pretty crazy how five years ago vaccines were the most devastating thing you could ever do to your body but nowadays its fine to inject chinese peptide from Temu because you cant stop snacking after dinner
When we first met Tom, his obsession with energy markets came through immediately. Seemed random, but it's "actually" central to what he's building at Actual Computer.
The thesis is that local inference is inevitable. Open source models are getting good enough, people don't want to feed their thoughts to AI labs, and demand for compute will continue to be insatiable.
But the main forcing function is that chips aren't the bottleneck anymore - power is. Compute is derivative of energy, and the massive data center buildout has created an energy shortage where GPUs sit idle waiting for power to come online.
Yet one place that already has power, and always will, is everywhere else. Homes. Businesses. Universities. Collectively, they have more compute than all the data centers combined.
@Tom_A_Lynch goal is to build a distributed network of people plugging in their local compute (devices like Mac minis to consumer Nvidia cards) to serve inference demand. The substrate he's chosen is Bittensor, on Subnet 95.
@actualinc has an exceptional team behind it, and this is one of the projects that's gotten me most excited in a long time.
Enjoy this conversation with the two of us!
My uncle is a front office risk taker for Citadel.
I was looking at the 2020 crash with him over the weekend.
I asked what it would take for vol to skyrocket and indices limit down. I'll never forget what he said.
"We can't anymore. We literally don't know how"
14 months ago Justin sent me the link to download the Vector beta when it was a Testflight and not even on the App Store. At the time there were only 40 users doing 100k in volume. Today they got acquired by @coinbase. Big shoutout to @justinzard, @0xrwu and everyone else involved. Hard work pays off π«‘
Almost two years ago we started building Vector with a simple idea: trading should be multiplayer
Our incredible users helped turn this idea into reality
Today, weβre excited to join Coinbase and help shape the future of onchain trading to 100M+ users.