For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.
AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.
Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.
The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.
https://t.co/AUKzoQ5Ikb
Our thoughts on the importance of AI sovereignty.
1. Your AI sovereignty dictates your institution’s future. Sovereignty is the precondition for choice. Relinquishing sovereignty transfers the future choices of your institution to others, who are likely to exploit it for their gain and your loss.
2. Data retention is your treasure. Transfer it at your own peril. Your ability to win is dictated by your ability to recognize and use your unique edges, and you keep winning by compounding the underlying data to generate new insights. Transferring that data hands over access to your pre-existing winning plays and yields the means of production for new ones.
3. Tokenmaxxing hijacks your value orientation and decreases your institutional fortitude and intelligence. The pursuit of high token usage incentivizes disposable scripts over robust software — with the addictive feeling of false progress. There is a reason why those selling tokens refuse to charge based on value.
4. Controlling your weights is controlling your fate. Weights are the distilled form of hard-won, accumulated institutional knowledge. If you let others control your weights, you are allowing them to migrate the alpha of your business to theirs.
5. There is no contradiction between sovereignty and alpha. The architecture that maximally preserves sovereignty is one that enables institutions to own their tribal knowledge, and to compound it as alpha.
6. Politicizing the technical issues involving sovereignty is what your adversary wants. Techno-politicization is the wellspring of false sovereignty. Techno-politicization drives decisions that seem to reduce dependency, but ultimately limit agency — especially on the battlefield in the West.
7. Real expertise is existential. Allowing politics or favoritism to determine your technical decisions rewards whoever is best at politics, not whoever is right. Listen to those closest to the problems, not those speaking most compellingly about them.
8. Learn from institutions that are winning or that have consistently delivered. Institutions facing existential threats do not have the luxury of making technical decisions based on political preferences.
9. Only listen to institutions, countries, and people who have a proven record of being right. A track record of correctness is the best and only signal for future correctness. Judging something as right or wrong based on who you like is exceedingly misguided.
Millennials are the elite generation because they cranked out 12-page essays the night before they were due. No ChatGPT. No Claude. Just lo-fi beats playing in the background, Black coffee at midnight, footnotes that were somehow correct, and pure delusion. Grade was an A minus. Period.
Macrohard or Digital Optimus is a joint xAI-Tesla project, coming as part of Tesla’s investment agreement with xAI.
Grok is the master conductor/navigator with deep understanding of the world to direct digital Optimus, which is processing and actioning the past 5 secs of real-time computer screen video and keyboard/mouse actions. Grok is like a much more advanced and sophisticated version of turn-by-turn navigation software.
You can think of it as Digital Optimus AI being System 1 (instinctive part of the mind) and Grok being System 2. (thinking part of the mind).
This will run very competitively on the super low cost Tesla AI4 ($650) paired with relatively frugal use of the much more expensive xAI Nvidia hardware. And it will be the only real-time smart AI system. This is a big deal.
In principle, it is capable of emulating the function of entire companies. That is why the program is called MACROHARD, a funny reference to Microsoft.
No other company can yet do this.
Announcing Personal Computer.
Personal Computer is an always on, local merge with Perplexity Computer that works for you 24/7.
It's personal, secure, and works across your files, apps, and sessions through a continuously running Mac mini.