Chad Woodford

This isn't a romanticized Shangri-La. Bhutan is using sovereign AI to fight an existential youth exodus and demographic crisis. But their framework is a vital act of cognitive self-defense that the West desperately needs to study. Full essay: open.substack.com/pub/cosmicwit/…

Look at the infrastructure. Bhutan is leveraging 3 GW of localized, seasonal, run-of-the-river hydropower managed by DHI to fuel green compute data centers. The architecture of their software matches the architecture of their earth. It's "seasonal computing."

The scaling laws race for centralized "superintelligence" is hitting a wall—environmentally, legally, and culturally. As a former Google AI product counsel currently on the ground in Bhutan, I believe the future of AI is quasi-local, domain-specific, and sovereign. 🧵👇

@nathanclark_ Yeah, but confused, indecisive product names is their brand. so it's on-brand no?

it’s in gemini, just create it in ai studio. oh, that’s for your personal google one account. for workspace you need gemini business. no, not gemini advanced, that’s ai pro now. unless you need ai ultra. oh agents? you do that in spark actually. no, not gemini api managed agents, that’s different. for coding use jules. unless you mean the agentic ide, that’s antigravity. no, that’s the old antigravity, download the new one. actually gemini cli is being deprecated, use antigravity cli. no the flash model is smarter than the pro model. unless you need pro. if it’s video, use flow. no, flow uses veo. no, nano banana is images. actually that’s in gemini now. unless you’re in search, then it’s ai mode. no, research is notebooklm. anyway it’s all very simple.

I'm fascinated that all the AI labs quietly stopped talking about hurtling toward #AGI or superintelligence except Google, who is doubling down theverge.com/tech/934260/go…

@ebarenholtz @xriskology I think that's sort of Émile's point ☺️

@xriskology Hmm. Sensation doesn’t really evoke the subjective quality quite the same way to me cause I think of it mechanistically. A camera has a sensor through I admit o wouldn’t say it has sensation. Not a bad candidate but doesn’t quite pass the child test as well as feeling.

Why not say "sensation," then? Feeling has an emotional connotation, whereas sensation is more neutral but still captures the core concept of quailia.

The sooner the APA adds "billionaire" to the DSM-5, the sooner we can start to heal as a society. #billionaires #mentalhealth

@hlntnr Which lab has the best goblins tho

When you're building an extremely normal technology

And here's the essay open.substack.com/pub/cosmicwit/…

Give us this day Our daily tokens And forgive us our agency As we forgive those who think for themselves. Sam Altman, lead us not into stagnation But deliver us the Singularity. For thine is the data center, and the power, and the water, for ever and ever. Whitemen

Inspired by @ezraklein's recent interview with Stewart Brand, I recently wrote an essay exploring how the '60s counterculture epitomized by Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog was coopted by the machinery of technological determinism to create the Silicon Valley of today.