory Tower (onanistically unmoored from practicality).

kids, always remember that money has log(money) utility, not linear utility. and almost all careers offer [10^n, 10^n+1] money, but rarely exceed some bound. ex: quant may be the best way to make 10 million, but the worst way to make 100.

Huh. Looks like Plato was right. A new paper shows all language models converge on the same "universal geometry" of meaning. Researchers can translate between ANY model's embeddings without seeing the original text. Implications for philosophy and vector databases alike.

C. S. Lewis, live near your friends

You can just do things

I have good news. Yes, the land is moving in an illiberal direction. It’s disorderly anarcho-nationalism and anarcho-communism in America. And disturbingly ordered nationalist communism in China. Businessmen are now randomly murdered in the USA and randomly expropriated in the

I often re-read Nat Friedman's personal website (former Github CEO)

Compute is the new labor. Leverage machines, not hours.

This was the only newspaper ad Y Combinator ever ran, in the Stanford Daily. Also the only time I ever wrote ad copy.