Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸

The fact this one dude - by himself - can walk into any state and find blatant fraud everywhere he goes proves two things: 1) the fraud is rampant at an unprecedented scale and 2) the government agencies who are supposed to protect our tax dollars are either completely incompetent or complicit in the fraud.

Nick Shirley uncovers an adult day care in Flushing, Queens with 7,000 phantom members. Nick: “This public document says you have 7,899 members.” Employee: “No, we don’t have 7,000 members.” Nick: “So you’re overbilling then? You’re getting paid $1,600 per patient — that’s how you got $12.9 million in 2024.” Employee: “Please leave.” American taxpayer dollars at work.

Yuji Tachikawa, one of the most respected mathematical physicists in the world, reports that Fable solved a problem that he and his collaborators were stuck on.

最近 Claude Fable を試しているのですが、昨晩ふと、ここ半年ぐらい進展がない共同研究について研究ノートをみせて聞いてみたら、なんと非自明な観察をして、ほぼ解決してしまった。一回目の返事は「計算ミスは一ヶ所みつけましたが同じところで詰まりました」だったが、「そこはこう解決するかなと

The skill that Theo is implicitly describing in this essay is quite hard to do well: management. In business schools we have a whole department devoted to it (I work and teach in one). A large fraction of people will soon find themselves going from solo work to managing whole teams. Knowing when to hand off to whom, how to communicate instructions, delegating leads and followers, establishing flexible hierarchies—it’s a completely different skill set than what most are used to, but it’s worth putting in time to figure it out.

This is the best essay of the year: - The dispersion of knowledge is a collective strength; it’s the source of variety, adaptability, and resilience of the overall system. It’s the reason that free markets outperform planned economies. - For artificial intelligence to benefit from distributed knowledge, it must itself be distributed. - [Models] that handle live, multimodal interaction natively, in the model itself rather than in scaffolding bolted around it [allows] interactivity [to scale] with intelligence. - Even with the best intentions, a model shaped in one place inevitably encodes the values of its owner, not the individual users it serves.

Steve Mandel of Lone Pine was making a similar point, that there were fewer players doing true price discovery on assets 3-5 years out, which advantages those who still play that game. Well, turns out, the water's warm, and Ken Griffin is wading in.

Ken Griffin says short-term alpha from calling the quarter with alt data is dying, and the next era of stock-picking belongs to those with a long-term horizon. "I think there'll be more focus and emphasis on those who have really good vision about what companies are actually creating transformative products that will change society. The market will reward that far more intensely in the future than will a company beat this quarter's earnings or not. I think the question of will a company beat this quarter's earnings has gotten far more difficult over the last 10 years because, for example, the rise of alternative data. I have access to the credit cards of millions of Americans. What are they spending money on? What's that mean for Starbucks revenues this quarter? What's it mean for McDonald's this quarter? This is a decade-old transformation, but the here and now is just becoming far more transparent, far more readily understood and triaged by the combination of really bright people and really good AI technology. Where this will leave us is those who are able to see what is unfolding over years to come will be in a very valued position on a relative basis."

I'm perplexed at why people who I know are smarter than me, including the authors, buy the epistemic strategy used in the AI 2040 scenario, in which, tl;dr, the famous METR time horizon plot predicts eschatological doom. I don't believe the authors have sufficiently grappled with why the radiologists and programmers still have their jobs, and why baristas haven't been replaced by automatic espresso machines Or even why we haven't seen more small-scale scheming / reward hacking / misalignment damages due to the use of coding agents across Big Tech, in which we've already granted such agents significant autonomy. I think if these gaps were more deeply considered they'd be making a more nuanced and less extreme argument. In the meantime I'm concerned that resources, advocacy and governance are being influenced by their conceptual model.

The age 20-24 unemployment rate is now ~unchanged since the AI boom began:

its kind of wild that multiple fields of art somehow fall to collective creative delusion that making things look crap is actually sophisticated. This is also what happened with Architecture.

Just 20 years ago, HBO's Rome was able to portray the ancient world as colorful.