Unfortunately, it took me way too long to realize how important your environment is. You can basically become a different person by changing your environment. If you care about tech or startups, you’re at a big disadvantage if you don’t live in SF. For this reason, when I decided to found a company I had to visit. After meeting a menagerie of investors, founders, twitter personalities and internet friends I decided to join the Entrepreneurs First program. It’s not yet clear what my company will do, but I’m confident we will be successful.
The highlight of my trip was probably riding in the Waymo (self driving car). I can’t wait for self driving cars to proliferate. Another was discovering that all the memes about SF are true, and in fact understated. A big thanks to everyone that helped me out, met with me, introduced me etc. I appreciate it!
A lot of people asked me why I want to start a company and what exactly I want to achieve. Broadly I have 3 goals:
- Live free or die. Live a beautiful life.
- Find “the girl” and eventually have kids.
- Work on something meaningful and big, and lead the next generation of the tech mafia.
Speculation about the future:
Thought dump, don’t take this as gospel.
Culture/Sociopolitics
TLDR
Breaking free of the algorithm and path of least resistance is the most important challenge
The struggle occurs between established, older rent seekers and the intelligent, dynamic but powerless youth.
- The delta between nonphysical, unregulated industries vs legacy, rent seeking industries will widen. The former will become extremely efficient, the latter will keep dragging us down.
- Middle class Westerners will opt out off the typical career. 1st gen immigrants will dream of going to offices in the downtown but middle class natives will just chill.
- An aging population plus increased longevity means that political power will be concentrated in the hands of non productive older people which will strangle a lot of growth.
- The complexity line - tasks where a human is a valuable addition to the AI. Anyone that can stay above this line will be in great demand, but over time this will be harder and harder to achieve.
- The delta between someone skilled and motivated vs an average person will widen greatly.
- A small group of highly productive institutions will carry society. High income inequality, but standards of living rise for everyone. Jealousy.
- The public will judge AI by its visible impact, not by the marginal efficiency it adds.
- There will be some SNAFU that gets blamed on AI at some point, and AI will have a group of dedicated haters.
- Memes will only get more valuable. Understanding the memes is very important.
- global homogenization will continue, taste is an important differentiating factor. Everyone will use the same AI models and derivative products. Everyone will accomplish tasks in the same way.
AI
- AI will take decades to trickle through the economy. Some sectors might be changed overnight.
- One or two areas of life will change visibly due to AI. The real gains will be non-visible efficiency gains (companies using AI lawyers instead of in house counsel etc) across the economy.
- Entities the utilize AI tools to their fullest will gain a lot more from AI than the makers of said tools.
- The AI line - information that can’t be obtained or digested by models. Anything below the line is waiting to get swallowed.
- The next gen app replaces/is the browser? Has access to all your chats and online accounts. You use it for everything, many tasks (semi) autonomously. It provides personalized recommendations for shopping and purchases. e commerce stores switch from SEO to AI optimized.
- AI systems make purchases for you.
- Owning the app/client is more valuable than owning the model.
- The operating system gets abstracted away, every interaction is via the AI app.
- To the extent that robotics is a control problem it will be solved. It will be very expensive to deploy these systems initially but afterwards cost will drop precipitously.
Other
- Theoretical science boils down to data + 1 in a million talents.
- Physical science won’t be massively disrupted. AI wont meaningfully impact drug discovery or materials science.
- Services companies will have tools (API coupled with a service) that give them order of magnitude more capabilities than a decade ago. Can be a lot smaller. Ops will be the sum of their tool choices and configs.
- China has a massive wave of technical (engineering) talent coming. China’s best talent won’t seek to emigrate. We should expect Chinese tech companies to easily match western ones in terms of engineering and operations. They will be competitive in the west if allowed to operate.
- Human connection and personal networks remain extremely important.
- Using standardized parts for advanced instrumentation is the new meta (see for instance using commercial chips for the mars helicopter)
Questions See AGI trades
- What happens with chips? What happens to everyone in the supply chain?
- Once things stabilize, what part of AI production becomes the bottleneck, energy? raw materials? fabs?
- What happens with China - Taiwan? How does China - USA play out?