Adam Peterson @Dad_Build_Run

AI Alignment is the DEI of yesteryear. Started with good intentions but then became a machine whose focus shifted to garnering more power, and resulted in worse outcomes than beforehand.

Christopher Nguyen ⽗ @pentagoniac

a day ago

AI alignment began as a control problem. It is becoming something much bigger: deciding what values machines should internalize, and then allowing those values to be applied back to humans. That raises a harder question: Aligned to whom? x.com/i/article/2108…

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$1 BILLION of your gas money since 2015 for “solar on low-income apartments.” We audited it: $72 million actually bought panels. $928 million went to Sacramento nonprofits doing “environmental justice” — voter registration and ballot harvesting. Becerra will keep feeding that machine. I’ll kill the hidden gas tax, get you to $3 gas, and put your money back in your pocket. WAKE UP CALIFORNIA.

Imagine being a tech founder and not on @X for these insights, opinions, and announcements.

Satya Nadella @satyanadella

a day ago

x.com/i/article/2108…

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Best treasury secretary ever

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent @SecScottBessent

21 hours ago

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Solid follow for AI takes.

Jeremiah Dillon @jeremiahdillon

2 days ago

The price of AI capability is falling faster than any technology in history. How long does it take for the price of a given capability to fall 10x? 💡 LED lights: 10 years 💻 Computer memory: 5 years 💾 Hard disk storage: 3 years 🧬 Genome sequencing: 16 months 🤖 LLMs: 6

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Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies. • How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be. • In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good! • It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.) • A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to). • Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big. • Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

Haha

Thomas Rice @thomasrice_au

3 days ago

Google has solved naming things.

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#StartX alum @Jonsid, founder and CEO of Turing ($2.2B valuation), says zero-to-one always comes down to 3 things: capital, first customers, early team. He calls his time here as one of the most educational parts of building it. Apply: startx.com/apply?s=app_ca… #StanfordFounders

So you want to “tax the rich”, do ya? The LA “Mansion Tax” in its first 3 years has resulted in: * a revenue DECREASE of $452 million * 9100 new home constructions blocked (1000 of which were “affordable housing”) * 16,650 full time construction jobs lost

Two things matter most when hiring executives or promoting leaders internally: 1. Can they hire exceptional people? 2. Can they solve hard problems? External executives are usually experienced at building teams, but often lack the context and content depth to solve the hardest problems themselves. Internal leaders usually get promoted because they’re exceptional problem solvers. The question is whether they can become exceptional at hiring. The best leaders can do both.

@JTLonsdale isn’t wrong

Joe Lonsdale @JTLonsdale

a week ago

@Jason Nobody sane prefers the socialists. He closed the border. Made DC safer and more beautiful. Cut a ton of waste and added some merit to govt, and built great tech that saves citizens billions of hours. The “war” took a huge amount of courage to confront a group holding the world

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🚨Abigail Spanberger unveiled her energy plan today… spoiler alert: it’s TERRIBLE. Here’s the rundown: ➡️The plan acknowledges that removing Virginia from RGGI, repealing VCEA, & ending the mandates would save ratepayers $127 BILLION ➡️The plan invents a totally bogus “social cost of carbon” statistic to make it look less expensive than it really is. ➡️Up to 277,000 acres of farms and forests will be converted to big, ugly solar arrays. ➡️The plan admits that Virginia must import 30 PERCENT of its energy from other states if it is implemented, adding even more costs for ratepayers. ➡️Under this plan, the projected average residential electricity bill will be $274/month by 2039. BOTTOM LINE: Spanberger & Democrats’ plan will result in YOUR FAMILY paying more, not less. This is not an “affordability” plan. It’s Virginia’s very own version of the Green New Scam that will make electricity - and everything else - more expensive.

@jgebbia @elonmusk @POTUS Thank YOU for your service!

I left Silicon Valley 6 years ago Why? Because it's a monoculture The most extreme group think of any place on the planet Show up to a dinner party and everyone is in tech So what do they do? They start stack-ranking each other And it's a totally ordered set: being founder of co $100B market cap > founder of co with $50B market cap > managing partner of tier 1 venture firm > hired CEO of $50B public co > founder of $10B co > etc etc Pure toxicity that nerfs creativty And then as a corollary, people are especially afraid to speak truth to power as everyone knows their place in "The Hierarchy" Reject this nonsense. Stay weird. Think independently. Be honest with yourself. Have fun.

@StevenShortino Will certainly be nice when the supply side of diesel gets figured out

Today at Hello America, we witnessed history in the making.    For almost 50 years, I've dedicated my life to helping people improve the quality of their lives, and I've worked with presidents on both sides of the aisle for more than 35 years.     I'm truly grateful to have been here to kick off the launch of America.gov, and to introduce the President of the United States and my friend of 15 years, @jgebbia. Joe is the co-founder of Airbnb and America's first Chief Design Officer, and he led the world-class team that built America.gov.    America.gov is a brand-new website built for one purpose: a government that truly SERVES its people.    Our government, sometimes with the best of intentions, has made it very difficult to get the help you've been promised.     Today that changes: 29,000 government websites are now ONE, using AI to answer your questions, and soon it will do the work for you. It's one website, one place, all the answers. It's simple, easy, and there for you whenever you need it.     You can even speak in three languages, with more to come. You have to check it out!    People right, left, and center came together to make this happen. Built by Americans, for Americans, to change the quality of your life. 🇺🇸🤝

Do the DMV next

Department of State @StateDept

2 weeks ago

PRESIDENT TRUMP: As Secretary Rubio, who by the way is doing a fantastic job, will demonstrate, getting a passport once required appointments, paperwork, and months of waiting. Now, it's done in a few simple clicks.

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Awesome to learn about the new bio wet lab in SF. WuhAnthropic will be so fun.

Listen to all three minutes. No notes, just a mom who doesn't play about her kids. This is the new standard for parents who care about what their kids are learning in school.