Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸

JUST IN: OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic.

The Electricity Grid I post a lot of stuff about the electricity grid, here the CEO of the largest grid in America (PJM) lays it out pretty clearly. • What worked for 2 decades… no longer works • This is structurally different from history • You are facing an era of scarcity • The situation is not tenable PJM are facing a demand explosion. Now a demand explosion in some industries is +500% demand. But this is infrastructure, this is tens of trillions of dollars of assets and it takes time to mobilise and deploy things at this scale. In infrastructure, when demand growth shifts from +1-2%/yr to +8%/yr, then you suddenly need to be building 4-8 times more assets per year, than you previously did. If you were deploying $1 trillion / yr to grow at 1%, you now need to deploy $8 trillion / yr to grow at 8%. Suddenly you need to deploy many trillions of dollars per year to meet this growth. If you cannot get it done, prices will rocket for everyone. Failure leads to inflation. This is not a PJM problem, this is not even a US problem, this is a global problem. PJM are formally validating what some people have been saying for a while now. This is not temporary, we cannot uninvent the technologies that have precipitated this change. The world has changed and we must adapt. Global retail electricity sales are about $3.6 trillion per year, of that, around $900 billion goes to transmission and about $2.7 trillion goes to wholesale generation. The transmission system many developed countries have is the wrong system going forward. Our transmission systems in the West are built for transporting power from big coal plants to power big towns. That’s not what we are doing now. We have replaced most of the coal plants with two largely decentralised but highly correlated fleets of intermittent generators (wind and solar), that are growing like fracking wells because they are also quick to deploy. Their quickness to deploy new generation projects is massively destabilising for the grid. The grid was designed for coal plants. The grid is a $50 trillion machine. It is by far the biggest asset in any country. It isn’t something you can toss away, it isn’t something you can swap out overnight. We also have new categories of industrial demand (hyperscalers) that will capture an increasing share of GDP. This new demand category is going to set the marginal price of electricity for everyone else, and these guys are not as price sensitive as your widowed grandmother. This is a difficult problem to address because of: i) the scale ii) the capital intensity It’s also a global problem, because it’s born out of a new technological paradigm. It will not spread around the world at equal pace, but everywhere is going to eventually face it down. Some people are fleeing to space for solutions to avoid this snafu, but that’s only a temporary fix. Once the hyperscalers have their demand satisfied, the next demand explosion immediately follows, and this second wave is 20x the scale of the current problem. The second wave is how do you power billions and billions of robots and billions of autonomous machines, doing work that currently can’t be done? This industrial revolution is very much a two stage revolution, first you power up the chips, then you power up the actuators. Chips scale down, actuators scale up. There’s no Moore’s Law for actuators, they obey Newton’s Laws of motion instead. This is the crux of the energy problem facing our civilisation. The energy system we have today is the one we wanted 20 years ago. The energy system we will have in 20 years from now, is the one we start building today. It’s time to build this solution.

Teana Baker-Taylor, co-founder of Venice, explains what 60 billion tokens per day of private inference actually looks like in practice. "Agentic wallets are able to actually transact for you. Find me the best yield on USDC and use this wallet to stake 30 grand." "Build me a website is fine. But if you want it to build you a website and then actually deploy it, there are transactions that have to happen in there." "Warden Labs has built the entire agent wallet infrastructure for that. Bringing Warden into BasedAI means businesses get access to agents that can actually transact, not just advise."