J. Eric Wilson

So. Much. Noise. In all my feeds, on every platform. Spam filters need to race faster in blocking chat bots.

Not enough companies are using AI to dissolve the coordination tax. As you add people and increase scope, the tax on aligning them grows superlinearly. AI can increase throughput without adding layers of humans whose core job is alignment work.

Hi @grok, how many regulatory hurdles and fees are included in developing, owning, and operating a casino? Now compare that to popular gambling apps that put a casino in your pocket.

“People tell you who they are, but we ignore it. Because we want them to be who we want them to be.” Don Draper talking about President Trump.

this is actually insane > be tech guy in australia > adopt cancer riddled rescue dog, months to live > not_going_to_give_you_up.mp4 > pay $3,000 to sequence her tumor DNA > feed it to ChatGPT and AlphaFold > zero background in biology > identify mutated proteins, match them to drug targets > design a custom mRNA cancer vaccine from scratch > genomics professor is “gobsmacked” that some puppy lover did this on his own > need ethics approval to administer it > red tape takes longer than designing the vaccine > 3 months, finally approved > drive 10 hours to get rosie her first injection > tumor halves > coat gets glossy again > dog is alive and happy > professor: “if we can do this for a dog, why aren’t we rolling this out to humans?” one man with a chatbot, and $3,000 just outperformed the entire pharmaceutical discovery pipeline. we are going to cure so many diseases. I dont think people realize how good things are going to get

Boil the Oceans You know the phrase: “don’t boil the ocean.” Everyone’s said it in some overly ambitious meeting. It’s good advice in normal times. It keeps teams focused. It prevents scope creep. But we are no longer in normal times, and I think it’s time to retire saying it. Artificial Superintelligence means it’s time to boil the ocean. We’ll start with a few lakes first. I was recently with a university endowment’s head of private investing who told me their engineers were terrified for their jobs after seeing what Claude Code could do. And I get it — that’s the natural first reaction. But it’s the wrong one. It’s a zero-sum reaction to a positive-sum moment. Instead of worrying about doing the same thing we’ve been doing for cheaper, why not focus on doing the thing we never even dreamed of doing? Why can’t that endowment achieve 50% net IRR instead of 10%? Why can’t a startup deliver a service that is 100x better than the incumbent? Why can’t we have fusion energy? Why can’t we talk to every single user and have a perfect understanding of every bug in our product? These aren’t rhetorical questions anymore. They’re engineering problems with paths to solutions. Here is what I think is actually going on with the fear: our fear of the future is directly proportional to how small our ambitions are. If your plan is to keep doing exactly what you’re doing, then yes, a machine that can do it faster and cheaper is terrifying. But if your plan is to do something dramatically bigger, then the machine is the best news you’ve ever gotten. If you’re a worker — someone who trades labor for a living — this is the moment to become a builder. Start a business. And if you’re already management or capital, it’s time to go 10x more hardcore on what your aspirations could be. Not eking out 5% efficiency gains. Not increasing profit margins 2% by lowering cost and firing people. Those are the old games. The new question is: what would it look like to build a product or service so good that people would happily pay 10x what they pay now? The net result of this is more jobs, not fewer. As Ryan Petersen likes to say, the human desire for more things is absolutely limitless. We can actually fulfill that desire now — if we have the agency to prompt it for ourselves. Buckminster Fuller coined the term “ephemeralization” in 1938: doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing. His entire vision of progress was about technology enabling radical expansion of human capability through dematerialization. He traced this from stone bridges to iron trusses to steel cables — each iteration stronger, longer, lighter, cheaper. He wasn’t describing job destruction. He was describing civilization getting better at being civilization. This is Jevons Paradox for everything. When you make a resource dramatically more efficient, you don’t use less of it — you use vastly more. Steam engines didn’t reduce coal consumption. They made coal so useful that demand exploded. The same thing is about to happen with intelligence, with labor, with every service and product we can imagine. But Jevons Paradox doesn’t activate on its own. It requires capital and management to actually raise their ambitions — to boil lakes and oceans instead of drowning them in committee That’s what startups have always been good at: moving fast in the face of radical uncertainty, building for the 10x future while everyone else is optimizing for the 1.05x present. Time to start.

When did war, including the deaths of men, women, and school children, become something to trivialize?

@JonHaidt @RepAuchincloss Top-down policies, instead of student-driven solutions in schools, is going to make this the next DARE.

Now that the world is moving to put age limits on social media, we're seeing a lot of creativity in finding ways to do it well. The Parents Over Platforms bill, from @RepAuchincloss, would have parents set age once, when setting up their child's phone. thehill.com/opinion/techno…

How many more steps away from its original nonprofit mission is @OpenAI willing to take?

@greg_price11 Disagree with most but I’m for ranked choice voting.

Democrats now control the legislature and Governor's office in Virginia. Here are just a few of the bills they've introduced - New 4.3% sales tax on Uber Eats, Amazon, etc deliveries. - New sales tax on admissions to a wide variety of businesses. - Create two new higher tax brackets of 8% and 10% on people making over $600K. - A new 10% tax bracket for anyone making over $1M. - 3.8% investment tax on top of state income taxes. - Raise the hotel tax. - New personal property tax on landscaping equipment. - Ban gas powered leaf blowers. - Guarantee illegal aliens free education. - Make it illegal to approach somebody at an abortion clinic. - Extend the time absentee ballots can be received after election day to three days - Allow people to cast their votes electronically through the internet. - Expand ranked-choice voting. - Extend the deadline for ballot curing to one week after election day. - Redact the addresses of political candidates from FOIAs. - Add Virginia to the National Popular Vote Compact for presidential electors. - Make it illegal to hand count ballots. - $500 sales tax on firearm suppressors . - "Assault weapons" and large capacity magazine ban. - 11% sales tax on all firearms and ammunition. - Prohibit outdoor shooting of a firearm on land less than 5 acres. - Lower the criminal penalties for robbery. - Ban the arrest of illegal aliens in courthouses. - Remove mandatory minimum sentences. - Allow localities to install speed cameras. - Replace Columbus Day with "Indigenous Peoples Day."

Who was in the room when this drug deal went down? Louisiana waived $3.3 billion in sales taxes (enough to build 33 high schools or pay every public school teacher for a year) to attract Meta’s Hyperion data center, which will create just 326 permanent jobs. h/t @kylewestaway

How Newell Brands onshored the manufacturing of Sharpie pens to a 37-year-old factory in Tennessee, while enhancing quality and without raising prices wsj.com/business/sharp…

Both sides are blaming the other for the #shutdown. Shocked. Which narrative will you accept and echo?

Tracking Measures of Performance (# tasks completed) vs. Measures of Effectiveness (result of tasks completed) are both important. The latter is harder and often ignored.

Writing is thinking. Don't let AI do it all.

The history of 3rd party candidates is one of failures. It’s because we have a political duopoly. The best analysis on this is Michael Porter and @katherinegehl’s book “The Politics Industry.” Highly recommend for @elonmusk and every engaged citizen.

After reading Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book Careless People, watching HBO’s movie Mountainhead, and witnessing the public breakup of the US President and the world’s wealthiest man, it’s taking extra effort to be optimistic. Dig in team.

Great interview with @aparnacd on @lennyspodcast. The three key characteristics of AI agents: 1) utonomy (delegation of tasks), 2) complexity (handling multi-step challenges), 3) natural interaction (conversing beyond simple chat) #ai

In May 2000, President @BillClinton announced that accurate GPS access would no longer be restricted to the US military. You’re welcome Google. h/t @AiBreakfast

The debate about AI safety is as important as they come. I can't recommend strongly enough this blockbuster talk at TED this year by @tristanharris. go.ted.com/tristanharris25 If you know anyone influential in AI, please forward this....