22 Tiny Lessons from my conversation with Nicolai Tangen.
1. The faster you reply, the less you need to say. If you reply in a minute, you can say two words. If you wait a day, it’s a paragraph.
2. Overanalyzing doesn’t improve the outcome. It just makes you more confident about the outcome.
3. “If you have really high ambitions, you achieve great things even if you fail. If you have low ambitions, you achieve nothing even if you succeed.”
4. “You call it gut feel, nobody believes in it. You call it pattern recognition, a lot of people believe in it.”
5. Repetition is persuasive.
6. “Why make the same mistakes when there are so many to choose from? Find some new ones.”
7. Take the same amount of risk after a win and a loss.
8. “Things shouldn’t take longer than they need to take.”
9. Doing nothing is often the best option.
10. Speed and agility are the only hedge in a world you can’t predict.
11. Be impenetrable against social pressure and instant in responding to evidence.
12. The people who feel weird, different, and misunderstood are the ones who change the world.
13. Changing a culture is a ten-year project. If you think you’re halfway done in two, you haven’t started.
14. Asking for advice makes people think you’re smart because you are clever enough to recognize how clever they are.
15. “If you’re not curious, you’re not going to listen.”
16. “I would inject AI everywhere. I would just go all in.”
17. “It’s difficult to find people who are really contrarian now because you need to live in a space where people don’t agree with you.”
18. “You don’t have to be disliked even though people disagree with you.”
19. You can’t please everyone. Even if you are right, 10% of people will disagree with you.
20. The source of most of our poor decisions is blind spots.
21. “I don’t think you should profit from people who have a tough time.”
22. “Wealth is basically created by owning one or two really good assets, and then you just hold onto it for the very long term.”
Listen and learn.
My conversation with @NicolaiTang1
Tangen runs the world's largest sovereign wealth fund and sees AI as a once-in-a-lifetime inflection point. He is responsible for managing $2.1 trillion. That's roughly 1.7% of all listed companies on Earth.
This episode is full of surprising insights.
Enjoy!
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If God wanted us to build Type 1 Civilization, he would have:
1. put a giant fusion reactor in the sky
(emitting blackbody radiation around 5800 K)
2. made 28% of Earth's crust out of a semiconductor with a matching bandgap (~1.1 eV or so)
3. filled the oceans with an alkali metal we could use to store limitless quantities of energy
(sodium or something similar)
That would be a crazy coincidence...
Thousands of distinct vehicle and pad criteria had to be met prior to catching the Super Heavy booster. Thanks to the tireless work of SpaceX engineers, we succeeded with catch on our first attempt.
Ilya and OpenAI are going to part ways. This is very sad to me; Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light of our field, and a dear friend. His brilliance and vision are well known; his warmth and compassion are less well known but no less important.
OpenAI would not be what it is without him. Although he has something personally meaningful he is going to go work on, I am forever grateful for what he did here and committed to finishing the mission we started together. I am happy that for so long I got to be close to such genuinely remarkable genius, and someone so focused on getting to the best future for humanity.
Jakub is going to be our new Chief Scientist. Jakub is also easily one of the greatest minds of our generation; I am thrilled he is taking the baton here. He has run many of our most important projects, and I am very confident he will lead us to make rapid and safe progress towards our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits everyone.