I was just Thinking… im old enough to remember that the 1980s drug game almost destroyed Sports as we know it .. as with the Black Community in the USA and others …. Ironically RAP and HipHop Attacked it vehemently. Aggressively. The corporations bought Rap and embraced it in the 1990s . Ironic
Aint this some sht ?
Rapper Killer Mike tears up while talking about black-Asian race relations after Rick Chow's acquittal
"We can't f**k with y'all. Y'all don't f**k with us. And it's obvious. And we are put in a position by a bigger master to be taught not to f**k with each other. So you, as the model minority, always see us as beneath you. And yet you need us because you could never put a store in the master class's neighborhood... But if we won't unite -- I mean the Asians and blacks against the master class -- then we can no longer f**k with y'all, because it's just not working."
"I'm telling this country, you're coming to a point of crisis with a group of people who -- right or wrong, we're here. We're part of the fabric. We have nowhere else to go. But if you're training groups of people to see us as beneath... People can only take so much."
.@scottbelsky: "We may look back at this early period of artificial intelligence and realize that by using frontier models in the cloud, we were essentially hiring PhDs for every task just because we could. Fast emerging efficient AI practices will help us avoid malpractice-by-overspecification - you don’t send a cardiac surgeon to take a patient’s blood pressure — not because the surgeon would fail, but because the surgeon is slower, scarcer, more expensive, and the nurse’s reading is indistinguishable. It is far more prudent to allocate the right talent for the right job."
California is one of the most dynamic places on the planet.
But it is a case study in how a rich society can spend more and more while producing less and less of what its ordinary citizens need.
My take:
This ugly reality is staring us right in the face:
Americans will have walled AI gardens where we beg for access from a few East India companies, open source will get banned on national security grounds, and 6 billion people who aren't American, aka the rest of the world, will standardized on a Chinese AI stack.
Bloated. Broken. Slow. Ugly.
There's still time to change it but it's slipping through our fingers like fast running sand.
Read this passage below from Bill Gurley because it's about to become our hideous reality if we don't change course quickly.
"If a credible Western open frontier player does not emerge, the consequences cascade quickly.
This is the inverse of the early Internet wave. In the 2000s and 2010s, Western companies — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft — dominated globally while China carved out its own walled garden. The AI version flips that dynamic on its head. Without a credible Western open frontier player, the only open models capable of running entire economies are made in China. If U.S. policy further restricts Chinese open-weight access on national-security grounds, the U.S. ends up with two or three closed Cathedrals serving the U.S. market — and the rest of the world picks the AI stack that is free, capable, self-hostable, and not embargoed. Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, India, the Middle East. Roughly six billion people. Chinese open models become the global default by 2030, and the United States ends up technologically isolated from the majority of the world’s AI users. We would have done it to ourselves."
Fully essay in replies.
El Niño development is firing on all cylinders.
Sea temperatures in the central equatorial Pacific have now broken records for five days in a row.
A locally record-breaking westerly wind burst is currently causing yet more warming there.
on 1: the chaebol only really exists as a result of concessions made by the state- the chung-hee government created de-facto sheltered markets for them to operate in (cheap credit, forex access, national champions selected etc)
the labs occupy an interesting position that are kind of the inverse. chaebols function as a result of the state provisioned access to capital which is scarce elsewhere in the local economy. the labs exist in the deepest capital markets humanity has ever built.
this means that the chaebol has incentive to cooperate with the state that the lab does not have. anthropic does not NEED concessions like the chaebol did
the state has much more teeth here to ensure that that sovereignty does not exist. this is why i think nationalization or something close to it (operational licensing scheme) is a foregone conclusion. the korean equilibrium only works because both parties hold each other in check (nation needs growth, chaebol needs capital) vs the ai trade which is a pure check mate.
if you are anthropic at present, your only rational move for any degree of survival is to airlift your entire team into contested hinterlands. AGI is much more likely to be achieved on a native reservation than in the marina.
without a jurisdictional challenge it seems foolish to believe an independent scaled frontier lab exists within 24 months, the state has no incentive to allow it.
on 3: a useful frame I like here (shamelessly stolen from @coen_armstrong) is modeling this via "drop out year". take the epochai trend line and model out when the cost of a frontier training run crosses 5% of GDP for a given country. this is somewhere around 2037 for US/China but only a few years away for the euros.
if you really only have 2-3 turns left you don't have a ton of choices: there will be some catch up economies that seem to uniquely benefit from ai-induced growth and will springboard (high professional services mix, already relatively offshored, structurally low margin) ie you could imagine the uk growing at 10-12% because of this
but otherwise your best bet is to make concessions to one of the sovereign trainers. there's also a handful of weird economies that own some factor input to training (a lot of the global south is underrated in its productive power capacity) that are going to inflect here.
one could easily imagine mexico being underpriced if a 2026 data-center ban means that frontier compute capabilities are built immediately over the border by american firms and intelligence piped back over.
☢️ Radiological cleanup at the US Navy Shipyard at Hunter's Point will be the subject of a submission to @xprize this El Nino season. "Who ya gonna call girl?"
A thriving floating San Francisco is knocked back to analog by a Rim of Fire quake, only to discover that its greatest threat is the poisoned legacy beneath the Bay - forcing Pier 70 and the refugee fleet to invent a new kind of harbor together. #FutureVision@xprize
A thriving floating San Francisco is knocked back to analog by a Rim of Fire quake, only to discover that its greatest threat is the poisoned legacy beneath the Bay - forcing Pier 70 and the refugee fleet to invent a new kind of harbor together. #FutureVision@xprize
1. if transacting with superintelligent models outside of the boundaries of a lab becomes difficult due to national security / ai safety concerns and so on, it will mean the Coasean boundaries of the labs will grow to encompass all interesting industry, creating a truly cyberpunk chaebol-capitalism type of future, where the goverment sort of runs them but they also sort of run the government
2. as if there weren't already enough reasons to break up your family, leave your home, the Zone of Thought will increase the attractiveness of migrating to try and have your child on american soil, so they can have 1000x the effective brain power of people born elsewhere
3. every country should probably try and either work towards a new ai security pact with the americans immediately or pool every ounce of national resources to try and create their own ASI labs lest you become complete intellectual, economic, and moral vassals to the united states of america and the output byproducts its ASIs (you wont even get to talk to them). if they succeeded (big if) this will imply a more global race and more risk factors than was previously implied by the formerly only "beating china" narrative -- but many will prefer it to the superintelligent monopolar value lock-in
4. the other alternative is to keep the tension between safety and concentration of power at the top of mind and for the government/labs to push for solving it, rather than instrumentalizing all other values to be subservient to minimizing ai harms. insofar as safety means defending properties of the fragile world we like, the diffuse nature of power is one of those properties
5. historically the americans have been really quite Benign about their global public goods hegemony despite the ability to extract significantly more rents than they do, and it makes it easy for people of all stripes to fight for america rather than under it. we probably don't have to, but i hope america overall works towards export promotion of american models rather than export control
@314STLTweet@adamscrabble You can catch Steuart running through campus and walk to The Hub. Razorback Greenway and Downtown Trail in spring are spectacular.
New: Remember that SF hype video with Steph Curry and the coyote from yesterday? A newly unearthed document shows the nonprofit behind it — Believe in SF — plans to spend ~$30M on Lurie’s agenda through 2027. Its donors are secret.
https://t.co/qjorLBRaVP
Okay, folks: The big El Niño update is now out on Weather West! This sure looks like it's going to be a dramatic year from a global climate perspective, and there are major implications for extreme events (across California, the U.S. West, & well beyond). https://t.co/gj3cMHttFF
I really don't think enough people fully comprehend the worlds that are about to collide here.
You already have people in geopolitical circles warning about the threat of famine based on surging prices / availability of fertilizer components, and you also have long-term weather modeling all converging on a worst case scenario for a building El Nino event, which will peak near the end of the year. These are two slow moving but entirely predictable disasters that when coupled together will each make the other orders of magnitude worse. (This will take months to fully unfold, but at this point, the die is cast.)
There's no event in our history books that combines the current global population with the impending fertilizer shortage and the strength of the El Nino that's coming. We are about to witness an unprecedented event that will push crops around the globe to their limit.