Vivek Wadhwa

Academic, author, entrepreneur, and speaker.

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

I completely agree with Prof. Mairal. I have never seen anything like this, it seems to be a concerted effort by nefarious groups. The level of toxicity and crudeness I am seeing is off the charts. Really sick comments. @elonmusk, your new algorithms are possibly amplifying.

[Anurag Mairal @mairal]

.@X has become a cesspool of anti-India bigotry by troll farms. Timelines on some of the posts have really yucky and deeply hateful stuff. Accounts get banned for far less if it involves any other group.

@elonmusk @nikitabier - shocking to see you not address this and allow it to go as long as you have.

If you know other @X leaders, please call them out for allowing troll farms to operate so brazenly.

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

Dear Anti-immigrants constantly crying that foreigners are taking American jobs: Why aren’t you teaching in rural Alaska?
Hundreds of positions sit empty. Remote districts are importing teachers from overseas on H-1Bs because you won’t move there. You don’t actually want those jobs; you just don’t want qualified foreigners to have them. Complete hypocrisy

[Sen. Lisa Murkowski @lisamurkowski]

Today’s decision from a U.S. District Judge to vacate the policy implementing the Presidential Proclamation mandating a $100,000 fee for H-1B visa applicants—a 5,000% increase in some cases—came at a critical time for Alaska’s schools that are in the midst of hiring before next fall. Many school districts in rural and remote parts of the state rely on the H-1B visa program to bring quality teachers to their communities. In Alaska, this isn’t a partisan issue: the state legislature unanimously passed a resolution last month urging the federal government to waive the fee for educators.

Last year, I introduced legislation to create an educator exemption, and I’ve been talking to Secretary Mullin about an administrative waiver from the fee to help bring teachers here. Today’s news is welcome relief for Alaska’s schools, but I will continue working to eliminate this fee permanently so that Alaska’s students are receiving the best education possible, regardless of the outcome of future legal challenges.

https://t.co/SyEJoeqvtJ

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

At least there is some sanity left in America!

[Holli Semetko @HolliSemetko]

This Judge is helping companies, startups, hospitals, and more to get the talent the U.S. needs to improve the economy. "Judge blocks Trump's $100,000 H-1B visa fee" https://t.co/a6G9Ja7t2D
@wadhwa @buzzindelhi #mpol385

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

I hope this is true...and not fake news. Taiwan deserves American recognition and protection.

[Aric Chen @aricchen]

🚨 Just in: President Trump Slaps Beijing in the Face: “I’ll Call Taiwan’s President ANYTIME I Want!” 🔥

While the Chinese Communist Party screams “hands off” and threatens to blow up U.S.-China relations, President Trump just looked straight into the cameras on Air Force One and said the quiet part out loud: “I’ll always talk to him.”

That “him”? Taiwan President Lai Ching-te @ChingteLai.

This isn’t some backchannel whisper. This is President Trump openly floating the first direct presidential phone call between Washington and Taipei in decades — right as he pushes a massive $14 billion U.S. arms package to arm Taiwan against Beijing’s bullying.

Beijing’s embassy in D.C. already issued the usual tantrum: “Handle Taiwan with extreme caution or else.” Translation: Don’t you dare treat Taiwan like a real country.

President Trump’s answer? Watch me.

Lai is ready. He’s already drafting the script: tell President Trump the truth — Beijing is the only destroyer of peace in the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan’s defense budget is exploding for one reason: Chinese warplanes, ships, and missiles swarm its airspace and waters every single week. Buying American weapons isn’t “provocation” — it’s survival.

Policy experts are stunned. One senior China watcher called the potential call “more explosive than the arms deal itself.” Beijing sees direct leader-to-leader contact as the ultimate red line. Trump just stepped on it with both boots.

This is the same President Trump who stared down Xi before. The same man who never bought the “strategic ambiguity” lie that kept Taiwan dangling for 40 years. Now he’s signaling: America stands with democratic Taiwan — openly, loudly, and without apology.

Think about what this means:

- First direct U.S.-Taiwan presidential hotline since the 1970s.
- A $14 billion message written in steel: American weapons, American resolve.
- Beijing’s bluff is being called in real time.

The old game is over. The era of treating Taiwan like a dirty secret is dead.

If you’re tired of watching the free world bow to communist bullies, this is your moment.

President Trump isn’t asking for permission. He’s daring Beijing to do something about it.

Share this if you believe Taiwan deserves to be treated like the thriving democracy it is — not a bargaining chip.

Comment “TAIWAN STRONG” if you’re done with CCP threats.

The world is watching. History is being made at 35,000 feet on Air Force One.

And Trump just made sure Beijing heard every word.

#TaiwanStrong #Taiwan #CCP

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Anti-Indian content in Singapore was found to be astroturfed by China.

Wonder about anti-Indian content in the U.S... 🤔

[Zack Korman @ZackKorman]

Companies are like "we are spending all this money on AI but we don't know what the devs are even doing with it." Let me answer that for you: They're working on their personal side projects.

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

David’s right: we should be careful what we wish for. Neither the left nor the right seems to fully understand what they’re getting into with their calls for government ownership and control.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right.

The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will cause massive job loss. This is not a story that I believe, nor does the data bear it out, but this is what they have told us. Similarly, they have hyped the risks of AI without putting an equal or greater emphasis on the benefits or readily available mitigations.

Conservatives have another fear. The employees of the leading labs claim to be philanthropic, but what we’ve seen is massive enrichment of NGOs advancing an agenda at odds with traditional values, fueling a revolution against our cities and communities. Soros-maxxing is not charity in our book.

Anthropic and OpenAI have established themselves as Public Benefit Corporations. What could be more in the public benefit than using half the wealth generated by these companies (which trained for free on the collective knowledge of humanity) to pay down the national debt? There is no ideological bias in that philanthropy.

Dario and Sam have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax.

There’s just one problem. Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward. Conservatives rightly fear a Central Bank Digital Currency. They ought to be even more concerned about Central Government AI — a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior.

We saw how social media was weaponized to censor conservatives (including President Trump) in the last Democrat administration. The definition of “trust & safety” expanded to mean protecting the public from supposed psychological harms, micro-aggressions, and disinformation (you know, like hearing conservative ideas or true facts about Covid).

That “safety” agenda as applied to AI will be vastly more powerful and Orwellian. AI won’t just moderate posts; it will curate reality — with the ability to rewrite history, enforce ideological conformity, influence policy at scale, mass surveil Americans, and condition the benefits of the many systems it controls on approved behavior.

America won’t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S. — and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control.

Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now (that are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government) will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power.

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

The US Federal Gvt collects $5.2 trillion in taxes per year but can't deliver working healthcare, functional infrastructure, or effective regulation. Meanwhile, a 22-year-old with Claude just built a working prototype of a government service in an afternoon.

[Dilip Kumar @kmr_dilip]

Hard pill to swallow for many

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

This is truly sickening. Corruption is out of control.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is so insanely corrupt, I can’t even believe it.

More than half the donors to Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom just won over $50 billion in new federal contracts in six months.

And here’s the part that should make your blood boil.

Sixteen of these 27 donors were facing federal enforcement actions, antitrust reviews, labor cases, securities charges. Many of those cases have been quietly dropped or scaled back since Trump took office. You write a check, your legal problems disappear. That’s not a coincidence.

The White House won’t even release the full donor list. They’re hiding it on purpose, because daylight is the one thing pay-to-play can’t survive. A federal judge already ruled ballroom construction has to stop until Congress authorizes it.

Government is supposed to serve the people, not auction itself off to the highest bidder. When access goes to whoever pays the most, working families always end up paying the price.

We either end the corruption, or the corruption will end us.

https://t.co/4MGFzSseFl

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

We have already gone from worrying about overpopulation to declining birth rates. And this is just the beginning of the crazy future we are headed into

[Tom Sasse @tom_sasse]

Our cover story in Asia this week is India's baby bust. Fertility rates are falling remarkably fast across the country-- in several states women are now having the same number of children as those in Scandinavia. That means we should think differently about India's future:

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

@sw_hines I have seen this being abused also, sadly

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

This is why skilled immigration is so important.

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

This new research on US unicorn startups is really interesting.

Some key facts from the report:

1. Immigrants founded or cofounded 455 of America’s 775 privately held billion-dollar startups, equal to 59% of all US unicorns.

2. 66% of all US unicorns were founded or cofounded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.

3. 79% of US unicorns have either an immigrant founder or an immigrant in a key leadership role.

4. The 455 immigrant-founded US unicorns have a combined valuation of $5 trillion.

5. That $5 trillion valuation is larger than the total stock-market value of companies listed in all but 7 countries.

6. Including immigrant-founded unicorns that went public since 2016 pushes the total value above $5.8 trillion.

7. The number of immigrant-founded US unicorns rose from 50 in 2018 to 455 in 2026.

8. 24% of US unicorns have a founder who first came to America as an international student.

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

@setuprepairllc @GameRepublik We don't need visas in the ocean, so all should be fine. :)

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

@sw_hines Yes, the program has been abused for sure. But we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

Not sure about AGI, or how we define it, but we are surely making incredible exponential advances...and science fiction is becoming a technology reality.

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

In 1999, Ray Kurzweil predicted human-level AI by 2029. Stanford's top AI experts said 100 years. Three years from the deadline, he says two things are still missing: AI that understands physics, and a robot that knows the difference between what goes in the fridge and what goes in the trash.

-- LLMs went from unremarkable to world-changing in 12 months. AI now outperforms human doctors by 50% in diagnosis.

-- LLMs have only been truly effective for six months, according to Ray. A year ago, "not really all that impressive."

-- The Genome Project was 1% done at the halfway mark. One doubling later — done. We're at that same moment with AGI.

-- Software alone has improved roughly a millionfold over 70 years. Total compute gain = hardware (75,000 trillion fold) × software (million fold).

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

@GameRepublik @setuprepairllc So we have more illegal aliens?!

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

It seems like @GaryMarcus was right: the AI revenue models are imploding

[Business Insider @BusinessInsider]

Sam Altman said AI budgeting has recently become a "huge issue" for some companies, something that "never came up" earlier this year. https://t.co/P2zODBNmDp

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

Very interesting analysis of the new China manufacturing threat.

[Izabella Kaminska @izakaminska]

The below story about Chinese tech involution is really insightful. I think it perfectly explains why China has had such difficulty reinvesting capital into the West (beyond purely financial assets or assets it wants to strategically sabotage).

Chinese FDI fell quite sharply post 2018 and it’s not just because Western countries became more wary of Chinese control and influence.

The documentary ‘American Factory’ perfectly illustrated the beginnings of the involution problem. The Chinese factory model (when powered by cheap exploited labour) simply can’t be replicated competitively in the West. At least, not without making the West visibly poorer, something that would likely trigger a political backlash.

The documentary tracks the successive attempts by the Chinese owners to block American unionisation to protect profitability. The Chinese managers are also regularly bewildered by American labour norms.

But the reason their investments eventually fail has little to do with Americans being lazy or overly unionised. On the contrary, it’s because when one’s comparative advantage is cheap labour and repression, it’s impossible to make that model work anywhere that doesn’t abide the same norms. This limits Chinese corporate expansion to jurisdictions with poor worker protections and standards, or non democracies.

This is why China’s American investments were eventually abandoned in favor of BRI countries: jurisdictions where China had more clout and influence over local governments and thus greater ability to run exploitative models. It also helped that these populations were generally poorer and had to take terms as presented.

But even that strategy is becoming increasingly politically contentious.

This has left China with no choice but to compete technologically. After all, the only alternatives at this point are: 1) bankrupting its primary customer and trade partner, aka the force that powers what growth it has, 2) writing off the wealth it thought it had on grounds it is no longer materialisable, a move that essentially locks its own people into exploitative conditions for the long term or 3) annexing foreign countries so that foreign populations can be forced to work in exploitative conditions instead. Aka actual old school colonial imperialism.

So far China is opting for the technological path.

But as the below story illustrates, the more China gives up on using its true comparative advantage (large cheap workforces) in favor of technological advances, the more likely it is to run into involution. This is because without a natural input cost advantage it has to compete on actual merit and non human labour cost control.

The problem for China is that simply shifting towards automation and technology is no guarantee of success, especially if the overall operation is far more capital or energy intensive than the old way of doing things. It might not even guarantee greater efficiency, since foreign competition will no longer be put off by an inability to emulate exploitative working practices their systems won’t tolerate. On the contrary China will now be the one constrained by its own inability to adopt Western practices, notably the art of yielding to consumer feedback and power, cost control and respect for hard budget constraints.

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

@ITestThresholds Long time! Please DM me

[Vivek Wadhwa @wadhwa]

Silicon Valley spent decades ridiculing religion as superstition. Now its top AI minds are the ones claiming neural networks may be conscious and exploring “model welfare.” It took the Pope to call out the new religion they’re quietly building.