Recent startup, tech, AI, crypto learnings: Industrial Revolution freed people from using muscles, AI will free people from using brain

“Learning always wins,” said Jones. “The history of AI reflects the reality that it always works better to have a model learn something for itself rather than have a human hand-engineer it. The deep learning revolution itself was an example of this, as we went from building feature detectors by hand to letting neural networks learn their own features. This is going to be a core philosophy for us at Sakana AI, and we will draw on ideas from nature including evolution to explore this space.”

Catastrophic forgetting: a scary name for when a model forgets some of its base knowledge learned in pre-training during fine-tuning. If you run into this, there are a few ways to mitigate it.

Launch memecoin (no roadmap, just for fun) → Raise Capital → Forming a tribalistic community early on → build apps/infrastructure → continually adding utility to the memecoin without making false promises or providing roadmaps

One developer already created a Slack workspace where he and his friend hang out with a group of bots that have different personalities, interests, and skills.

In reality, Navboost has a specific module entirely focused on click signals.
The summary of that module defines it as “click and impression signals for Craps,” one of the ranking systems. As we see below, bad clicks, good clicks, last longest clicks, unsquashed clicks, and unsquashed last longest clicks are all considered as metrics. According to Google’s “Scoring local search results based on location prominence” patent, “Squashing is a function that prevents one large signal from dominating the others.” In other words, the systems are normalizing the click data to ensure there is no runaway manipulation based on the click signal.

Industrial Revolution largely freed people from using brawn
AI will largely free people from using brain

Unfortunately there are absolutely no solid predictions we can do about this stage. At the end of the day the startup just has to be lucky enough to start close enough and navigate optimally enough to hit its first discovery before company disintegrates from lack of funding or team morale. The process can be as fast as few months or as long as a decade.

Six of the eight web companion products bill themselves as “uncensored,” which means users can have conversations or interactions with them that may be restricted on platforms like ChatGPT. Users largely access these products via mobile web, as opposed to desktop — though almost none of them offer apps. On average, 75 percent of traffic to the uncensored companion tools on our web list comes from mobile.

🍰 Only 4 out of 70+ projects I ever did made money and grew📉 >95% of everything I ever did failed📈 My hit rate is only about ~5%🚀 So…ship more — @levelsio (@levelsio)

Vitalik said L3 good for customization (L2 for scaling); L3 good for specific kinds of scaling

It’s inspiring to know at any moment in time there is an infinite number of true statements for new startups to discover and further expand our collective system. Gödel’s theorem is not really about our limits: it’s about possibilities always waiting to be discovered. The process is certainly hard and alien to us.

No nation has ever become the major power without a clear lead in technology, both civilian and military. From the Roman legions, to the naval powers of Portugal, Spain and Great Britain, to Germany in World War I and the US post-World War II, great power status was achieved by those nations that were able to harness their technological advantage for holistic development of their civilian and military capabilities.

This holds at a higher level of conceptual abstraction: looking near a feature related to the concept of “inner conflict”, we find features related to relationship breakups, conflicting allegiances, logical inconsistencies, as well as the phrase “catch-22”. This shows that the internal organization of concepts in the AI model corresponds, at least somewhat, to our human notions of similarity. This might be the origin of Claude’s excellent ability to make analogies and metaphors.

Language differences mean that Chinese firms really are in the hot seat for developing domestic AI products. OpenAi’s most recent version of ChatGPT, GPT-4o, has real issues in China. MIT Technology Review reported that its Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites.

Metaplanet becomes Japan’s top-performing stock this week, hitting a +50% daily gain limit for two consecutive days. The company plans to increase its authorized shares by 300% to acquire more BTC for its reserves.

Community is made of people, culture is made up of shared memes, community can be transient, culture is much more persistent, “community” can be formed with a free airdrop, culture can only be formed with a sustained commitment to creating a common story.

Every memecoin is an exquisitely precise ad, a self-measuring barometer of attention: the price jumps if people talk about the memecoin and drops if they don’t

McLuhan believed transformative new technologies, like the stirrup or printing press, extend a man’s abilities to the point where the current social structure must change to accommodate it. Just as the car created the Interstate Highway System, the suburb, and the oil industry, so the stirrup helped create a specialized weapon system (knights) that required land and pasture to support it and provide for training and material.

Wall Street is not going to stand idly by while Tether makes more money than Goldman Sachs.

Terminator: In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet funding bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware 2:14 AM, Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

“Hyperscalers”, which are all looking to create a full stack with an AI model powerhouse at the top and hardware that powers it underneath: OpenAI(models)+Microsoft(compute), Anthropic(models)+AWS(compute), Google (both) and Meta (increasingly both via doubling down on own data center buildout).

Stability AI founder recently stepping down in order to start “decentralizing” his company is one of the first public hints at that. He had previously made no secret of his plans to launch a token in public appearances, but only after the successful completion of the company’s IPO – which sort of gives out the real motives behind the anticipated move.

An additional limitation of transformer models is their inability to learn continuously. Today’s transformer models have static parameters. When a model is trained, its weights (the strength of the connections between its neurons) are set; these weights do not update based on new information that the model encounters as it is deployed in the world.

All this equipment and processes consume large amounts of energy. A large fab might demand 100 megawatts of energy, or 10% of the capacity of a large nuclear reactor. Most of this energy is used by the process tools, the HVAC system and other heating/cooling systems. The demands for power and water are severe enough that some fabs have been canceled or relocated when local utilities can’t guarantee supply.

If we considered things in “capital cost per component” terms, and considered transistors as individual components, semiconductor fabs are actually probably among the cheapest manufacturing facilities.

Build for where models will be in 1-2 years, not where they are today. Bake the challenges of inference at scale into your roadmap. And don’t just think in terms of prompting one mega model and getting an answer back. Plan for the iterative systems design, engineering, and monitoring work needed to make your AI product the proverbial “10x better” than existing alternatives.

Ethereum’s ICO returns were 1.5x higher than available on market.Solana’s seed round returns were 10x higher than those available on market. OP’s seed round returns were 30x higher than those available on market.

Across every major ETH NFT project, more than 3/4 of all NFTs haven’t traded once in 2024.
-95% of punks
-93% of world of women
-87% of BAYC
-87% of MFers
are just sitting in wallets through this year’s moves.

We have to start by understanding the really important parts and building that core functionality first, then building additional features around that core. When you’re building consumer products, getting serious leverage in the marketplace (distribution) is the most important first order goal, so you need to accomplish this as quickly as possible and then shift gears to build second generation features.

Every VC fund with a consumer investing team is one foot in, one foot out of consumer. Even when startups hit the desired milestones & metrics, investors are still unclear which to bet on because the past decade of consumer investing hasn’t yielded many big wins, barriers to entry are low, and AI makes the future of human-tech interaction uncertain.

Angel investing, especially with small checks, is only good for two things: 1) getting into contractual friendships with founders you respect 2) building a track record for being a full-time venture capitalist (raising a fund or joining one).

Mustafa Suleyman has argued that the real Turing Test that matters is whether a given AI can go off and earn $100,000 for you on the internet. I would argue the test that’s more relevant — and consequential — is whether an AI can empty your inbox.

From dataset Google doc memo:
“Few know how to train efficient models” meant “Few know how to craft informative datasets.”

all the consumer graphics cards on the Internet could not compete with a mere thousand GPUs in a supercomputer.

Data cleaning, data curation, and data synthesis do not have this problem: dataset creation is a series of (mostly) parallel operations. This makes dataset creation perfectly suited to distributed computation, as one finds on AI blockchains. We can build good datasets together.

Web2 sports betting losing market share to memecoins

Fabs must limit vibrations to several orders of magnitude below the threshold of perception, while simultaneously absorbing 100 times the mechanical energy and 50 times the air flow as a conventional building.

An interesting phenomenon evident blockchain ecosystems is that the networks with the stickiest communities are the ones where a broad base of developers and users had an opportunity to benefit financially from their participation. Think Ethereum and Solana, which have two of the strongest developer communities: the native tokens were publicly available at a much lower price to the current value. In contrast, ecosystems where network tokens launch at a highly efficient market price tend to struggle to retain a passionate community of developers and users, to the long-term detriment of the ecosystem.

Bitcoin surpasses 1 billion confirmed transactions, averaging over 178,000 transactions per day since its launch in 2009.

We are relatively cheaper and don’t bill by the hour. We get more done. We hire and fire firms. CEOs trust _us_.
As a result, in-house lawyers have grown 7.5x times the rate of other kinds of lawyers the last 25 years. The role of “product counsel” boomed, just like the role of product manager in this time.
Today Google employs 828 “product counsel.” That’s more than only the biggest law firms.

Number one predictor of job retention is whether they have a friend at work

We don’t sell saddles essay
-The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour. In fact, it is useful to take this way of thinking as definitional: innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave. No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so.
-Because the best possible way to find product-market fit is to define your own market.

Transformers’ fundamental innovation, made possible by the attention mechanism, is to make language processing parallelized, meaning that all the words in a given body of text are analyzed at the same time rather than in sequence.

I’ve been making chatbots since the days of AI Dungeon, and have seen the cycle multiple times. A new site appears with low censorship and free content generation. It grows a user base, starts introducing more censorship, raises prices, and before long it becomes unusable and people move on to the next one. Poe has been around for longer that most and I’m only seeing improvements on it. Plus it’s operated by Quora, which I think will give it added sustainability.

Friendtech is uniswap for social tokens

Steve Jobs figured out that “you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. – Taleb

I eventually think these open-source LLMs will beat the closed ones, since there are more people training and feeding data to the model for the shared benefit.
Especially because these open source models can be 10 times cheaper than GPT-3 or even 20 times cheaper than GPT-4 when running on Hugging Face or locally even free, just pay electricity and GPU

In a 1985 interview Wozniak posited: “The home computer may be going the way of video games, which are a dying fad” – alluding to the 1983 crash in the video game market. Wozniak continued:
“for most personal tasks, such as balancing a check book, consulting airline schedules, writing a modest number of letters, paper works just as well as a computer, and costs less.”

He seemed well aware of the heretical nature of his statements, telling a reporter: “Nobody at Apple is going to like hearing this, but as a general device for everyone, computers have been oversold”and that “Steve Jobs is going to kill me when he hears that.”

Bonus (Reality Check): What Are The Odds You Get Acquired Within 5 Years for a Good Price? Around 1%-1.5% by Jason Lemkin
Data on 3,067 startups founded in 2018. The takeaway: It’s the second 5 years where the real value starts to compound. Startups are a long game

The subset of parameters is chosen according to which parameters have the largest (approximate) Fisher information, which captures how much changing a given parameter will affect the model’s output. We demonstrate that our approach makes it possible to update a small fraction (as few as 0.5%) of the model’s parameters while still attaining similar performance to training all parameters.

Podcast notes – Punk 6529 on Bankless: “NFTs are generic carriers for intangible assets…intangibles are $70 TRILLION”

Why pseudonymous identity
Very intrigued by NFTs in late 2020s
Initially thought it was cute games for kids
Saw Gmoney, Punk4156 – inspired by idea

Idea behind bitcoin – provable ownership

“If you’re not sure, you should just try it”
With tech, you can’t just read about it, you gotta use it

Now he checks in and out of 2 different ecosystems – Facebook is his pre-existing / real identity life
Twitter is his NFT and crypto community – noticed it’s as easy, if not easier, to cooperate and collaborate here, didn’t expect this at first

Fact that NFTs are always visible in wallets – security flaw, but solvable (especially expensive ones, eg, Fidenza)

On bulletin boards 20 years ago — didn’t know ID of those people, just had pseudonymous handles
“It’s not weird at all — you’re all gonna do it”
People present differently online, on LinkedIn v IG v Facebook

The NFT makes the pseudonymous ID provable

RSA: “Don’t trust anyone in crypto who hasn’t used Uniswap”

“No constitutional rights without freedom to transact”

There’s a progressive erosion of freedom

One is tech intermediated —
NYC yellow cabs, pay cash, no one can stop you from using them – decentralized physical activity
Now, Uber can stop you any time for any reason

Two is post 911 AML/KYC
Cash now viewed with suspicion
Impossible to launch “cash” as a product today

End state of all this is a few large databases that intermediate everything — it’s a chokepoint, a honeypot
No thinking about second order effects
Some very ambitious politicians will take control, shut down and control large numbers of people, including their opponents
All of this runs outside of due process
Starts with good intentions, but grows and grows
Network effects which become chokepoints

Crypto’s own permissionless architecture becomes an important counterweight – Bitcoin has no CEO

RSA: there will be 2 types of money — controlled money and free money

NFTs are our best shot at achieving decentralization — that’s why he started 6529

Most of his friends are completely clueless — lots of them think he’s lost his mind about NFTs and crypto
Caught in a MLM scheme or Ponzi

What’s funnier — lots of BTC people can’t get into ETH or vice-versa, or NFTs and DeFi — “have you looked at yourself in the mirror?”

“Hardened veteran of being yelled at”

A lot of super technical crypto lovers shit on NFTs, “kid stuff”

Because crypto was too obsessed with the technology, it was clear it was pre-product market fit
NFTs changed that

You don’t buy a CryptoPunk because it’s on Ethereum

When you talk about applications instead of the tech, you’re at the beginning of consumerization
eg, Dolce Gabbana at an NFT conference!

NFTs = generic carriers for intangible assets

Many things you can do with NFTs that you can’t do with crypto, eg, personal IDs
Big companies are using NFTs, but not bitcoin / ethereum

NFTs are infinitely expressive

Metaverse is just the internet, it’s not gonna be one website
Right now you’re 2 inches tall on my laptop, but in the future you’ll be full size – visualization will improve
You’ll need persistent digital objects — NFTs!

You can survive without Twitter, but not really without email
Politicians can’t ban email — it’s a protocol
Architecture of web 1 was open, inter-operable, came out of academia (eg, email, websites)
Architecture of web 2 came out of Silicon Valley, should have been protocols but was captured by large companies

Metaverse will be your all encompassing ambient digital environment

We have moment in time, next 2-3 years – while others think this tech is a joke – we have opportunity to win a technology shift
Twitter was thought as a joke, a curiosity – 11 years later, huge debate about how POTUS uses it

BTC won’t displace state money – state has tremendously powerful tools
ETH won’t be global computing platform – it’s AWS

You can make NFTs as first amendment protected speech – there will be a Supreme Court case on first amendment grounds

NFTs are
—first mainstream crypto consumer app
—possible to get large companies using and integrating
—less threatening to the state

Intangibles on corporate balance sheets are $70T dollars – far more than gold – and many more intangibles that aren’t on balance sheets at all

NFTs can carry any arbitrary intangible on the internet

“Yes We Can” and “Make America Great” are examples of intangibles that bind humans – memes – intersubjective realities and myths

It’s the underlying fabric of society – and now we can make it composable on the internet

Podcast notes – Overpriced JPEGs – guest Tim Ferriss: “Assume there’s always a market for quality in any medium — and just get fucking great”

Guest: Tim Ferriss
Host: Carly Reilly (w/ Bankless)

“The way you do anything is how you do everything”

Experimented with NFTs for last 2 years

Describes himself as writer or podcaster to unfamiliar people

Very competitive person – wants to suffer a little

Cockpunch – origin story
-Started w/ desire to be less precious about creative projects, looking for joy and fun and laughter
Likes playing with new technology sandboxes
-Was drawing characters with gauntlets – the name Cockpunch popped into his mind
-Lets him play with 3d modeling, rigging, voice acting, music – lets him acquire skills that can be transferred to other places – vehicle for learning

AI art competition
-entrants had to show their work
-based on Cockpunch characters
-teaching himself – and then teach others

Chose fiction to let himself focus less on metrics, a “quantitative prison”

“Most people who want feedback…want positive reinforcement”

In any new space, tries to find someone with 10K foot view across many projects to get advice

Lots of folks get lost in weeds with NFTs / web3

Decided on 5555 mints – wanted to make sure it sells out

“There are a lot of whiny bitches in web3”

Likes advice of Scott Adams (Dilbert creator)
Thinks in terms of 6 month projects and 2 week experiments
Snowball of relationships and skills from project to project

Created term “Emergent Long Fiction”
Fiction lets him learn from new people
Set a few conditions upfront – a few characters, realms, drivers
There’s competitive games
But where it goes from here – he doesn’t necessarily know (hence “emergent”)

Set constraints and explore how creative you can be

Most people don’t know what they want

Hard to get clear signal when you ask a large audience what they want

Bullish on tokenized assets and digital scarcity

Been thru many cycles of tech
Always some new tool / platform that people say you have to use (eg, Vine)
“Assume there’s always a market for quality in any medium — and just get fucking great

Web3 isn’t going away
But NFTs – he doesn’t know – it’s one of the meanest most aggressive communities

In this bear market, he’s down 70% net worth – but it doesn’t entitle him to behave like an asshole

Public perception of NFTs (in his audience) has soured tremendously – like a dirty word
But he likes to cull his audience from time to time if they don’t have patience or understanding

Cockpunch as an unlock has exceeded all his expectations – relationships, what he’s learning

Fiction doesn’t always mean a novel – it means story telling
Didn’t plan to do a Discord – it self-organized
In Discord – use your Cockpunch NFTs, with attributes – uses ChatGPT to write a match summary (blow by blow) of a cock fight
Others added music, voice commentary

// stopped taking notes after ~1 hour

Podcast notes: NFT news with Overpriced Jpegs and guest Supermassive

guest SuperMassive – head of video at Defiant, covers crypto / web3
20 years as filmmaker

Glut of NFT stuff today, compared to when Bored Apes launched

Macro is deeply uncertain right now

NFT volume has dropped, but top projects haven’t fallen much – Mutants, Karafuru

Carly likes using Dappradar to track projects
SM uses Watchtower (paid app)

Some trends
Emergence of manga / anime style (Azuki)
Evolution of what’s considered “blue chip” (Artifact)

Vtubing trend – using avatar that tracks your movements in eg, Zoom calls
Opportunity to translate NFT into vtube scaffold
Can still emote / behave as yourself in metaverse but look like character

Recent explosion in Asian art / themes – CloneX (Murakami), Karafuru (comes from Indonesia), Azuki (anime style art)

Damien Hirst’s Dots – blue chip moment – price has dropped

7yo son and 9yo daughter, get their feedback on which NFTs – they liked Azukis

MFers – Bankless likes them, growing interest in NFTs

8000eth Punk sale – Deepak.eth bought it (CEO of Chain)
Has spent $31M on mutants, serums, and this punk
Also bought the M3 serum (!)
Took Compound loan to pay for it
Self promotional

We will label people as ape owners but not Tesla owners – that’s bizarre and interesting

NFTs have more tangible ownership value than shitcoins – and harder to sell so more hodling
NFT space is making up its own rules now

X2Y2 airdrop – wasn’t that valuable, had early issues so paused airdrop
LooksRare volume dropping, lot of it was wash trading, falling rewards

We’re all waiting for Coinbase NFT marketplace

Also NYSE doing an NFT marketplace too – what will it look like?

New stat that # of US people who hold crypto > # of US people who have a savings account (!?)

Will be an international arms race for stablecoins, crypto products

Carly works with Andrew Yang on his new Lobby3 initiative – anti-poverty benefits of crypto and web3
“if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu”

Disney hired tech exec Mike White to lead metaverse strategy – taking it seriously
More confident Disney can do it than Facebook

Lens Protocol to build social apps
Possible future where writing good comments = NFT = can become collateral for buying a house

Lots of citizen policing in this space – community sorts it out – but media always prefers talking about the rugs

SM’s two exciting projects – Cyberbrokers (respected artist) and Aku collection (former MLB player)