Vijay Rayapati

Multiple Waymos city-wide in San Francisco were disabled last night. I wonder why these keep doing this every so often.

As a founder, your number one job is to eat shit. You're on the call with the upset customer. You need to fire people by telling them directly. You're listening to the engineer who wants to quit due to burnout. You have to read the 40-page vendor contract, which is a nightmare to go through. Every hard, uncomfortable thing lands on your desk. That's the whole job. You're here to absorb the bad stuff so everyone else can keep moving.

Our thoughts on the importance of AI sovereignty. 1. Your AI sovereignty dictates your institution’s future. Sovereignty is the precondition for choice. Relinquishing sovereignty transfers the future choices of your institution to others, who are likely to exploit it for their gain and your loss. 2. Data retention is your treasure. Transfer it at your own peril. Your ability to win is dictated by your ability to recognize and use your unique edges, and you keep winning by compounding the underlying data to generate new insights. Transferring that data hands over access to your pre-existing winning plays and yields the means of production for new ones. 3. Tokenmaxxing hijacks your value orientation and decreases your institutional fortitude and intelligence. The pursuit of high token usage incentivizes disposable scripts over robust software — with the addictive feeling of false progress. There is a reason why those selling tokens refuse to charge based on value. 4. Controlling your weights is controlling your fate. Weights are the distilled form of hard-won, accumulated institutional knowledge. If you let others control your weights, you are allowing them to migrate the alpha of your business to theirs. 5. There is no contradiction between sovereignty and alpha. The architecture that maximally preserves sovereignty is one that enables institutions to own their tribal knowledge, and to compound it as alpha. 6. Politicizing the technical issues involving sovereignty is what your adversary wants. Techno-politicization is the wellspring of false sovereignty. Techno-politicization drives decisions that seem to reduce dependency, but ultimately limit agency — especially on the battlefield in the West. 7. Real expertise is existential. Allowing politics or favoritism to determine your technical decisions rewards whoever is best at politics, not whoever is right. Listen to those closest to the problems, not those speaking most compellingly about them. 8. Learn from institutions that are winning or that have consistently delivered. Institutions facing existential threats do not have the luxury of making technical decisions based on political preferences. 9. Only listen to institutions, countries, and people who have a proven record of being right. A track record of correctness is the best and only signal for future correctness. Judging something as right or wrong based on who you like is exceedingly misguided.