Estimates range from 750,000 to over a million people living homeless within the USA. Housing supply shortage estimates are around 4 million homes in the USA. 2 of the 8 billion humans on earth lack adequate access to toilets & clean water. That is 1 in 4 humans! Why can a person live in a car or on the street, but we can’t build 200 square foot housing in most of the USA? There are multiple pieces to the housing puzzle. First is materials. Then is zoning & codes. Then we have labor. Then we have supportive infrastructure such as roads, gas, electricity, communications, water, sewer, and waste water treatment. And lastly is the actual energy to sustain it all. Beyond that extends to NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) style objections. People don’t want developments near their homes that could lower the value or bring unwanted types of people. If we segregate lower income, disabled, mentally ill, and any other people then we also have to maintain all the other supporting infrastructure for them to survive. Someone has to pay for it and it often falls into disrepair if we don’t have a mix of incomes paying taxes. This keeps people in poverty & creates an us vs them mentality. I am not saying we should not protect society from dangerous people… that is entirely different. A kid fresh out of high school or college doesn’t need a big place to live & are rarely even be able to afford it. They are then pushed into having roommates, living with a boyfriend or girlfriend too early, staying with parents, or pay for more space than they need. A single adult may not even want or need a big space. We can buy a brand new 200 square foot travel trailer camper for less than $35,000… on a 15 year loan, but good luck building or renting a home like that. Trailer parks have proved for decades that factory built housing works for lower incomes, but comes with stigma, lack of walkability to necessary services or employment, among other issues. Campgrounds & motels with long-term options have often turned into alternative housing options proving people can do it, but laws prevent new developments for such uses. Society & the way we build housing must shift. It is not simply housing, but also factories, educational facilities, and entire towns. Densities, parking, supportive infrastructure, & more needs to shift as artificial intelligence outpaces human intelligence. We can no longer live like we did in the past. Developments of the future must take inclusivity, walkability, & quality of life into account. Many of these ideas have existed for decades with visionaries seeking to build them, but were never actually built due to lack of funding. Meanwhile, we now have OpenAI with over $100 billion to build AI data centers that no one wants in their backyards. We have seen some mixed-use options that attempt to fix this, but education, factories, food production, & energy have not been included as core to them. There is buzz & conspiracy theories about 15 minute cities where everything is within a 15 minute walk… outside of an Orwellian dystopian fear, there is no real reason to avoid such developments. Data centers are being cancelled due to NIMBY, AI fear, & lack of water/power for massive centers that require more than entire cities. There is now an effort to create distributed data center options to solve the gaps… but they lack community focus or solving human problems. With the AI infrastructure buildout focused on housing, factories, & education… we can reshape how humans survive & thrive. We no longer have the luxury of NIMBY & must begin 100-2,000 acre walkable communities (Factory College Towns) EVERYWHERE to solve these issues. I believe that if we build 1,000 of these developments around the USA, we can absorb pockets of stranded energy that have gone unused to now power AI data centers, revitalize America, solve housing shortages, and improve quality of life.

When I saw George Hotz say this live, it was in that moment that I decided I was going to work at comma. It took a few months, but I ended up working there building the first tiny boxes. I had known a lot about comma and tiny, but at this event he convinced me that they were worth setting my mission aside to be there. The mission is to feed, house, and self-actualize humans in Factory College Towns with smaller Factory-Datacenters to seed each community. By the middle of 2024, I could see that AI was moving a lot more quickly and data centers were going to become a huge topic of debate. As I look at the landscape today, I understand now more than ever that it’s still just the beginning. What we are doing is changing the future to one that would not exist otherwise. A more empowering future for humans.

There is no end in sight. SpaceX’s Starship 14 is more evidence that Elon is serious when he talks about Terafab. The AI advances keep coming. We need a massive mobilization of able-bodied Americans solving problems of reindustrialization and artificial intelligence.

Solving bottlenecks of Reindustrialization is a significant part of Reindustrialization.

Praxis keeps telling us what they are, but at the same time I cannot find their mission. Our Factory College Towns aren’t attempting to build a new religion or hip version of communism, we are on a mission to feed, house, and self-actualize humans.

It’s not that big of a deal. If you’re afraid of homelessness as a founder, then don’t be a founder.

3 Autonomous vehicles at a light next to each other. I see this daily. When people don’t understand why I would sleep on a bench to be here, they need to understand this photo. Why would something as simple as, housing the most vulnerable, be a problem for a place like this?

Can’t build basic public restrooms or housing that is needed, but will accelerate this? Highly unlikely.

If you have Netflix and are interested in some of the AI threat debate, watch “The Al Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist”

200 square foot units could solve the housing crisis inexpensively. If it’s enough for the richest man in the world, it’s enough for addicts, alcoholics, college students, single adults, elderly, etc. We need to end such high housing size requirements and we will solve a lot of the USA’s problems.

The reason I know that AI is going to wipe out a lot of humanity is because Silicon Valley is soulless. I’ve walked around downtown Palo Alto for 2 hours asking people if they would give $20 to a homeless person or if they would prefer the homeless person commit suicide. I didn’t get a single person to choose life for the homeless person. Not a single person.

Greenfield Factory College Towns and revitalizing existing towns with factories and higher education (including trades) is how humans and AI align for abundance. The transition to full automation is unknown, humans must stay in the loop for now while remaining the focus indefinitely. Innovation is for humanity, we have to remember that and never forget it.

I’ve only been woken up and harassed by police twice since living homeless. The first time was the day after my cancer surgery (that encounter led to a $30,000 ER visit). The second time was tonight, just before 3am. Late night fishing expedition by the police department.

This is top of everyone’s mind. Data centers and community impact. This is where we needed to be. This has been the goal, to get everyone caring. You have freedom of opinion, but everyone must be focused on this.

Especially in manufacturing.

This is the actual bench I have been sleeping on the past few nights. I have freedom unlike most people can comprehend. I’m working on the mission to feed, house, and self-actualize humans. The synchronicities of me being here and it relating to this mission is laying the foundation for a multi-trillion dollar company that impacts a billion lives. I would not be this dedicated to launching this company right now if I did not believe we are at a tipping point with artificial intelligence. Our humanity and how we care for the most vulnerable humans is human-AI alignment. Kindness. Being able to be dangerous and holding back unless absolutely necessary to protect the ones you care about. I’ve slept outside people’s tents on the ground to help them feel safer. I don’t care, I am on a mission. I can sleep anywhere… whether it’s a data center, factory floor, random bench in a random city… I am resourceful and will figure it out. I can live minimally in order to lay this foundation properly. It may look like I’m behind… but it will soon look like an overnight billion dollar unicorn. This isn’t a promise, this isn’t hype, it’s simply me telling you what I believe based on who I am, what I see in Silicon Valley, and where we are culturally right now as a nation and planet. I’m the founder of a future trillion dollar company, the average homeless person is not… the average person is not. We are building Factory College Towns in order to usher in the era of human-AI collaboration for human abundance. It’s not about everyone having the exact same things, it’s about providing a foundation for people to create the lives they desire. It’s about providing a foundation of food, housing, and empowering environment for people who cannot create the lives they desire. Towns built for living, working, playing, loving, learning, and paying-it-forward. Last night I had a call drop and then a homeless guy next to me started talking. He needed that conversation. I needed that conversation. I never met him before in my life. These are real people. If we cannot provide an unconditional base for these people to eat, sleep, shower, and use the restroom then artificial intelligence is going to wipe us off the planet… because there will soon be a lot more humans that cannot provide for their basic needs.

Education is undergoing a transformation. Colleges come next.

Insane to think about a town inside... 1.1 acres

It is pretty incredible to think companies as small as comma ai / tiny corp would be able to do what they are doing with openpilot and tinygrad. The open source community has sort of been the equivalent of a really good LLM for George. It hasn’t replaced him, but has empowered him to do almost magical things. When you begin using FrogPilot or SunnyPilot with collaborative steering on all the time, it changes driving and travel as a whole. It opens up so much if you choose to take advantage of the superpower it gives you. For people who never want to give up driving to a robot, it is the perfect transition. It is fun. George used open source collaboration and community to build software. He makes money with his companies selling hardware devices that run his open source software projects. Android is interesting when you look at how Google monetized it. I think that may be how comma and tiny make the best in class products while the Android ecosystem of so many companies struggles to compete against the single Apple internal ecosystem. When you control the whole product and make money selling a great solution, you have incredible power. Without open source, we would only have Tesla Full Self Driving and sad ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) from the other Automakers. George’s small little company outdoes all the other automakers ADAS… because of open source. NVIDIA held an event, Jensen headlined like a rockstar. AMD held an event, it launched with a room to George Hotz. It wasn’t as big as the later session held by Lisa Su, but it was pretty interesting to compare the two events and power that open source holds within AMD (number 2 for AI compute).