caleb | sanctum ☁️

x.com/i/article/2079…

📙@elonmusk sat with The Economist for 85 minutes. It's paywalled, so here's what stuck with me, watching it as a builder in Asia 1. AI passes the sum of all human intelligence in about 5 years Not twenty. Five. The man running the biggest AI cluster on Earth put a number on it. If your roadmap assumes a comfortable decade before this reaches your industry, it's already wrong 2. In ~10 years, abundance, and money starts to lose meaning Every crypto person should sit with this. If money matters less because everything gets cheap, what's left to fight over is attention, compute, and ownership. That's the bet a lot of us made years ago and got laughed at for 3. AI plus robotics is deflationary enough that he thinks it ends America's debt crisis in three years Run that on ASEAN instead of the US. Young population, cheap labor, infrastructure finally catching up. If AI collapses the cost of making and serving things, we skip a step the West had to grind through 4. Superintelligence is coming, so "enjoy the ride." Easy to say when you own @xai. Harder for the devs I know in KL who are genuinely wondering if their job survives the next three years. Fighting the arrival is pointless. What you build on top of it isn't 5. Mars isn't the main mission anymore. Preserving human consciousness is, and AI is the vehicle The old pitch was a backup of civilization on Mars. Now it's AI as the way to carry consciousness forward. You don't have to buy it. But when the richest builder alive quietly swaps his primary mission, it's worth knowing which way the capital walks 6. Frontier models should be peer-reviewed by rival labs. Government only as a last resort The most useful thing he said, and nobody's clipping it. Labs auditing each other is faster, more technically literate, and much harder to lobby than a regulator. @VitalikButerin has argued a version of this for years 7. Chinese labs could lead, and China will "far exceed the rest of the world in AI compute." If you build in Asia, this is the line. ASEAN sits physically between the two AI superpowers. Someone will build the bridge between the Western and Chinese stacks, and whoever does is standing on the most valuable ground in tech. That's our backyard 8. He admits he "got carried away" with DOGE Politics aside, the smaller point stayed with me. Even the most prolific builder alive spreads himself too thin. I've felt that recently, shipping across too many things at once Everyone's posting their take on this interview Mine: the world Elon described is one Asia is unusually well-placed for, and most people here still don't believe it's theirs to build What is your take?

🇲🇾 I'm Malaysian, so watching @balajis's Network School (@ns) get its license pulled in Johor isn't abstract for me The concept was good. It brought real energy into a near-empty city. It still got shut down. If you're a Western founder looking at Asia, don't read the headline. Read why: 1. You're a guest here. Not a disruptor The whole network-state pitch runs on "permissionless," but Asia runs on permission, and permission is earned. Local law and sovereignty aren't friction to engineer around. The moment your project looks like it thinks it sits above them, it's already over. You just find out later 2. Trust comes first, not after you scale The Western instinct is raise, grow fast, apologize later. It doesn't translate here. You build the relationship, you earn face, you move quietly, and then you're allowed to grow. Walking in pitching fast-track visas and an RM500m expansion before anyone trusts you is the whole thing backwards 3. How you handle friction matters more than being right Going public, openly asking the PM for a "deal," hinting you'll take your community elsewhere if you're not wanted, that's all perhaps normal in western culture. Here it's the move that ends you. Threatening to leave isn't leverage. It's an insult. Things get sorted quietly, over relationships, not on your timeline 4. And respect the local lines. All of them Every country has things that aren't up for a founder's debate. You don't have to agree. You do have to remember you're in someone else's house, on their soil, under their rules Here's the part that stings You can vibe-code a product, arbitrage cheap tokens, and move a whole community overnight. You cannot arbitrage trust. It's slow, it's earned in person, and it's the one thing the move-fast playbook has no shortcut for The West optimizes for permissionless We run on permission Learn that before you land Not after they shut you down

DEX volume on @solana is now also back above Bybit again. Binance is the only CEX with more spot volume.