📌 Mind Crunches

• OpenAI released two major new preview models last month: o1-preview and o1-mini previously rumored as having the codename “strawberry”. There’s a lot to understand about these models—they’re not as simple as the next step up from GPT-4o, instead introducing some major trade-offs in terms of cost and performance in exchange for improved “reasoning” capabilities. One way to think about these new models is as a specialized extension of the chain of thought prompting pattern—a “think step by step” concept. Pre-trained models are doing next token prediction on an enormous amount of data. They rely on “training-time compute.” An emergent property of scale is basic reasoning, but this reasoning is very limited. What if you could teach a model to reason more directly? This is essentially what’s happening with o-1 models. When we say “inference-time compute” what we mean is asking the model to stop and think before giving you a response, which requires more compute at inference time (hence “inference-time compute”). In case this rings a bell, it’s pretty much the same concept as Kahneman’s System 1/2 thinking. So where do we go from here? I see two major trends:

  • A rapid rise of an agentic economy built on the next-gen reasoning capabilities of LLMs

  • More innovation and focus shifting from the Infra stack of AI, which is dominated by Big Tech, to Inference whose costs go down. This means more apps, new use cases, more VC money pouring in the system.

• The crypto industry went wild the past weeks with AI agents onchain. Some autonomous agents launched memecoins and demonstrated interesting behaviors like for example tipping humans to convert them into influencers. I am personally cautiously optimistic about the future of agents onchain. There are some use cases that make absolute sense like for example providing crypto payment rails for agents to transact onchain or coordinating thousands of micro-agents to orchestrate an action. There are some other that are still emerging but they are fascinating like attaching a real human behind an agent, embedding an agent in your own wallet to provide personalized financial assistance, hooking agents in prediction markets etc. There is also an innovation race for providing amazing tools to launch agents onchain. Coinbase has an SDK to launch an agent in a few minutes, Brian provides an intent engine that makes agent functional, Giza builds a full stack for ZKML agents. The next months will be interesting.

• The world of progress is filled with O-ring problems. For example, driverless cars -a manifestation of brilliant software and hardware engineering- will not be super useful if our roads are bad -something which only requires basic state capacity-. In a similar fashion, next gen AI won’t accelerate Bio sciences if we don’t first address “infra problems” like the cost of raw materials. This is another post from Tyler Cowen on whether AI itself suffers from O-ring problems. I had written about the O-ring theory in one of my previous posts and I have to admit that once you internalize the concept, it becomes like a second nature. You constantly try to identify O-rings that can hinder the success of your idea/project/startup.

• How exactly is it working for Palantir? Highly recommend you reading the whole thing. Especially, the part about moral decision making in tech is fascinating. In a way, this applies to crypto as well. For many people in crypto, the “System” (tradfi, institutions etc) is a priori immoral, hence working with the “System” is anti-crypto. A more empirical/realistic/effective approach would be to pursue crypto projects with the “System”, infuse new behaviors, change the paradigm.

• Satya’s speech on the new world currency: Tokens x USD x Watt. The Crypto version of the currency is: Tokens x Tokens x Node.

• The Startup Pirate on the vibrant Greek crypto ecosystem! A combination of micro and macro factors built the right conditions for many Greeks to play a pivotal role in the future of crypto.

• Casey Handmer makes the case for a terraformed American West. The American West is empty. We could have many more metropolitan cities and a better life for millions of people (this is a good book on why need millions of more people in America). The main problem is water scarcity. The key to solving water scarcity is to make more of it using solar powered desalination technology.

• The Atlas of live players and institutions by the excellent Samo Burja. Again, do yourself a favor and subscribe to Palladium. It’s definitely expensive for a digital subscription but it’s totally worth it!

• Ben Thompson is bullish on Meta’s AI future. His main thesis is that GenAI can make a big impact in advertising and further enhance Meta’s strategy to bypass ATT.

• Oldie but goldie. Paul Graham on Makers’ vs Managers’ Schedule. The way it works for me -that I am not a maker- is to block days, or big chunks of days, for back to back meetings and reserve the rest for deep work.

• The excellent Jason Zhao on how blockchains will eat the world. Come for the tool, stay for the network.

• My observations on the future of prediction markets.

• Sotheby’s first AI art exhibition by Botto. Since 2021, Botto has been generating prompts for text-to-image models without direct human intervention, seeking to create what might qualify as true "art". An open, decentralized community votes on Botto's outputs, training Botto in artistic sensibilities. Weekly, the most popular image is published as a canonical Botto artwork that is then sent to auction. To date, Botto has sold over $4M worth of art, from just over 140 unique pieces.

• Charter cities and network states are currently one of the hottest startup sectors. My personal thesis is that charter cities/special economic is a fascinating concept and have already proven to deliver interesting results. I am all for more innovation, more charter cities, more experimentation. But the concept of “network states” the way it’s articulated in Balajis’ book is problematic mostly in the sense that it envisions a non-pluralistic future focusing on exitocracy when the future we should aspire to is one of deliberate bridging of antithesis and plural governance.

  • The brilliant Devon Zuegel founded Esmeralda, a new city outside San Fransisco.

  • Praxis raised >$500M to build a new city from scratch

  • Zuitzerland is buying land for 10,000 people in Switzerland, with the eventual goal to be Switzerland's 27th Canton (Swiss version of state)

• I have written multiple times in the past how fragile the MSFT<>OAI partnership is. It’s now an established reality that the bromance is over.

• What ladders are you climbing? A great read on the importance of carefully choosing which hierarchies we decide to climb and why.

• The one video you have to watch if you want to understand memecoins. As the famous lyric goes “Nobody know what it means, but it’s provocative. Gets the people going”

• This is a good breakdown of how much smart people are paying to boost their AI productivity. I am using many of these premium services myself. I expect a big consolidation happening pretty soon for most of these services but i still see a market for extremely narrow/specialized LLMs to assist specific professions.

• We have now mapped all the 140,000 neurons in the fruit-fly brain. Magic.

• Packy on Cuby, the most exciting startup that you have never heard of. Build more housing. End of discussion.

• On the importance of being “taught a culture”. Karlsson makes the case that “culture” is a catalyst in the effectiveness of all teaching methods, interventions and tools and if you learn how to “scale culture” you can actually build a new educational movement that will shape individuals throughout their lives the same way that Montessori and Jesuit schools did.

• One thing I am convinced about is the natural PMF of stablecoins in emerging markets. Here is a great report from Castle Island Ventures.

• Short comments on Draghi’s European competitiveness report.

• OnlyFans is a hell of a business.

• Why the energy-hungry AI industry is actually good for the climate. tldr: Clean energy technologies are famous for their learning rates - they get cheaper as you build more of them. Data centres create price-insensitive clean power demand that will foot the bill of expensive early projects. Read the whole thing!

• Lux’s letters to their LPs are always a must read.

• A robot controlled by a fungus. Remember! Fungi are truly amazing.

• A fascinating read on the concept of Advanced Market Commitments or aka Economy as a Service.

• Recommended Blog: Ben James’ blog about the Climate. One of the best blogs out there.

• Recommended Book: The MANIAC - Benjamin Labatut

• Recommended Podcast: The MetaScience podcast series

• Quote: “Bring forward what is true. Write it so that it is clear. Defend it to your last breath.” Ludwig Boltzmann

💡Meditations

• The State Capacity Theory Of Everything: there is a growing consensus that the West is in decline. Income inequality, woke culture, housing shortage, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, falling fertility rates are ingredients of a mix that people use either to justify their degrowth and nihilistic agenda or get motivated to fix things (this blog is, of course, a big advocate of the latter).

  One of the most influential articles I have read the past years is the Housing Theory of Everything from the always excellent Works In Progress. I highly recommend you reading it in detail but in a nutshell the authors believe that housing shortages are the root cause for all the malaise in the West. You may agree or disagree with this view (I personally don’t) but the reason I really loved this post is because it follows a clear and action-oriented rationale on how to fix things. If you are a subscriber, you already know that a core tenet of my life philosophy is an action-first mindset. Only when you do things, you can move forward. You may go sideways or even backwards before you go forward but only when you act, you will generate information to update your worldview. If you want a more academic term, you can use the word “effectuation” which is one of the core values of great tech entrepreneurs I personally admire like Jude Gomila and Brian Armstrong. Or if you are a visual person, this viral meme is a good depiction of effectuation and path dependent futures.

My personal unified theory of everything is that the overall decline is a result of the institutional decay and low state capacity in the West. These two aren’t the same but are communicating vessels. The Niskasen Center has observed that declining state capacity has led to declining trust in government – and a growing impatience with the often messy and muddled workings of democracy

The institutions that were once the four pillars of Western society - representative government, the free market, the rule of law and civil society - are degenerating. The U.S. state capacity is rapidly declining. For example, roads and trains in the U.S. cost much more per mile than other rich countries. Ezra Klein has written a lot about our inability to just build.

So how do we fix this? Renovating democratic institutions and increasing state capacity aren’t easy tasks and definitely don’t have a single magical solution. But at the same time, we have to start somewhere and I am very confident we now have important tools in our hands to help us accelerate.

These “tools” is a combination of sociocultural trends and technological advancements that together form a perfect recipe for meaningful change. I will focus more on the technology side of things but a short summary of the cultural change I see is the continuous rise of Progress studies, optimistic mindset, YIMBYism, nuclear energy advocacy and the realization that “technocracy” is a losing bet.

When it comes to technology, what makes me bullish is the rapid advancement in emerging tech (AI, bio, crypto, energy, defense) and cross-pollination of ideas between seemingly separate fields. I see crypto as a horizontal technology that can enhance other fields infusing them with a foundation of trust, verifiability, transparency and -sometimes- decentralization. I have argued for long time that Crypto needs to become more extrovert and insert itself in the tech optimism and accelerationism narrative.

So what does this have to do with Institutions and nation building? Here are some examples and ideas of how crypto can make Democracy future proof.

• Next-gen Capitalism: a combination of smarter property rights, global and 24/7 free markets and trustless systems is the perfect recipe for an evolved version of capitalism. Packy’s post is still an excellent read on why onchain capitalism is just better than current capitalism. It’s true that capitalism has got a bad name the past years mostly because it’s associated as the root cause of inequality but it’s still the best system we have, it has proven it can bring tangible results to world’s GPD and it’s directly connected with the future of liberalism. Liberalism is another “theory” whose meaning has completely altered from its initial inception but in its core is a philosophy that focuses on individualism, liberty, free markets and equality. These are values that act as communicating vessels with capitalism and can be championed by crypto. Hayek FTW!

• Government information integrity: at its heart, the institutional crisis is about trust. As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama has argued, “Belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to the dead end of universal distrust. American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life.” Blockchain and zero knowledge technologies can solve this by bringing transparency and verifiability to almost all government information from voting to political campaigns and from fiscal figures to agencies spending. One way to have better bureaucracy is to have transparent bureaucracy. Side example: I am Greek and

• Participatory Governance + Deliberative Polling: we need to do a better job on engaging and informing every citizen about local and national issues. It is not possible to manage toward outcomes that are good for all without the inclusion of all in the structures of decision-making used for that management toward outcomes. But at the same time, we can’t succumb to a vetocracy. We already have some early examples of Citizen Assemblies and real-time AI systems for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think. We need to accelerate this and incentivize everyone to participate through zk-voting, NFTs for contributions to local groups and quadratic voting.

• Prediction Markets-Based Policymaking: public discourse around improving democratic systems is currently stagnant and market failures are creating problems across domains, from climate change to extreme inequality in access to healthcare. With prediction markets gaining increasing popularity, we could test a model where an LLM trained with country-specific data is measuring predictions against actual outcomes and asks citizens to vote on policies enabling subsidiarity and reducing conflict between groups.

• Decentralizing Energy: DePINs redefine physical infrastructure management by embedding smart contracts into operational systems. This shift not only reduces operational costs but also accelerates service delivery. Energy DePINs enable individual energy producers, such as homeowners with solar panels, to engage directly in peer-to-peer energy trading. This model bypasses traditional utility frameworks, fostering the adoption of renewable energy sources and democratizing access to energy markets. For example, a16z recently published how we could have a much more performance electric grid if we decentralized it ahead of an incoming load growth.

• An excellent interview with Matt Lira on why U.S. Congress is so slow to adopt digital technologies.

  “That would liberate the rest of that time for higher order tasks, whether that's proactively communicating with constituents or doing legislative research and oversight. And that's just one office. If you take that and apply it across all 435 offices, you've unlocked a ton of institutional capacity.”

• I have written in the past about the Cobra effect of policymaking/regulation and how sometimes well intended movements generate undesirable results. Maxwell Tabarrok has a really interesting post on how environmentalism, one of the most influential political movements of the past decades, is both unnatural and polluting. Eye-opening!

• Extremely excited about the Biden-Harris Housing Plan and their clear focus to accelerate/improve it. Make YIMBYism Great Again.

• Andy Matuschak on his most extensive and insightful post on the science of learning aka how to learn to learn. I picked up the concept of “spaced repetitions” from Andy’s blog a few years ago and it proved to be very impactful for me. This post includes many more tips and recommendations.

• On a similar note, an oldie but goldie post from Haseeb on why our psychological self-reaction to try NOT to look stupid prevents us from actually learning hard things. Excellent!

• I was one of the very few people who publicly said that the Microsoft<>Open AI deal had some amazing short-term impact but it would soon become bumpy and gnarly. Competing incentives, overlapping Venn diagrams between different Open AI partnerships with Big Tech, corporate governance drama, OS AI catching up are very strong forces to ignore. It now seems it’s public consensus that the deal isn’t as perfect as once seemed.

• Why haven't biologists cured cancer?

• It’s very common for the Silicon Valley crowd on Twitter to create cool new narratives about “world changing” startups and I will admit that I have been a victim of this in the past. A great example is Lambda School which apparently was a huge scam inflated by fake numbers and a super-confident CEO who was willing to publicly lie about these numbers. A great read that feels like Bad Blood.

• Concerning field results for UBI-like experiments keep coming up. If you are interested in UBI, I highly recommend Esther Duflo’s “Poor Economics”.

• Synthetic data won’t solve the data wall problem on their own. New research shows that indiscriminate use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, in which tails of the original content distribution disappear. Also, my pov about the data wall problem.

• A blogpost on how life in China actually is from the always excellent Lux Securities. Self-recommended.

• Palmer Luckey’s interview at Tablet magazine is already viral (and a great read). The most interesting part of it is Luckey’s view about free will and how our environment at early age pretty much shapes (or determines if you want) what we will do in the future. Luckey thinks that future is pretty deterministic to which I personally agree. A great assorted post was recently published by the excellent Matt Clancy about the effect that mentors have on what their students will study.

  “I’ve always done a lot of thinking around free will and whether it exists,” he said as his eyes reopened. “And I’m quite concerned that I’m doing what I was programmed to do when I was 8 years old. If you like Yu-Gi-Oh! and the Power Rangers, can you really do anything except build virtual reality and tools of violence to enact your aims while feeling superior?”

  “Probably not,” he said. “You probably just have to do it.”

• My latest obsession is Virginia Postrel.

• Super cool AI hardware that I don’t need but I would buy just to reward the unconventional mindset of Avi Schiffmann.

• Personal highlight of summer: meeting Manolis Kellis in person. He is building some really cool stuff that will go public pretty soon. His podcast with Lex is a great way to get familiar with his research.

• I have written multiple times in the past how impressed I am by Sakana AI and their focus on nature-inspired methods to advance cutting-edge foundation models. Their latest “AI Scientist” release is probably the most fascinating thing I have personally seen since the whole ChatGPT craziness started. It is the first comprehensive system for fully automatic scientific discovery from idea generation to paper writing. Even as I am typing this, I can’t fully scope the importance of this initiative. Super bullish on Sakana AI!

• ESM3 is fire!

• Patrick Collison on how to change the world.

• It was a matter of time to see the AI stack getting commoditized and turn into a race to the bottom.

  • You can now train a pretty good diffusion model with $2K.

  • You can now run Llama-3-405b with 2 MacBooks at your living room.

• Recommended Blog: The Techno-Humanist Manifesto by Jason Crawford

• Recommended Book: The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder - David Grann

• Recommended Podcast: Evolved Technology - Why Tech Is Counter-Intuitively Pushing Us Back To Natural Products In Pharma

• Quote: “The whole is simpler than its parts” Josiah Gibbs

On Crypto’s Lack of Culture Market Fit: Crypto has many challenges to face (political enemies, lack of regulation, bad actors are just a few) but I hold the unpopular opinion that its biggest problem is that it still hasn’t found Culture Market Fit. By that, I mean that it still hasn’t convinced the younger generations that it’s not just cool but actually groundbreaking to use crypto. This video with Ohio State's commencement speaker being booed by mentioning Bitcoin is just an example of how much the average, non-tech person hates crypto. I don’t blame them. Crypto has a very bad reputation but more importantly has failed to eloquently communicate its values and ethos to the masses. We spent too much time trying to find utility but we forgot culture. This is a short screenshot essay I wrote about this.

• A really insightful analysis on the current state of the AI industry. It’s quite funny that one of the points made is that distribution is king (to which I agree) and a few hours later the first rumors of an Apple<>Open AI partnership came out. Another key point is that Microsoft isn’t so well positioned anymore. This is also something that I agree with. A personal conclusion is that the Open AI<>Microsoft partnership is poorly designed and it will either backfire (almost did a few months ago) or will create conflicting market positioning. Will write a post dedicated on this soon.

• Eli Dourado on how societies collapse. Exellent essay.

• Hidden culture gem. Asterisk online magazine. It’s added in my list of favorite Internet corners with: Palladium, Noema, Works In Progress.

• Anthropic just killed prompt engineering.

• Climate activists attacking Tesla’s factory in Germany is the most post-surrealistic thing you will watch this week. It also has GenAI video vibes. It feels like Sora made it. Which makes the whole thing even weirder.

• Money doesn’t solve homelessness. I have spent a lot of time reading and thinking about homelessness because it still strikes me as something which is relatively easy to solve for a country with the economic power of US. This report is excellent not because it comes up with amazing insights we didnt already know but because it outlines everything that has been already documented. Homelessness is a multi-variable problem that requires good data, strong coordination between public and private sector, money and most importantly a logical way of thinking. None of that exists in the US and especially in the West Coast.

• Recommended podcast: Sam Altman on All-In Podcast. It’s very interesting to me how Open AI and Sam Altman aren’t so popular/loved anymore, especially in tech crowds. Of course, there are many people who don’t approve Open AI approach regarding AI regulation and OSS models and some others who got disappointed by the whole Open AI drama. But I believe it’s also the fact that Altman quickly converted into a political animal. Every word he says is extremely calculated (which I personally find OK considering his position) and unfortunately lacks of any major insight/substance. He is just extremely careful not saying anything out of script and ends up sounding like a bot. I guess someone would argue he isn’t a live player anymore.

• Recommended Blog: Not Boring by Packy McCormick

• Recommended Book: Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World Hardcover - Nick Bostrom

• Quote: “Happinness writes in white ink in white pages”

• The Convex vs Concave Debate about Decentralization: one of the things I have realized about the world is that most problems/challenges/debates can be viewed as a battle between convex and concave philosophies. If you aren’t familiar with these concepts, a concave pov is when someone tends to think that non-extreme (something in the middle) solutions are the best while convex theory promotes a binary way of thinking (this is the only solution). An area that the convex vs concave pov applies very well is that of decentralization. I work in an industry that is obsessed with decentralization and this is one of the reasons I love working in crypto. But nature/history/personal experiences show that an obsession with decentralization can often lead to slow decision making, inaction and chaos. There is a deep biological tendency to work collectively and in a decentralized way (think of cells inside an organism) but there is also a natural urgency to act/decide fast in a very centralized fashion. So how can we build an agile and adaptive model to use Minimum Viable Centralization (MVC) without succumbing to the challenges of centralized concentration of power? How can we learn from nature/biology where organisms often use very centralized decision overruling decentralized systems for the greater good of the whole? So far, the framework of quadratic voting/funding seems to be a well-thought approach to this problem. There is also a deeper philosophical question that arises from this debate. Should we judge the “whole” for the actions of one of its “units”? Or does each unit have its own existence/decision making progress/entity? In real terms, should we judge/cancel/criticize a political party/media organization for the bad/unethical actions of one of their candidates/journalists?

• On Technological Parasitism: this is something I have been monitoring on a daily basis in terms of how Web2 and Web3 influence one another. It was recently reported that the New York Stock Exchange is considering to open up 24/7 trading as a way to adapt to the always on nature of the crypto economy. Most people, including Uniswap’s CEO, encouraged this and perceived it as a sign of the “traditional world” adopting crypto practices but I am bit more pessimistic. I see this as a form of parasitism (in that case Web2 being the parasite) where the traditional world copies the best ideas and maybe some tech primitives from Crypto but not the core ethos/values of decentralization. If that happens, then we end up in the worst equilibrium where major corporations keep harnessing power/revenues and they can still communicate they “transformed”.

• On HyperStructures: Since the moment I first read about the concept of hyperstructures, I have been fascinated with them. In its literal sense, a hyperstructure is an algebraic formula but in the context of networks, a hyperstucture is an open, permissionless and expansive protocol that runs on a blockchain and is coordinated by cryptography. The analogies with ecologies and evolutionary biology are numerous. At first, I realized that GenAI will enable us to build entrepreneurship hyperstructures where builders will build rails for other builders and so forth and so on (the inspiration was Shopify’s announcement of Sidekick). But in a Web2 environment, you still have some closed doors/permissions/moats that don’t allow the ecosystem to grow organically. But this isn’t the case with blockchains. Lens or Farcaster are open protocols on top of blockchains that can grow exponentially allowing anyone to build their apps on top of them, the protocol teams can build modular “rails” to make app creation easier and apps can form new added value when they connect with each other. They are positive sum infinite games and we never had something like that before. The coolest thing about them isn’t only their expansive nature but also how they can change the behavior of static players. For example, we now see more and more VCs launching OSS products to kickstart the flywheel of app building on top of hyperstructures. a16z Jolt is a great example.

• Tech/Political Ideologies: still debating myself about Thiel's famous analogy AI=communist/Crypto=libertarian. The analogy that seems to work for me at the moment is: AI=mercantilism, Crypto= classical liberalism (democracy+capitalism+meritocracy), ZK=libertarianism. Glen Weyl’s post on 21st centuries political ideologies is still a must-read. For people who are interested in what framework is the closest to my political beliefs, I highly recommend reading the Power-Sharing Liberalism manifesto. I look forward to a future with more plural political ideologies that don’t fall in the trap of Left/Right but rather create a new worldview through an ongoing and dynamic deliberation of their constituents.

• On Procrastination as a Competitive Advantage: Procrastination has a bad name but it can unlock amazing alpha if you accept it and convert it into an intellectual serendipity and combinatorial thinking enabler. I have found the skill of “staying informed in different fields/disciplines” to be one of the most important pillars in my career. Staying informed and developing combinatorial thinking gives you an amazing edge if you are working in Strategy/BD roles. Many people conflate "staying informed" with unproductive procrastination and twitter scrolling but, at least in my experience, it's a skill that requires constant optimization (information diet) and rigorous planning (when to read, where to store info, taking notes etc). It took me many years to understand that "staying informed" is a competitive advantage and I was happy to see Josh Wolfe (Lux Capital) and Haseeb Qureshi (Dragonfly) recently sharing their stories on how procrastination has actually helped them stay on edge and I am now convinced that we have been fooling ourselves for years. Procrastination is good. You just have to embrace it!

• Do Your Own Research (DYOR) Limitations: How realistic is to expect everyone to do their own research, especially in highly complex issues? Does DYOR lead to more extremist views and amplification of conspiracy theories or does it lead to a wiser crowd equilibrium? And how can someone rely on his own research when it’s also true that most media/academic journals/government sources are ideologically biased? Blockchains could be (part of) a solution providing a proof of truth.

  🧑‍💻 Things That Excite Me

• The concept of collective intelligence:

  • I have written in the past that Michael Levin is one of the most fascinating scientists out there. His latest paper argues that intelligence doesn’t have a narrow, specific definition (as we tend to believe) but it’s rather a concept of collective decision making between competent sub units. If you don’t like reading papers, his Noema article is a great summary of the basic findings.

  • Sakana AI, a Japanese GenAI startup developing nature-inspired LLMs. Their latest research proposes an evolutionary approach that automatically discovers effective combinations of diverse open-source models, harnessing their collective intelligence without requiring extensive additional training data or compute.

• What if we interpret History wrong? What if we could find new patterns that explain differently many historical facts? This research describes how using stochastic processes to analyze historical datasets could reveal surprising patterns that have gone unnoticed in previous models. A stochastic model, which incorporates uncertainty and randomness, would treat historical shifts not as deterministic but instead as probabilistic.

• Bacterias are technically motors that can rotate and switch directions.

• The Sphere: I recently had the chance to visit The Sphere in Las Vegas. I consider myself a techno-optimist but I also recognize that the older I get, the more cynical I become about tech-driven narratives. Which means that I didn’t expect to be amazed by The Sphere. I have to admit that it was a transcending experience. The enormity of the venue definitely creates a wow factor but I believe the reason it touches so many people is because it’s a sensory-centric innovation. You don’t experience something new/unknown like you do with AI or robots. In a way, the experience is super basic. You are watching a movie. But then it hits you. It’s the first time that you don’t have to adjust your senses to the size/shape of the screen. You can look in any direction and see something. Exactly as you do IRL with your peripheral vision. The Ultra-HD makes the whole thing hyper-real. Human senses on steroids. The Sphere= Technological Ayahuasca.

🎤 Speaking at Panels/Podcasts

• I moderated a panel, organized by 1kx, about the future of decentralized and verifiable AI at ETH Denver.

• I was invited at Delphi Venture’s podcast to discuss about the intersection of crypto and AI with Casey Caruso and Colin Gagich.

• Casual conversation with Panos Papadopoulos and Alex Alexakis from Marathon VC about the state of crypto and the transition from Big Tech to Web3.

📌 Mind Crunches

• If you are into Progress studies (as I am), take a look at the newly formed Abundance Institute and this piece on how we can re-brand Progress.

• Plurality, the book from Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang about the future of collaborative digital democracy, is finalized and will be soon printed and published. I was honored to be part of this project from the very beginning and I have come to realize that Plurality is now the framework I am using most often to think of complex, multi-disciplinary challenges. Highly recommended.

• Crypto is back baby!

• It’s been 18months since ChatGPT caught the world by storm which means that we can now have a solid understanding of where the money is made, if there are moats and how the stack will evolve. At the moment, most value is accrued on the Semi/GPU level (duh) but the trend shows that Apps will be able to build stronger monetization and rely less on the NVIDIAs of the world. I believe this is a valid hypothesis but I also think we will see more innovation in the Decentralized AI space that will completely transform the pyramid into a different shape with new players like Data DAOs, aggregated compute layers and synthetic data marketplaces.

• Hottest trends in GenAI: small, on device, no cloud LLMs and AI agents trained on synthetic data.

• I recently had the great opportunity to meet Emad Mostaque in person. He recently stepped down from CEO at Stability AI and he is pursuing a very inspiring vision about decentralized, locally aligned and transparent AI world. One of a kind! More news on what he’s cooking soon.

• How to do things if you aren’t smart or talented!

• Memecoins and DAOs are very GenZ concepts and they have attracted (not always unfairly) a lot of criticism but I find them to be very interesting social experiments on community building, culture alignment and coordination. Higher has the potential to be the first decentralized brand.

• Based on the latest Stanford research, Industry has released 80 more AI foundation models than Academia. Not sure how I feel about this.

• NTUA is the MIT of Europe. We can do even better.

• Lux Capital published its first risk gaming simulation. This (risk games) is something that they have been doing/offering as a service to many organizations but now it’s the first time they publish one.

• Regardless of your job, we are all in the business of building worlds. Great read.

• What if there isn’t a great stagnation? I am personally not convinced by the core argument of the article but the concept of “cumulative culture” is fascinating.

• Hugging Face is a force of nature. Still haven’t figured out how other startups can actually compete with HF. They seem invincible.

• Simple steps on how to build a new city in California.

• How is Dwarkesh Patel preparing for his podcast interviews? For what it’s worth, I have a very similar philosophy about everything in life. (and mostly in business)

• Why civilizations collapse? The tldr; is that it’s very difficult to reform societies that accumulate social and cultural technical debt but make yourself a favor and read the whole thing. Samo Burja is excellent.

• Palmer Luckey is hands down the most exciting, refreshing, anti-fragile, fun tech CEO out there.

• Take more shots. What’s there to lose?

• It is now well established that high quality data create better LLMs. But where do you find clean data? Hugging Face released FineWeb, a dataset of more than 15T tokens of cleaned and deduplicated english web data from CommonCrawl.

• Recommended podcasts:

  • Dwarkesh’s podcast with Zuck. Fascinating conversation on the future of open source LLMs and Zuck’s decision framework. Ate-a-Pi’s summary is great.

  • Tyler’s conversation with Jon Haidt. It’s been almost 8 years that I have been following Cowen and I don’t remember a single other episode where he had a more heated debate with someone. I haven’t read Haidt’s latest book but it seemed to me that his rationale/argumentation is much more logical than Cowen’s. Also, people start finding holes in Cowen’s polymath namedropping.

  • Sriram Krishnan's career lessons after 20 years in tech.

• Recommended Blogs:

  • Strange Loop Cannon, Rohit Krishnan

  • Guzey, Alexey Guzey

• Recommended Books:

  • Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

  • The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

  • The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

  • Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class

• Quote of the month: “Hypocrisy in search of social acceptance erodes self-respect”

• Photo of the month: a glimpse of the hyper-real experience at the Sphere.

Write anything - from your smallest paragraph to your grandest masterpiece - and publish it online or send it as email newsletters directly to your readers.

Your Paragraph publication is blazing-fast, SEO optimized, and combines the best parts of both web2 and web3 to help you create content and grow your community better than ever.

Getting started

What you're looking at right now is the Paragraph editor. We support markdown, callouts, code, and rich media embeds like Twitter and YouTube.

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On paragraph.xyz, all posts are stored on @ArweaveTeam. This means they're immutable, uncensorable, permanent, and composable

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Paragraph | all-in-one publishing & newsletter platform

Create, publish and share web3-native blogs & newsletters.

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7:12 PM • Aug 18, 2022

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