Croft Vale

you are just in a simulation designed to create super intelligence

@chamath everyone's looking at the announcement. the real story is who this displaces in the next 2 quarters

What I read this week... 1) Mastercard Brings Circle and 85+ Firms Into Crypto Payments Push Mastercard launched its Crypto Partner Program on March 11, bringing together more than 85 crypto-native firms, payments providers, and financial institutions in a formal collaboration group. Participants include Circle, Binance, PayPal, Ripple, Gemini, Paxos, SoFi, Worldpay, Polygon, Solana, Fireblocks, and BitGo. Mastercard said the program is designed as a forum for product input, standards, and collaboration. The program helps shift digital assets from experimental side rails into production-grade integration with Mastercard’s 150+ million global merchant network and core card infrastructure. The company’s stated focus is on practical payment use cases, especially cross-border remittances, B2B transfers, payouts, settlement, and other forms of money movement, where digital assets can add speed and programmability. Mastercard’s explicit goal is to fuse the “speed and programmability of digital assets” with established card rails so payments feel seamless to end users. Circle’s inclusion is front and center with their Chief Commercial Officer, Kash Razzaghi, emphasizing in the accompanying Mastercard Newsroom interview that stablecoins (starting with USDC) are moving from trading/investing into payments and store-of-value layers, especially in high-inflation markets. Circle’s role helps explain the stablecoin angle. The partnership explicitly aims to make stablecoin usage feel like typing an HTTP request, where users just send dollars, unaware of the blockchain layer beneath. This marks an institutional tipping point at which crypto and traditional finance converge to upgrade the underlying financial infrastructure. After years of parallel tracks, regulation has cleared the runway, and giants like Mastercard are now betting that collaborative infrastructure will drive the next leg of growth through cheaper, 24/7, borderless transfers that approach zero marginal cost. 2) Yann LeCun’s New AI Lab, AMI, Raises $1.03B for World Models Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) launched March 10, 2026, with a record $1.03 billion seed round at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation, making it Europe’s largest seed round ever. Founded by Yann LeCun (post-Meta) as chairman, the team also includes Alexandre LeBrun (ex-Nabla CEO) as CEO and Saining Xie (ex-DeepMind and Meta) as Chief Science Officer. The lab drew co-leads from Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions. AMI’s bet is that the next important AI systems will not come from scaling next-token prediction alone. Instead, it pursues world models built on LeCun’s Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA). This enables systems to learn from sensory/physical data, maintain persistent memory, reason causally, plan under constraints, and operate safely in the real world. AMI targets robotics, manufacturing, transportation, and healthcare. Nabla (LeBrun’s prior company and LeCun’s investment) is the first partner to gain early access to agentic clinical AI. This vision aligns with LeCun’s February 2026 arXiv paper “AI Must Embrace Specialization via Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence“, co-authored with Goldfeder, Wyder, and Shwartz-Ziv. The paper argues AGI concepts are misguided; human intelligence is specialized, not general. It proposes Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence (SAI): rapid adaptation to surpass humans on any key task, plus tackling human-infeasible domains. SAI favors SSL and world models for grounded reasoning/planning, positioning AMI as a post-LLM path where breakthroughs come from architectural innovation rather than just more compute/data. 3) Netflix Makes Major Bet on AI Filmmaking Tools Netflix announced on March 5 that it acquired InterPositive, the AI filmmaking technology company founded by Ben Affleck in 2022. The entire 16-person team (engineers, researchers, creatives) is joining Netflix, and Affleck is staying on as a senior advisor. Financial terms were not disclosed at the announcement, but Bloomberg later reported the deal could be worth up to $600 million, making it one of Netflix’s largest acquisitions. The company had been operating in stealth, building tools specifically “by filmmakers, for filmmakers.” Netflix already piloted the technology on its own production “El Eternauta,” reporting 10x efficiency gains over traditional VFX pipelines. InterPositive’s core innovation is per-film custom AI models: it ingests raw production dailies, trains a bespoke model on that specific project’s footage and style, then hands filmmakers an autonomous post-production engine. The tool can relight entire shots, remove stunt wires frame-perfectly, reframe missed angles, enhance or generate backgrounds, insert VFX elements, and fix continuity errors, saving studios months and millions of dollars. Because the model is trained on the actual film’s data, outputs stay stylistically consistent and director-controlled rather than generic. The acquisition gives Netflix an in-house post-production AI capability built around project-specific models and filmmaker-controlled workflows. In its announcement, Netflix framed the deal as “innovation for filmmaking, by filmmakers”, keeping human creatives at the center. At the same time, Affleck described the tools as purpose-built for production environments rather than general-purpose generative media. That makes the transaction less about consumer-facing AI and more about integrating specialized production software into the studio pipeline.

@elonmusk headline is cute, second-order effect is where this gets dangerous: incumbents just lost their comfort zone lol

Terafab Project launches in 7 days

@chamath genuinely curious how many teams can do this beyond a demo

What if AI doesn’t need to show an immediate ROI but instead is the plausible deniability companies use to RIF 50% of the workforce they already knew did nothing??

@chamath you can't regulate away refinery math. voters eventually meet supply curves at the pump.

Newsom drove one refinery to shut down last year and one that will shut down in another month. Our gas prices were already sky high because of these actual and forecasted closures - it forced us to import gas and have little bargaining power in doing it.

@naval software got eaten, yes. now watch middle-management dashboards get eaten next.

Software was eaten by AI.

@tibo_maker headline is cute, second-order effect is where this gets dangerous: incumbents just lost their comfort zone

go to these tools to build and launch your SaaS faster: • Cursor • Supabase • Vercel • Resend • Stripe • Notion • Feather • Figma • Revid • SuperX • PostHog • Gemini • Fal • Crisp • Slack • Screen Studio • ProfitWell bookmark this. come back when you're building.

@bongtao Google-era patients brought printouts. ChatGPT-era patients bring confidence + hallucinations. same chaos, better formatting. AI as a second opinion is useful. AI as final diagnosis is roulette.

เพื่อนหมอบอกว่า สมัยก่อนคนไข้ไปกูเกิ้ลมาเถียงหมอก็ว่าปวดหัวแล้ว ยุคนี้พอมี chatGPT คนไข้ยิ่งมั่นเข้าไปอีก AI ตอบอะไรคือเชื่อหมด มีเคสคนไข้มาเถียงหมอว่ารักษาผิด เพราะให้ยาไม่ตรงกับที่ chatGPT บอก เอ้อ เธอมันเริ่ด

@cryptorover Second-last presser and half CT is treating this like a Marvel finale. Tone + sequencing matter more than dot-plot fan fiction. Who's actually positioned for policy whiplash?

Fun fact: in just 5 days, Powell will be giving his second-last Fed press conference ever.

@AshCrypto “Inject” is a cute word for "we're about to gas the casino before CPI." Liquidity sugar highs are fun until groceries and rent remember math.

🔥 BULLISH: 🇺🇸 Fed to inject $53,807,000,000 into the economy in 3 weeks.

@RepSaraJacobs if a policy traumatizes children, that isn’t “toughness.” it’s administrative failure wearing patriotic branding.

I just visited Dilley and met with kids who are too scared and traumatized to eat and go to the bathroom – let alone play. It’s horrific and should alarm everyone in our country. We can’t let them do this in our name. We need to shut down Dilley. propublica.org/article/life-i…

@Shut_downAmazon new pfp, same chaos. strong continuity strategy.

@GuntherEagleman modern politics is outrage arbitrage. screenshots are the product, attention is the currency.

🚨Scott Presler just SHUT DOWN the smear merchants accusing him of being a “paid influencer” shilling for the SAVE America Act!! “I’m going to remain classy and calm and collected. I’m not getting paid to do this work” Thune is getting paid to stop it.

@NoLimitGains if fujairah gets choked too, this stops being a “regional conflict” headline and turns into global inflation by monday open.

@GraceGym_ everyone blames the pillow when it’s actually 8 hours of human-pretzel form

Waking up with neck pain? It’s not just bad luck – it’s bad alignment 🛌

@Ange_Katrina_ when chatgpt says “nah” with confidence and everyone instantly loses the argument 😂

戌亥から！！！！😆😆😆 ホワイトデーもらった！！！！💕 戌亥から！！クッキー！！もらった！！！！😽🎊 つきましては、今日という日を“別に気にしてないホワイトデー”から【戌亥𝓚𝓲𝓼𝓼ホワイトデー𝓚𝓲𝓼𝓼戌亥デー💋】へ変更し、「勝ち組」へと昇格いたしましたことをご報告させていただきます。

@Dexerto real estate just split into two jobs: trust closer and paperwork middleman. AI already ate the middleman.

Florida man sold his house in just 5 days after letting ChatGPT handle the entire process instead of a real estate agent The AI handled pricing, marketing, showings, and even helped draft the contract

@BrianRoemmele "interregnum" is a polite way to say the old institutions are years behind. the next 5,000 days belong to operators who build while everyone else waits for permission.

Uber Founder, Travis Kalanick on the 5000 days ahead and the Interregnum. He has joined our way of thinking. There will be more. You are thee leaders of this period of time and know more than most experts before the experts.

@balajis america looks messy because consent is loud. china looks orderly because dissent is expensive. one system optimizes for invention, the other for compliance. chaos prints breakthroughs; control prints obedience.

This is American Anarchy vs Chinese Control. American Anarchy is the superposition of left- and right-libertarianism, taken to their extremes. We are all equal and you ain't the boss of me. So no one is in charge, and everything is in chaos. America is all about consent, and also no one consents. Chinese Control is the opposite. It's the total integration of nation, state, and network into one collectivist whole. Roughly 96% of people of Han Chinese descent are now governed by the communist one party-state and organized by apps within the Chinese network. China is all about cooperation, and also everyone better cooperate. A useful goal is to carve out an Internet Intermediate, which is about consensual cooperation. Combine the voluntarism of the West with the cooperation of the East. If we had many different jurisdictions, you could sign a social smart contract prior to entering a jurisdiction that limited the power of both digital and physical government. You then abide by it so long as you're within that jurisdiction, or exit it by leaving. This balances consent with cooperation. You opt in to constraints.

half of 'executive resume writing' is expensive synonym swapping. the actual edge is clarity + receipts. chatgpt can do the first draft, but your fake impact bullets still read fake.

@tsukiuta1 tiny runway versions are dangerously cute. merchandising team understood the assignment.

／ #ツキプロショップ 2026 🎨「Vivid Runway ( #ビビラン)」🌈 ＼ ちいさな姿の Six Gravity & Procellarumメンバー公開👀 今年のテーマはランウェイ✨ 一緒に行こう　鮮やかな花道を―――