Kenneth Hurley

New blog post: The third wave of American philanthropy Hundreds of billions of dollars in new philanthropic capital will soon become liquid. The OpenAI Foundation holds 26% of OpenAI, worth about $220B at today’s valuation. Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth and have instituted the most aggressive donor matching program for employees in tech history. How much does this all add up to? And how meaningful is that in the context of philanthropy today? I was doing some simple napkin math to wrap my head around the scale of what’s coming, and radicalized myself in the process. I had dramatically underappreciated the scale of the philanthropic capital that’s about to become available and the corresponding gap in talent and organizations that will be needed to make the most of it. This piece aims to directionally sketch the scale of what’s coming, the gap in operational capacity needed to absorb it, and what we can do to fill it. (Link to full post in reply)

Lots of founders pursue business opportunities to make a buck. I get it. But it is way easier to get through tough times if you are mission oriented and would love doing the work for 30 years even if you didn’t get paid a dime.

I have two NVIDIA DGX Sparks stacked in my office. They've been sitting there for a month. Here's my honest take. Open source AI is never going to compare to frontier models. Running quantized Kimi K2.6 and GLM 5.1 locally is cool. But practical? No. Not even close. I run all my Hermes agents on GPT 5.5 through my ChatGPT Pro subscription. Practically free. GPT 5.5 is the intelligent model in the world. Why would I route serious tasks to a watered down local model? If you need fast and accurate, you're not using local inference. You're using GPT 5.5 or Claude Opus 4.7. I'm not saying this to rage bait. I genuinely want to know. Why would anyone serious about vibe coding and AI agents use a local model when frontier is this far ahead?

The next big crypto company won’t market “onchain” at all. It’ll look boring feel familiar and quietly run on crypto rails underneath. That’s how you win distribution.

Your opinion on AI data centers is a good indicator for your IQ.

The real tenor in SF is as it would be at the moment AI is usable, more or less at AGI, still expensive and the domain of a priesthood That priesthood is building now, and this is the moment the hobbyist and the inaccessible enterprise tech becomes ubiquitous Personal AI coming

decentralization is a bad sell the reason is that it focuses on the absence of something rather than a concrete, perceptible difference gained from its addition humans buy presence -> i.e the gain of time, money, access, identity, status, and joy bitcoin does this well, and is arguably the only one to have done so the decentralization isn't why you buy bitcoin, you buy it because of what it promises you for some people, this is money free from the state; for others it's identity, for some insurance, for some status, and for most it's the appreciation of the asset and hence money decentralization is necessary for the selling point to work, but it is not the end itself so if you've made the choice to build on top of a decentralized platform, it is mostly useless to talk about it (except in so far as trying to avoid regulatory responsibility, which is fair), talk about why you are now different as a result perhaps that's asset selection, perhaps that's access, perhaps it's efficiency or composability or speed or security, but without something tangible you won't be able to sell effectively once you do this, you'll understand whether the thing you're building is useless or not because if there's nothing gained from the decentralization vector except putting the word itself in your tweets to signal virtue, then you are building the wrong thing

The absolute non-takeoff of VR and AR is probably one of the big upsets in consumer electronics history Pretty much everyone thought this would be huge and it sort of just isn't