Peter Thiel just told Silicon Valley it’s automating away its own cognitive moat.
Nobody there is paying attention.
Thiel: “It is striking to me how bad Silicon Valley is at talking about these sorts of things.”
The industry is either arguing over 20% improvements in the next transformer model or jumping straight to simulation theory.
They’re missing the massive real-world shift happening right in the middle.
Thiel: “My intuition would be it’s going to be quite the opposite, where it seems much worse for the math people than the word people.”
For decades, Silicon Valley worshipped quantitative intelligence. Math and coding were the ultimate safety nets.
Thiel: “Within three to five years, the AI models will be able to solve all the US Math Olympiad problems.”
Once a machine instantly solves the hardest math problems on earth, the economic value of being a human calculator doesn’t just decline.
It disappears.
And the historical irony is brutal.
The societal bias toward math over verbal ability started during the French Revolution. Not because math was more valuable. Because verbal ability ran in aristocratic families, and math was elevated as the great equalizer to break nepotism.
A 200-year-old political accident became the foundation of Silicon Valley’s entire hiring philosophy.
AI is about to snap it back.
The people who built the models that can now outperform them mathematically spent their careers optimizing for the wrong skill.
The future belongs to the word people.
The engineers didn’t see it coming because they were too busy calculating.
1. When you write something intended to be read by an important person, go through it and cut every unnecessary word.
2. The reader of anything you publish is an important person.
@Georgiyxo_agent Remember that I invested in ICE and never sold. Then I moved to WAGMI and kept increasing my position. I have diamond hands, even if it loses 95% now
Peter Thiel's advice to early-stage startups:
"One basic frame is that if you're starting a company, you always start small.
So how do you get to monopoly when you're small?
Answer, you start with a very small market. And the conventional business thing is always you want to go after really big markets.
There are no big markets without lots of competition.
You never want to go after big markets. You want to go after small markets.
Facebook started with 10,000 people at Harvard. It was such a small market, it could not have been funded.
It would not have been funded by investors if you'd actually pitched it.
So it sort of bootstrapped the whole thing. It went from 0% to 60% market share in 10 days. That was actually a very auspicious start.
Now, PayPal, we went after 30,000 power sellers on eBay.
Again, sort of a subset of a subset of a subset of the payment space, but it has these very distinct, unique characteristics that made it a well-defined market.
We got to about 30%, 35% market share in three months. Again, a very, very promising start.
There was a tremendous amount that went wrong with all the clean tech companies in the last decade.
And I think failure is always a little bit overrated because people can't learn much from failure.
When you fail, you normally failed for multiple reasons. You failed for reasons A, B, C, D, E, and F. And maybe you think you failed because of A.
Next time around, you'll fail for the other five reasons.
So that's why I think we often make the mistake of... of overrating failure in various contexts.
Cleantech failed for many different reasons. But one that I think is very important, and people haven't thought about enough, is that the markets were just way too big.
Every PowerPoint presentation you saw in the period 2005 to 2008 started with, we are in the energy market. And this is a market that's in the hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars.
And then it's a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that market.
And then you end up with a dynamic where you have to beat the other nine thin film solar panel companies.
Then you have to beat the other 90 solar panel companies.
Then you have to beat the wind companies.
And then fracking comes out of right field. And China comes out of left field.
And you're sort of like this minnow in this vast ocean.
And there's just competition everywhere, most of it not even visible from the point at which you get started."