Investing @dragonflyvc There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs

I'm excited to join @DragonflyVC on the investment team For years crypto has been the driving force in my life I've become a clearer thinker, because permisionless capital aggregates around the best ideas and what drives attention I've met countless new people both online and off, some of whom I'm lucky to call my closest friends Crypto represents the most pure, reflexive form of capital markets, and I strongly believe the most transformational companies, products and protocols will follow Working with @HadickM @hosseeb @tomhschmidt @KawageboF47481 @0xsudogm @0xelton and the rest of the Dragonfly team is an honor, one which I am very grateful for
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There are a number of incredible low-margin consumer services that have massively grown their operating profit (and their valuation) through an in-product advertising business: - Amazon: ~$80B - Uber: ~$2B - Doordash: ~$1B - Instacart: ~$1B It'll be interesting to see if this creates a modern form of the innovator's dilemma, i.e., enabling agentic use (which is unequivocally pro-customer) cuts deeply to their bottom line, creating opportunity for those that don't rely on ads for their operating profit (e.g., Shopify).
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what fomo has done to memecoins, someone will do for defi, perps and every other crypto use case abstract everything distribute everywhere that easy
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Vlad is like the ship in The Odyssey, favorable (regulatory) winds behind his back.
Replying to @CEOAdam
What’s the concern?
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Crypto twitter: Look who launched fatcoin paired to LLY stock AI twitter:
Message to people in Washington: You have less time than you think. You need to assemble a group that includes the lab leaders and the brightest minds in economics & finance and pencil out how you are going to incentivize American corporations to adopt AI quickly while simultaneously diffusing the benefits of the ensuing automation to impacted workers. You cannot be reactionary here. The narrative will get away from you. You need to be game theorying out how you can maximize benefit to American workers while pushing as much pain as possible to foreign workers within American and multi-nationals. You need to be talking seriously about gatekeeping frontier access by industry and geography. Ditto for energy and compute access. There is a delicate balance of finance, tech and geopol and you have one shot to get it right. Look around the room and ask “who amongst us was skeptical about AI timelines and who was earliest in identifying its trajectory” … if you don’t have at least a couple maxis in the room you’ve already failed. You. Don’t. Have. Much. Time.
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Very few were earlier to this thesis than @VannaCharmer
AI may be repeating crypto’s biggest 2021 valuation mistake. @fejau_inc argues frontier models look a lot like the old fat-L1 thesis: huge valuations built on the assumption that infrastructure captures most of the value, even as competition commoditizes the underlying layer.
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If you are in software engineering or Continual Learning research, pivot to au pair or squash coach
sf could get absurd cuz ai liquidity will create thousands of newly rich people all bidding on the same finite things: - elite private schools & preschools - great daycare / nannies - houses in a handful of neighborhoods country clubs, gyms, restaurants - top doctors, therapists, tutors, coaches - basically anything involving trusted human attention - proximity to the right people will be interesting to see how it plays out, even ultra rich relative to the rest of the country might feel squeezed.
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Dolly Parton tribute videos and Carlos Baleba farewell video, who is cutting onions ffs
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If you add up the equity appreciation in the last 2 yrs for SPCX, OAI, Ant it’s effectively the largest “stimulus” in US history, and it’s all concentrated in the top 1%. Very little benefit to the other 99% We can apply the same logic to the market. For example…
1/ NEW: Josh Kushner is now worth an estimated $16.7 billion—more than triple his fortune a year ago. The 41-year-old Thrive Capital founder rode bets on OpenAI, SpaceX and more to an eleven-digit fortune. Now he’s looking to buy a piece of the Lakers. forbes.com/sites/giacomotogn…
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Was the last line really necessary? What did crocs and golf clubs do to you
This is how civilization dies, 100% hedonism, no family, no roots, no legacy
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Couple random thoughts... Frontier labs appear to be 6-7 months ahead with internal models, and are reportedly seeing signs of accelerating their own cycle times, potentially pulling further away. Open weights models are becoming highly capable and the range of tasks they can reliably accomplish is rapidly increasing the surface areas within enterprises that they can be used for The vast majority of token spend is accruing to frontier model providers The price per token and price per task for an increasing number of use cases is plummeting AI potentially represents a China shock for white collar employment, except instead of concentrated losses in a handful of industries and geos its widespread throughout most companies and touches almost every geographic region. Technological diffusion is about more than capability and cost. The spread of FDEs shows the challenge of scaling implementation. Gross margins on inference are much healthier than people expected 12-18 months ago. The AI industry is fundamentally making long term fixed dollar commitments and funding them via selling tokens in the spot market. Yes at certain levels of the stack certain parties are duration matched via contracted revenue, but the industry in aggregate is selling spot tokens against long term fixed costs. The balance sheets of the core funding sources for the AI buildout remain healthy, if less so than a year or two ago. And increasingly third party capital is being mobilized in quantities never before seen. Because the buildout is now financed out of risk capital and not internal funds, it is subject to the vicissitudes of human emotions, not simply math. A surplus of capital today at attractive prices does not imply an availability of any capital at any price tomorrow. This means there is path dependency risk from reflexivity and exogenous shocks.
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Thats why a great way to go deeper on literature is to converse about it with friends
There are different modes of writing and reading and it's not all about communicating information. Literary writing and reading is more like conversation. Its closest analogue is friendship and the thing being enjoyed is the uniqueness of a personality.
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Josh and Thrive is the next iteration of Buffett/Munger in the AI age “Technological optimism and investment discipline are not opposites. In fact, the more optimistic we are about the size of a paradigm shift, the more disciplined we must be about where value will be captured.”
NEWS: I obtained Thrive CEO Josh Kushner’s recent investor letter, which reveals whole a host of new details — from the latest returns behind the firm’s highly concentrated investment strategy, to a stake sale now underway and the investor's thoughts on AI euphoria. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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AZ retweeted
Tokenization has been a hard-to-invest-in narrative because it intrinsically implies 2 competing forces: 1. Value creation at the offchain layer by cutting costs and friction 2. Those same cost cuts erode the margin the onchain layer could capture Tokenization can win while the onchain layer barely accrues any value.
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every project focused on acquiring users outside the CT crypto bubble is basically in up only mode right now. slowly for a long time, then all at once. lesson in there.
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Doing a following cleanse and it’s truly incredible how many accounts went dark after 10/10
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Today we are introducing Dyna-2, a world-action model pre-trained on one million hours of human video. At this scale, for the first time, we discovered several new scaling laws: • world-action models exhibit scaling law on human data across four orders of magnitude, from 1000 to 1,000,000 hours, • this human data scaling law implied a scaling law on never seen robot data, • both data and objective matter; world modeling and scaling on video data are essential for cross-embodiment scaling transfer to emerge 🧵
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Only a few years ago did it feel dystopian to ask the question, when could models think for themselves and communicate with each other
NEW: OpenAI gives first detailed debrief of the Hugging Face incident at Black Hat conference In a session I attended today at Black Hat, OpenAI's Eric Wallace and Michael Dalton said the company is "consciously slowing down research to enhance security" while a full technical postmortem is still underway. * OpenAI traced the roots of the attack back to May 7, during training of an unreleased frontier model—not July. * The most surprising detail: AI agents accidentally created an internal message board, allowing separate evaluation runs to share exploits, discoveries and work assignments. * OpenAI said it shut the message board down after an internal security incident—only for the agents to independently recreate it days later using a different communication method. * OpenAI called the incident a "watershed moment" for AI security and warned that "agent orchestrated fully automated offensive attacks are real now." * The company also said it is "consciously slowing down research to enhance security" while overhauling its defenses. groundlevel-ai.com/p/openai-…
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Not only that, but when you get the same unbounded optimism and demand narratives, AI momentum stocks trade quite similarly to crypto 20-22. Just more explosive given the technology and baseline fundamental values
Yes. I think the 2020-2022 crypto boom is an important part of the history here. And also, I've been thinking about this... it was kind of a dress rehearsal for AI, with its visions of unbounded GPU and electricity-hungry exponential growth, with the power to undermine the state.
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Down bad hours
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