ChristopherJBoyle

Slope of Enlightenment in the streets - Plateau of Sustainability between the sheets

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

@firesidealpha Share of wallet <<< share of mind.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️AI capability is commoditizing faster than the United States expected, and China is winning the diffusion layer.

The chart does not prove China has taken the frontier.

It shows something more immediately dangerous: Chinese models are becoming the default working substrate for more users, more developers, and more token volume.

That matters because technological power does not come only from having the single smartest model. It comes from deployment, price, availability, integration, developer habit, and how much real work runs through the system.

China is attacking that layer aggressively.

Cheap models.

Open weights.

Fast iteration.

Good-enough performance.

Massive domestic deployment.

Low-cost inference.

Broad integration into apps, devices, commerce, education, coding, and enterprise systems.

That stack can overwhelm a smaller number of superior American models through sheer adoption density.

The real variable is cost-adjusted usefulness. A model can trail the frontier and still dominate the market if it is cheap enough, open enough, fast enough, and good enough for most tasks. Most economic activity does not require the best model on Earth. It requires a model that works reliably at scale for almost nothing.

That is where China is becoming dangerous.

The United States still owns the strongest high-end stack: frontier labs, advanced chips, hyperscale cloud, elite talent, capital markets, enterprise trust, and the strongest research ecosystem. But that advantage can be hollowed out if Chinese models become the world’s default utility layer.

The historical analogy is not luxury cars. It is manufacturing.

America can invent the highest-performance machine.

China can learn how to produce, distribute, and embed the machine everywhere.

Once the ecosystem forms around Chinese models, usage creates feedback. More developers build around them. More tools optimize for them. More data flows through them. More fine-tunes appear. More enterprises become comfortable with them. More governments outside the U.S. orbit adopt them because they are cheaper and politically convenient.

That is how market share becomes strategic power.

The real signal is this:

China may lose the prestige race and win the substrate race.

America may own the models everyone talks about.

China may own the models everything quietly runs on.

That split would be extremely dangerous for the U.S. because the lower layer compounds faster. The frontier gets headlines. The substrate captures workflows.

Expect a tiered Chinese strategy:

Broadly distribute capable, cheap, open models.

Keep the strongest unreleased or controlled models inside the sovereign perimeter.

Use public models to capture ecosystem share.

Use private models for state, defense, industrial, cyber, and strategic advantage.

That is the likely architecture.

The United States is still ahead at the top. China is closing from underneath. The real danger is that Washington keeps measuring leadership by benchmark crowns while Beijing measures it by global dependence.

The winner of the AI race will not be the country with the single best model.

The winner will be the country whose intelligence stack becomes unavoidable.

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

@firesidealpha Of course share of wallet increased - they’re vastly more expensive.

A 10x cost-per-task hides the sheer volume of tasks going to other options.

The right metric for adoption is % of tasks, not share of wallet.

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

@theallinpod @altcap “bulletproof”
“slot machine”
“if it breaks”

None of this sounds like zeroing in on a sustainable growth advantage.

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

@theallinpod @altcap In light of Chamath’s comments re: the limited true productivity gains
-comments which I think are spot-on + vastly more widely felt than admitted-
Brad’s comments sound like companies are paying the premium for CYA more than anything else.
“We bought the best, don’t blame me”

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

I like this idea far better than any of the other UFO stories.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️The whole UAP question turns on timing. Walk the dates.

July 16, 1945. The Trinity test.

The first atomic bomb detonates in the New Mexico desert. Atmospheric fission has a signature nothing else in nature produces. It is the first announcement a species can make that it has crossed the energy threshold.

Within two years, the modern wave begins. Kenneth Arnold's sighting, June 1947. Roswell, eleven days later. The Air Force opens its first formal UFO investigation by 1948.

Now the detail that breaks every comfortable theory. In 1944, a year before Trinity, Allied pilots were already reporting glowing objects pacing their aircraft. They called them foo fighters. American command assumed they were German secret weapons. German pilots were reporting the same objects. They belonged to nobody in the war.

Do the math on distance. The nearest star system is over four light years away. Even moving at light speed, nothing out there could detect Trinity and arrive by 1947. And the foo fighters were already here before the bomb existed.

Whatever responded to Trinity did not travel here. It was already here when Trinity went off.

That deletes the invasion story, the visitation story, the recent-arrival story. And it forces a stranger question: what kind of thing waits?

Nothing alive. Biology has lifespans, expeditions have return dates, and no crew parks in a foreign solar system for a hundred thousand years waiting on primates to split the atom. But you already know what waits, because we build it ourselves. Voyager has flown for fifty years and will outlive everyone who launched it. When humans want to watch a place we cannot stay, we leave a machine.

Now give that logic to a civilization a million years older. It does not send crews. It seeds watchers: small, automated, patient, parked wherever a biosphere might someday produce technology. Waiting costs a machine nothing.

And it wakes for exactly one signal, the one that cannot be faked and cannot be missed: fission inside an atmosphere. The first atomic flash is the moment a biosphere announces it has produced something capable of ending itself or leaving home. Everything before that moment, the empires, the cathedrals, the radio broadcasts, is background noise. Trinity is when Earth became worth watching closely.

That is a sentinel. A tripwire with a camera, left behind by something that wanted to know one thing about this planet and was willing to wait indefinitely for the answer.

July 1945, the wire fires. The machine wakes. The protocol is simple: find the capability, catalog it, keep eyes on it.

And once you see that, the target list stops being random. It follows the weapons.

1948: green fireballs swarm Los Alamos, the lab that designed the bomb, so often the military convened a conference to rule them meteors. Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, the country’s foremost meteor expert, said no. Meteors fall. These flew flat, silent, at constant speed, and kept choosing nuclear sites.

2015: an object violates the sealed airspace over Pantex, the most guarded plant in America, where every US warhead is assembled. Multiple personnel watched.

1967, Malmstrom Air Force Base: launch officers reported ten Minuteman ICBMs dropping offline one after another while security described a glowing object over the gate. The missiles were the one thing in the state that stopped working.

Put the three together and read the behavior. It ignores cities. It ignores presidents, armies, televisions, eight billion people. For 77 years it has shown up at exactly one address: the machinery of the bomb. The lab that designs it, the plant that builds it, the silos that would fire it.

It does not care about us. It cares what we can now do.

77 years of flawless patience. Zero contact. Zero mistakes. Its only job was to notice.

Everyone asks where they come from.

The record answers a different question: how long has the neighborhood been occupied.

Since before anyone was watching.

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

The amazing thing about these findings are the scalability.

This is *exactly* what heavy LLM use shows at the small biz level, too.

Obvi there are things to automate 🥳
But when it comes to anything beyond those 5-8 standard cases, the tools lose their magic luster.
And fast.

[Jon Yeo @jonyeo88]

On today's All-In podcast, @chamath dropped a reality check: AI compute costs are doubling every 45 days, but he’s only seeing a 5% productivity bump.

I wrote about this exact dynamic months ago. If you look at this Stanford study, 5% is exactly where AI productivity gains crash when a codebase hits 10M+ lines of code.

Reality check:
• Prototypes? AI is magic.
• Complex codebases? Prepare for massive rework.
There is way too much hype and not enough focus on the signal-to-noise ratio in complex business applications.

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

If you’re wondering why a new NHS2.0 / too-big-to-kill Maslowian megabureaucracy is being rushed in before the UK’s next general election, this thread provides insight as to some potential drivers. 🧵⤵️

[ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ 🛡️ @DanielMiessler]

People have been wondering why there haven't been more direct replacements of employees by AI.

The reason is because we haven't yet had a product that was general enough in the tasks that it could do, with low enough onboarding friction, to do actual work.

That just changed, and I think we're about to see a completely different character of mass layoffs due to AI.

This time it won't be in anticipation of AI getting good enough, but because somebody has already literally replaced them and has the ability to compare their work side by side.

So the question becomes how many tokens it will cost to replace a slightly below-average, average, or halfway-decent knowledge worker versus what their total comp was.

I'm guessing that for many, many jobs, the token cost will be somewhere between 1% and 50% of what they are paying the human worker.

Absolute Insanity: We got AGI not from a new model or a sexy new startup, but from a Slack integration.

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

Pretty wild change of events.
Monumental change is afoot.

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

For the first time since 2022, Ukraine has a coherent theory of victory. Instead of grinding down the Russian army at huge cost, Kyiv now destroys Russia's capacity to wage war.

It targets the revenue, fuel, and the supply lines that feed the front — Christian Caryl, FP. 1/

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

Life.

[✧˚ @Kinngszn]

Exulansis

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

@aporia9n 1. Make a good bet on that one as an anchor.
2. Get skilled enough so you can compress time/results.
3. Add new paths to fill in time you gained back.
4. Repeat 2 & 3.
5. The portfolio will definitely compound.
6. And the variety provides for some good 10x bets

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

Good thread 🧵
The problem runs deep and is deepening.

[Aporia @aporia9n]

Most ambitious people I know are mentally cooked, by the combination of infinite optionality and infinite comparison.

They’re torn between climbing the corporate ladder, launching a startup, becoming a solopreneur, buying an SMB, moving to NYC, moving to London, moving to Dubai, staying close to family, optimizing for money, optimizing for freedom, optimizing for status, optimizing for peace.

Then they open TikTok and see some 22yo flying business class like it’s nothing, or casually spending their monthly salary at a beach club.

The issue is not just envy. It’s the feeling that there are 10,000 possible lives available, every one has someone younger apparently winning at it, and somehow you might be choosing the wrong one.

[Breadman @BTCBreadMan]

The next time you’re feeling down, remember it's all about perspective. I got a friend who reads 2-3 books a week, works out twice a day, has no financial worries, & has people who want to have sex with him all the time & yet he constantly complains about how much he hates prison

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

@theallinpod @altcap If you can’t see the scam by now, I don’t know what else to tell you.

[dnap @dnapway]

Chamath reveals his company's AI token costs are doubling every 45 days but productivity is only up 5%

"I sat down with my CTO today, I said how are we doing on token spend. And he said the most incredible thing, he said right now, our token costs are doubling every 45 days. I said well what is the downstream productivity? And he said maybe 5% max."

"So my costs are doubling every 45 days, my upside is essentially flat. He said honestly, what we're finding out is that you need to use a lot more tokens to get to this next iteration of improvement because we've effectively already asymptoted."

"We're going to take a step back and try to figure out what to do. I don't know how many other companies will actually go through this reckoning now, but the point is everybody in the next three or four years will for sure go through it."

"I suspect that if you can get out now, you should get out now before all of that starts to seep into the water table. Because I think that's probably what allows you to get out at a huge price and raise a huge amount of money."

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

Signs of life?

Meta set to overtake Google’s frontier AI models in six months, SemiAnalysis says https://t.co/QvicFzZCgN

[boris @boristane]

god tier ad

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

@TheDealMakerGuy Exists in other sectors too.
The chance to build independently as an owner is really rewarding after stepping out the capitol games of thrones.

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

@garyblack00 Listening to “permabears” get led around by their noses all day is wild.

It’s like none have grasped what

“shoot for the stars & you just might hit the moon”

actually means.

Hey, here’s a hint:
“multi planetary species” = “the stars”
“the moon” = “the moon”
Start there.

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

👨🏻‍🍳🤌🏼❣️

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

The moment you realize those old stunning, impossible looking oil paintings of sailing ships in storms were absolutely accurate.

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

This is a fun find!

[Nibiru @JinxedHorizon]

The most controversial artifact on Earth isn’t locked in a vault. It’s on public display at Oxford University right now. 👀
It’s the Weld-Blundell Prism - a 4,000-year-old clay tablet holding the Sumerian King List. Ancient Babylonian scribes carved a royal bloodline that begins when the Anunnaki kingship “descended from heaven.”Found in the ruins of Larsa which is modern Iraq. Currently sitting in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.The numbers will break your brain:Baked around 1800 BC.
It lists 8 Anunnaki kings who ruled for a combined 241,200 years.Then comes the line that changes everything:“Then the Flood swept over.”
Before the Flood? God-kings living tens of thousands of years with cosmic precision.
After the Flood? The lifespans suddenly crash into normal human biology.Same clay. Same handwriting. Same scribes.
Yet mainstream historians say:
“Top half = pure myth.
Bottom half = real history.”
C'mon… how does one document flip from fantasy to flawless accuracy halfway through without skipping a beat?
This isn’t just a king list. It’s the oldest surviving record of an Anunnaki genetic reset...

#Anunnaki #Sumerian #WeldBlundellPrism #AncientHistory

[ChristopherJBoyle @ChristopherJB07]

This is the way to live.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A Tuscan wine family spent seven years and more than a hundred million dollars on a winery built to disappear. The roof is a working vineyard. From the hill across the valley, all you can see are two thin strips of glass in the dirt.

This is Antinori nel Chianti Classico, near the village of Bargino, about halfway between Florence and Siena. The architect, Marco Casamonti, dug the whole building into the hillside and planted vines across the top, so from above it looks like plain farmland. They even make a wine called La Vigna sul Tetto, "the vineyard on the roof," using only grapes grown on top of the building itself.

Building it was a nightmare. About a year in, the main wall holding back the hill slipped several inches because there was too much water in the ground. Engineers drove thousands of support columns deep into the slope and drained the water through a set of wells. The budget nearly doubled and ended up past $130 million.

The family paid for all of it because it plans in centuries. The Antinoris have made wine since 1385, when one of them joined the winemakers' guild in Florence. That is 26 generations under one family with no outside owners, which makes them one of the oldest family businesses in the world. For most of that time they built nothing for visitors. Bargino, opened in 2012, was the first.

The wines have the same stubborn streak as the building. In the early 1970s the family took its best red and sold it as "vino da tavola," or table wine, the lowest grade Italian law allowed. They did it on purpose. They aged it in small French oak barrels and left out the white grapes that Chianti law required, so it could not be sold as Chianti at all. Its name was Tignanello.

Critics loved it anyway. Tignanello helped start a whole category now known as Super Tuscans, and it sold so well that Italy had to create a new legal wine class in 1992 just to make room for wines like it. Its sibling Solaia, made mostly from Cabernet grapes, became the first Italian wine ever ranked the number one wine in the world by Wine Spectator, back in 1997.

In 2022, this hidden winery was voted the number one vineyard in the world. The person who called it the most beautiful winery they had ever seen was standing on a working farm, above a cellar kept cool by the earth around it, drinking wine from a family that has been refusing to do things the easy way for 641 years.