cryptoshadow

.@dwarkesh_sp: By 2030, it will be less expensive to monitor every single nook and cranny in America than it is to remodel the White House. “Mass surveillance is, at least in certain forms, already legal. It has just been impractical to enforce so far. Under current law, you have no Fourth Amendment protection against any data you share with a third party. That includes your bank, your ISP, your phone carrier, and your email provider. The government reserves the right to purchase and read this data in bulk without a warrant. What’s been missing is the ability to actually do anything with all of this data — no agency has the manpower to monitor every single camera, read every single message, and cross-reference every single transaction. However, that bottleneck goes away with AI. There are 100 million CCTV cameras in America. You can get pretty good open source multimodal models for 10 cents per million input tokens. So if you process a frame every ten seconds, and each frame is 1,000 tokens, then for 30 billion dollars, you can process every single camera in America. And remember that a given level of AI ability gets 10x cheaper every single year - so a year from now it’ll cost 3 billion, and then a year after 300 million, and by 2030, it’ll be less expensive to monitor every single nook and cranny in this country than it is to remodel the White House. Once the technical capacity for mass surveillance and political suppression exists, the only thing standing between us and an authoritarian state is the political expectation that this is not something we do here.”

IRL is going to crush AI over the next 5 years. In the last 3 months, $750M+ in capital was deployed on "anti-AI" bets. Big players are doubling down on their investments in events, experiences and in-person connection. Here's what I'm seeing: @cornerapp, a social map app for Gen Z, has grown to 60K+ users helping people curate and share places to meet IRL—"Google Maps but social." Everyone ik in NYC loves them. @partiful, @poshvip_, and @LumaHQ have raised a combined $60M and are exploding. Partiful hit 500K+ MAU, Posh hit 6 million registered users, and Luma has over 2 million users signing up for events. Harvard alum @aidaxbaradari just launched @be_inaudible, the first smart device to stop unwanted audio recordings and keep IRL conversations private. @mcuban made a massive bet, investing in Burwoodland, a NYC-based live-events company behind IRL experiences in the US, Canada, and Europe. Former COO and CPO of Hinge officially launched Rodeo to help people spend more time IRL with friends. @a16z keeps doubling down on IRL via investments and a16z Build — a dinner series and community for founders / operators figuring out their next move. @nazzari, @katiekirsch, @eriktorenberg. Billion-dollar companies are paying $$$ for community and events leads: - @AnthropicAI: Events Lead - $320k - @Substack: Events Lead - $190k - @VaynerMedia: Head of Experiential - $250k - @Spotify: Global Experiential & Content - $175k - @BiltRewards: Director of Events & Experiences - $150k Investors are pouring billions of dollars into AI. But smart money is quietly deploying millions into IRL at the same time. a16z backs both OpenAI and Partiful. ElevenLabs and Substack. The nuance is - it's not AI vs. IRL. It's that the more we live online, the more premium real-life connection becomes. They're not competing investments. They're a hedge on each other.

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