There were a lot of terrible things about “crypto,” but there was also some really hardcore nerdery in there.
Every so often I stumble upon some random pile of very esoteric now semi-abandoned code from that period, and I think “wow, these people really nerded pretty hard here.”
Anthropic is questioning whether AI may turn out to be altogether useless. This is the single most honest thing Anthropic has ever written.
“But achieving recursive improvement alone does not suggest an immediate change in how industrial production occurs, societies organize, or markets function. More intelligence can’t learn what a drug does over decades of use, can’t hold elections sooner than a constitution dictates, and can’t turn a stranger into an old friend in a weekend. For most people, the felt pace of this future will still be set by the bottlenecks, even if the laboratory upstream runs at the speed of compute. That collision, where recursive intelligence building itself ever faster meets the world of humans, relationships, and governance, is another part of this future we can’t predict.”
“So you bootstrapped the whole company?”
“Yeah, I turned it down. Turned down the funding.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I turned it down just to do this, just to grind it out, build it myself.”
“So you had an opportunity to take venture money?”
“Yeah, a term sheet and everything.”
“From who?”
“Yeah, a big fund out in Menlo Park. It was a top-tier firm, though. And they offered me like 15, some shit like 10 billion or something like that, 5 billion, something like that.”
“Wait, wait, wait. A term sheet.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, but not 5 billion dollars. They offered you 5 billion dollars for your seed round?”
“Yeah.”
“For a seed round?”
“Yeah.”
“What are we doing here?”
“Like, what the y’all, like, you know what I’m saying?”
“That’s more than the GDP of a small country.”
“But I was so younger, like, I didn’t know what a cap table was.”
“Are you sure they offered you 5 billion dollars?”
“I turned it down.”
“You didn’t even have a product.”
“It was a SAFE, like, I had to give up equity for this decade.”
“But you would get $5 billion?”
“Yeah.”
“You’d be one of the most valuable companies on earth.”
“It was somewhere, it was in the billions, though.”
@santisiri Qué tipo de “chequeo” es eso? El tipo registró sus corporaciones en direcciones físicas de Florida. Se registró como votante en Florida. Todo esto es chequeable
Tu tweet aludía a la residencia fiscal de Thiel (y al 5% que está tratando de escapar), y es incorrecto