💡 Reflections
Politics is everything: the last weeks, the tech industry (or at least #techtwitter) has been taken aback by two speeches that took place in the All In Summit and the Permisionless conference. The first one is from Bill Gurley and the second from Erik Voorhees. I highly recommend you watching these speeches because, regardless of where you politically stand, they are definitely interesting. But we have watched inspirational speeches in the past. YouTube is full of them. What I found especially interesting this time is not the speeches themselves but the fact that the tech industry is openly debating again about deeply political and philosophical concepts. It’s been a long time since we had skillful orators laying out their vision about emerging technologies or venture capitalism and it’s so refreshing to see that individuals, from random twitter users to CEOs, are willing to openly discuss about the values of liberal democracy vs libertarianism, express their views on podcasts about the ethics of government regulation and productively end up in a common ground that will advance the industry and humanity all up. We spent a lot of time and energy discussing the technical background of GenAI, the intricacies of modular blockchains and the infrastructure of a future Metaverse but at the same time it became very clear that if we want these technologies to actually work, scale and change our lives we should reach a consensus about some more basic (but equally complex) stuff like progress, regulation, democracy, governance. Why did this happen now? My theory is exactly because we can see how fast the pace of tech innovation is we can compare it with “real life” and instantly recognize that the chasm is growing. This is not a sentiment. It’s a reality. Our institutions are old and sclerotic. America can’t build anything but at the same time LLMs can work on protein structures. If we want to have real spillover effects to our everyday life we need to find a common political ground. This is something I have been thinking a lot about and while I find merit in competing worldviews (libertarianism, pluralism, mercantilism) I am convinced that the right way forward is a renovated, not rebuilt, form of liberal capitalism. Regardless, it’s great that we remembered we are all political animals. Aristotle would definitely love crypto and I am convinced that he would write long essays on regulatory capture.
On Singapore: I recently traveled to Singapore for the first time. I was really looking forward to that trip both because I was excited to speak at Token2049 (hopefully the video from my panel will be published soon) but also because I wanted to experience this amazing sociopolitical experiment called Singapore. I have been reading a lot about Lee Kuan Yew and how he managed to transform a failed post-colonial strip of land into a fully developed country with high-income but I was also curious to see whether I could detect any signs of “political capitalism”. Political capitalism, which is technically the political philosophy of Singapore’s government, is an alternative form of capitalism associated with effective technocratic bureaucracy and the autonomy of the state in matters of private capital and civil society. It’s technically a mildly “illiberal” evolution of liberal capitalism. It was of course naive of me to think that I would be able to recognize subtle nuances of a political philosophy visiting Singapore just for 3 days but I did find some very interesting nuggets:
Local -English- newspapers were very critical of how “autocratic” the government was. It’s important to remember that The PAP has won every election in Singapore since 1959. That by itself is problematic.
There was a lot of public nudging mostly addressed towards preventing illegal behaviors. The debate about the ethics of nudging is complicated and, personally, I don’t have a strong view but it felt like a lot like adult babysitting. For the record, nudge policies try to improve people's decisions by changing the ways options are presented to them, rather than changing the options themselves or incentivizing or coercing people.
The city seemed to be split into 3 parts. The super glamorous eco-futuristic neighbor with Marina Bay Sands, the business center with skyscrapers and local food shops and the residential area with abundant public housing. In other words, a perfect blend. The key questions are still not answered. Could Singapore scale if it was a bigger country? Is there a realistically better governance model, based on liberal values, than Singapore’s?
On my production function: I very often get the question, both from friends and colleagues, on how I stay up to speed with interesting updates on crypto, AI and various mind crunches. I am planning to write a post dedicated just on this but a very useful shortcut is to identify initiatives and/or lists with a lot of “interestingness” like grant programs. For example, Daniel Gross recently released the second batch of AI startups that received support/funding from his accelerator. It is 100% certain that just by going through the websites of these startups, you will be able to pick up some emerging patterns. Another example is the Blogging Fellowship from Roots of Progress. There are zero chances that you won’t find something really interesting or provocative in these 20 blogs. Once you identify the blogs/lists/startups/accounts that are of the most interest to you, having your own lists is a good productivity accelerator. A new tool I am experimenting with is Matter. It’s an interesting product where you can gather all your favorite reads and podcasts in one place and then be able to easily reference and search what you want.
📌 Mind Crunches
A common theme of my previous posts is my skepticism towards the **real** change that GenAI can unlock. Ramani’s and Wang’s essay is a great read if you want to deep dive on the limitations/bottlenecks for AI.
Things that excite me: rapidly scaling ZKML.
Matt Huang, from Paradigm, on thinking crypto as a new planet. I have some philosophical objection with the notion of a new planet but I found it very interesting. I found Packy’s essay on on-chain capitalism even more interesting.
Rohit Krishnan on the case for sabbaticals. Highly recommended post and personally endorsed philosophy. There are multiple times in my career that I have mentally struggled because I wish I had more intellectual freedom and time to explore new ideas. As Amos Tversky has famously said: “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours”.
Acemoglu on how to regulate AI.
Crypto is still a weird industry. And this is good!
I have been thinking about this tweet a lot!
“Recent work indicates that innovative firms and scientific institutions tend to exhibit an anti-novelty bias when evaluating new projects and ideas” - the fact that big firms are more inclined towards “safer” incremental solutions compared to risky innovations is something almost everyone working in BigTech already knows. Having a paper to prove it is always welcome!
New Lux Ventures report is out! Not as super insightful as previous issues, but still a great read.
“What I would really like to see is large-scale public libraries of prompts, written by known experts and tested carefully for different audiences” - Ethan Mollick on the importance of packaging knowledge for others.
Steven Sinofsky on why we should be suspicious of companies asking to be regulated. Spot on.
Ben Evans showing the future of LLMs in one photo.
Kellogg announces a new research institute focusing on complexity sciences. Every initiative that promotes complexity sciences -and biomimicry practices- is a good initiative.
A live experiment of how Andy Matuschak, one of the leading scientists on mnemonic media and meta-learning, is absorbing new information.
People in 1993 reacting to credit cards being accepted at a Burger King. Makes you think what is the equivalent scenario of today. I am biased but I’d say crypto/stablecoins.
Do you remember the (now) famous AI Simulacra paper? It’s now fully developed into an online town with AI agents.
Jude Gomila on why a bad plan > no plan. In other words, effectuation is a very important concept in business especially for new/emerging technologies.
We are close to see entrepreneurship hyperstructures! Like this. And this. Exciting times.
History is facing a replication crisis. Not surprised at all since most scientific research has the same problem. Blockchains can (partially) address this challenge.
Back in 2020, I had started becoming excited about the forthcoming knowledge/brain as a service industry but I could never imagine how fast and scalable this could be. Fast forward to today, Delphi is offering everyone the ability to clone bots on their data/style.
Erik Hoel on the supremacy of novels compared to any other artistic form.
The brilliant Shrey Jain on AI x Crypto!
Map of maps of interesting fields! My favorite one is Nadia Asparouhova’s map of climate tribes.
The first full brain connectome of an adult animal, in that case of a fruit fly, is now available for everyone to analyze.
“The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work.” - Paul Graham, one of the best essayists out there, on how to do great work.
The business model of manufacturing drugs in space is a fascinating read because you can clearly observe the economics of first principles even in super complex industries like the one that Varda operates in. Reminder: I had written about Varda Space in my previous post.
“Those differences can help explain why bigger firms keep up the R&D pace, even as they appear to be worse at doing R&D. Maybe they aren’t actually worse at R&D! They just do less innovation we can see, and more that we can’t.” Matt Clancy, one of the very few researchers in the world who can dissect how innovation actually happens.
A primer on xenobots. Bonus: one of the pioneering figures in xenobots research is Michael Levin, a scientist whose work I try to follow as closely as possible. He recently launched his personal blog which I highly recommend.
For the first time after many years, Europe is actually the leading hub for a new technology innovation. Blockchain :)
Concise explanations accelerate progress. Simple as that!
Marginal Revolution celebrated 20 (!!) years of daily blogging. I am visiting MR every single day since 2016 and I always find a cultural hidden gem. Hands down the most influential website out there.
Recommended book: Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality. Such a well written biography that connects how Parfit’s personal journey actually led him to write one of the most influential philosophical books of the past century. Most people have an outdated view of what it means to be a philosopher. This is a great read to understand what philosophers do and more importantly how they do it.
Recommended podcast: The Complete History & Strategy of Costco, Acquired FM
Recommended Newsletter: Statecraft, a newsletter about how policymakers actually get things done!
Quote of the month: “Failure comes from a failure to imagine failure. More things can happen than will.” Josh Wolfe
Photo of the month: Card Players, 1991, Fernando Botero
Botero, who died last week, is one of my favorite artists and it was so interesting to see modern/pop artists (like KAWS or Cleon Peterson for example) throughout the years being clearly influenced by his style and approach. Genius!