In the 90s, the worry was that only the rich would have digital products. That was called the digital divide. And it turned out to be completely wrong.Because digital is cheap.Physical is the premium product. ...

RT a16z (@a16z)Balaji Srinivasan on the coming verification gap in an AI world.“AI is going to create massive numbers of jobs in proctoring and verification because it’s so good at faking things.”“AI makes everything fake, and crypto makes it real again.”@balajishttps://t.co/65sKsnsCuv ...

The cost-of-living crisis is really a sovereign debt crisis.You can only print and borrow for so long.It causes problems in the long run.And the long run is here. https://t.co/e4XPpyVt7r ...

RT a16z (@a16z)Balaji Srinivasan says every startup now needs a founding creator. Someone who speaks for the product before it ships.“The founding engineer is the how… The founding creator is the why.”@balajis https://t.co/gmbgWa0PRw ...

For years, the conventional wisdom was to put 100% of your energy into building, and to ignore politics.The problem was that those who put 100% of their energy into fighting, particularly politicians, would then take everything you’d built.Like the video game Civilization. If you put everything into science and commerce, while the next door tribe puts it all into swordsmen and slogans, they’ll waltz over and walk over you.The temptation is then to respond in kind, by putting 100% of your resources into figh ...

I’d add to @karpathy’s point that LLMs are also optimized for being downstream of humans rather than upstream.Like domesticated dogs or horses, they have been bred for alignment, to do what humans tell them to do. ...

Animal evolution: survival of the fittestDigital evolution: survival in the marketAndrej Karpathy (@karpathy):Something I think people continue to have poor intuition for: The space of intelligences is large and animal intelligence (the only kind we've ever known) is only a single point, arising from a very specific kind of optimization that is fundamentally distinct from that of our ...

Caveat: optionality isn’t everything.The best long-term relationships (commercial and otherwise) are actually with just one party. If you switch too much, you don’t compound over time.Like the multi-armed bandit problem. Exploration (optionality) vs exploitation (commitment).Suhail Kakar (@SuhailKakar):@balajis this actually applies to everything in life. optionality is the most underrated form of wealth :) ...

Also holds for supply chains.If you have at least two independent vendors, you have one reliable supply chain.But if you have only one vendor, you may end up with zero margin.So: if you have two, you have one, and if you have one, you have zero. ...

The lesson of deals is that if you have two, you have one. And if you have one, you have zero.In other words: the second bidder sets the price and ensures the deal goes through. If you only have one bidder, the price floor is zero. And the deal may not get done at all. ...