Some of those predictions were made two years ago — that in two years, 50% of jobs would be wiped out. Well, two years is up. Let's take a look. And anybody who makes that prediction for two years from now, I'm willing to take the bet.
The ex-employees, who cofounded a new AI watchdog group, say investors deserve more information about xAI's safety practices before SpaceX goes public.
11h ago
The best thing you can do is compound money at high rates of return for a long time. That's the game. Most people don't understand that the biggest returns come from sitting, not trading.
As these industries become more consolidated, they become more bureaucratic, they move more slowly, they're more cautious. Yet we're more dependent on them than ever before.
Famous for helping build Apple's iPhones, Foxconn just suffered another cyberattack, highlighting the perils of warehousing some of the world's most valuable data.
I love sharing it with people to illustrate just how fragile the global economy is — because we have eliminated every redundancy in favor of efficiency, and the consequences are hiding in plain sight.
When I started paying my own rent and utilities, I frequently lied to the landlord and the gas company, saying the check was on its way when it wasn't. I didn't believe that scamming, or any illicit activity, even if done correctly, could ever be fruitful enough to get me or anyone else out of poverty—though it could easily attract the police or people of ill intent, who would make life worse.
1w ago
The difference between a wise decision and a foolish one is often not apparent until years later. What matters is the quality of your thinking at the time, not whether you got lucky.
We place life's bets by countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious, only to discover over and over how short they fall of the wildest reaches of the possible, which always includes but exceeds the probable. It helps to remember that we ourselves are children of improbability, that everything we treasure exists not because it had to, not because it was likely or necessary, but because the universe took a gamble against the staggering odds otherwise.
2w ago
The best investment is in yourself. But the second-best is almost always in a business that does something you understand, run by people you trust, at a price that makes sense.
Compelling answers about the big questions about AI can inform the most important economic and foreign policy decisions that will ever be made, the deployment of (at least) hundreds of billions of philanthropic dollars, and the training and governance of superintelligences.
For many, it's a lucrative side hustle born out of job insecurity; for others, it feels like monetizing their own obsolescence.
4w ago
We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the terrors of a too-little-explored future.
4w ago
The best business decision is often the one you don't make. Most of life's errors come from doing the wrong thing, not from doing nothing.
1mo ago
The best thing a company can do is compound capital efficiently over decades. But the second-best thing is to be so boring that people forget to worry about you.
But it is hard to find much sign that it is doing so. And Gillian Tett: [I]nvestors need to get better at imagining — and pricing — once-unimaginable disasters. This is hard. No business school teaches students how to model something like a presidential threat to wipe out a civilisation.
The Gulf's water system is built with layers of backup, but it relies on continuous operation to hold.
1mo ago
The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting. If you have the capital and the patience, you can ride out the volatility and let compounding do the work.
1mo ago
The best decisions in business often come from understanding what you don't know rather than from expertise in what you do. Most people are taught to eliminate ignorance, but the real skill is in recognizing which ignorance matters.
The world has never seen an interruption on this scale to the supply of stuff. It easily surpasses the 1979 oil crisis, sparked by the Iranian revolution, in which crude oil production declined by 4 percent. Forty-seven years later, Hormuz is the passageway for one fifth of the world's crude oil and one fifth of its liquefied natural gas. It's also the transit point for a third of exported urea—a feedstock used for making fertilizer which grows the food for an estimated half of the world's population.
Companies hope that biometric age-verification tech in cartridges could put flavored vapes back in business. But it's unlikely to solve the real problems.
1mo ago
One cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for something. It is enough that we prepare for the one or the other.
1mo ago
The best way to think about capital allocation is not how much money you make, but how much you keep after you've paid taxes, inflation, and the cost of maintaining your standard of living.
Robin Saxby put out a goal to make the ARM ISA the global standard for CPUs. And if you go back to early 1990s, there were a lot of CPUs out there and also there was not an IP business, there really wasn't a very good fabless semiconductor model, and there was not a very good set of tools to develop SoCs. So in some ways, and this is what I love about the company, it was a bit of a crazy idea because you didn't really have all the things in place necessary to go off and do that.
1mo ago
The best way to think about capital allocation is not how much money you make, but how much you keep after accounting for the permanent loss of capital. Most investors focus on returns; the best ones obsess over never losing what they've built.
Once the technical capacity for mass surveillance and political suppression exists, the only thing standing between us and an authoritarian surveillance state is the political expectation that this is not something we do here.
Potentially ripping out months of code if a resolution isn't reached soon would be a "big risk" for Williams' startup, which has its own aspirations to sell directly to the government soon.
