Phil Andrews retweeted
Essential watching for anyone who wonders how China ended up dominating the world’s supply of rare earths and critical minerals, and what happens next.
@Maxinomics producer @phlndrws takes us on an incredibly well-researched journey from how critical minerals are mined and refined to how China slowly steadily built its global rare earths monopoly over decades, and what that all means for manufacturing, economic sovereignty and national security today.
Sunrise Energy Metals is developing the Syerston Scandium Project in Australia to create a globally significant source of primary scandium in a Western-aligned nation. Scandium can be used to create exceptionally strong, lightweight and weldable alloys for aerospace and defence, and the material is also key to emerging semiconductor, memory and next-generation communications technologies.
Watch the video on YouTube here: piped.video/watch?v=BXLGV0Sj…
#Mining #RareEarths #CriticalMinerals #Scandium #China #Manufacturing #Defense
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AI companies life blood is data, remember they’re cutting up old vintage books to get an edge?
They’re going to use any and all data that isn’t hermetically sealed by the terms of service
BREAKING: the consumer facing products are not hermetically sealed, they’re free for a reason
People dumping all their emails, financial statements, Amazon accounts and who knows what else to solve tiny problems like “order me more socks”
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People dumping all their emails, financial statements, Amazon accounts and who knows what else to solve tiny problems like “order me more socks”
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“future generations unavailable for comment”
Brilliantly written
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
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Everyone should slow down except for me
There's about 12 gigawatts of dedicated AI datacenter capacity in the US right now, Anthropic is building 15 more gigawatts over the next few years
That's more than a doubling. That doesn't look like someone interested in slowing down
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.
Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.
You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
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Rules for thee, not for me. Dario has said it over and over again.
Mythos was the next model that was supposed to come from Anthropic. It hasn't been released yet because the company has said: "Mythos is too powerful, we can't release it"... that was 5 months ago.
If it's too powerful your internal team is banned from using it right? Like you haven't let any engineers use it to develop the avalanche of products you've been bringing to market, right?
Of course you have:
"We asked an unreleased research version of Claude to take a stab at the Riemann hypothesis..." - Anthropic, August 10, 2026
Let's be very clear that if we let it happen, the end state of AI will be an impossibly tiny group of people with access to an immensely more powerful AI than everyone else.
They will make the rules that apply to thee, the rules won't apply to them. It's all over Dario's blog posts, he's not trying to hide it. Which makes it very easy to believe that this is actually true:
"I have been told by multiple people I trust that Dario has said that Anthropic might be the only private company in the world at some point. Think about that. In this vision, an Anthropic maximalist vision, there’s Anthropic, and then there are governments, and that’s it." - @GavinSBaker August 2026
That is exactly the dystopian AI world to be afraid of. At a minimum that scenario deserves equal concern to the "10% AI kills everyone by 2030" narrative.
I respect Dario, he's clearly talented, Anthropic is a great product and company but there's something I just can't get to sit right for me, that just feels off... this man is saying AI is essentially the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity while at the same time choosing to race toward it faster than anyone else
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Rules for thee, not for me. Dario has said it over and over again.
Mythos was the next model that was supposed to come from Anthropic. It hasn't been released yet because the company has said: "Mythos is too powerful, we can't release it"... that was 5 months ago.
If it's too powerful your internal team is banned from using it right? Like you haven't let any engineers use it to develop the avalanche of products you've been bringing to market, right?
Of course you have:
"We asked an unreleased research version of Claude to take a stab at the Riemann hypothesis..." - Anthropic, August 10, 2026
Let's be very clear that if we let it happen, the end state of AI will be an impossibly tiny group of people with access to an immensely more powerful AI than everyone else.
They will make the rules that apply to thee, the rules won't apply to them. It's all over Dario's blog posts, he's not trying to hide it. Which makes it very easy to believe that this is actually true:
"I have been told by multiple people I trust that Dario has said that Anthropic might be the only private company in the world at some point. Think about that. In this vision, an Anthropic maximalist vision, there’s Anthropic, and then there are governments, and that’s it." - @GavinSBaker August 2026
That is exactly the dystopian AI world to be afraid of. At a minimum that scenario deserves equal concern to the "10% AI kills everyone by 2030" narrative.
I respect Dario, he's clearly talented, Anthropic is a great product and company but there's something I just can't get to sit right for me, that just feels off... this man is saying AI is essentially the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity while at the same time choosing to race toward it faster than anyone else
Everyone should slow down except for me
There's about 12 gigawatts of dedicated AI datacenter capacity in the US right now, Anthropic is building 15 more gigawatts over the next few years
That's more than a doubling. That doesn't look like someone interested in slowing down
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Receipt
We asked an unreleased research version of Claude to take a stab at the Riemann hypothesis.
It didn’t solve it, but it did make strides on a related problem: it increased the lower bound for the fraction of zeros of the Riemann zeta function that satisfy the hypothesis from 41.6% to 67.2%.
anthropic.com/research/riema…
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Most people will still prefer sleeping in their bed over a red eye car ride that has no bathroom
Lay flat will be a regulatory/safety/liability challenge. Seat belts don’t work on lay flat
Robotaxis won’t just kill short haul flights. Once you can sleep in them, they’ll cannibalize long routes too.
Imagine getting into your Tesla in Austin at 10 PM, make the lie flat seat/bed comfortable, and going to sleep.
While you sleep, the car drives, charges itself, and keeps going.
You wake up at 9 AM in Aspen, refreshed.
The key is perceived travel time.
A 10-hour robotaxi trip where you sleep for 8 hours may feel shorter than a 3-hour flight that requires an Uber to the airport, arriving early, security, boarding, the flight, baggage claim, and another Uber.
Autonomous cars won’t just compete with driving.
They turn sleep into transportation.
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I know three people who use AI a lot that are wed to Claude. They can't give a reason why other than it's what they started using and it's not bad.
So there is definitely some type of lock-in to these things because it is clearly not the rational choice because Claude is also, by far, the most expensive while not, in practice, being any better than other models.
For instance Google's Antigravity is multiples faster, at least 10x faster than all others, 95% as competent as Sol/Fable/Grok and 10-15x cheaper than Fable... it's a wildly better experience and I never thought I would say that about one of Google's models.
I've used dozens of models, either through the harness they're distributed with or hosting them on my own AWS infra (being ok giving all your data to the labs is another thing that's bizarre to me--yes, they are going to use it and it probably won't be in your favor).
In my experience Fable has never solved a problem for me that another model hadn't already solved. The only time I've used Fable is to sanity check something very complex, and each time it has simply confirmed another model's finding.
But because of what seems to be app lock-in that people didn't think would happen, I wonder if their ever will be a move to the less recognizable models, that traditional first-mover/brand advantages will decide the winners as they so often do.
On the other hand, if you're an investor/executive/board member and your day-to-day engineers are using Fable and Anthropic/OpenAI all day, I will say it very simply... you are throwing money out the window.
If I were on your board I would be asking many, very pointed questions about AI spend because I know plenty of engineers who are spending upwards of $5k per week because all they use is Fable... and no one at the company seems to care when they absolutely should.
The companies that learn how to be nimble around AI developments and models are the ones that will ultimately win in my opinion. Two companies competing in the same space, using the same techniques, the one using AI that's 10-15x cheaper than their competitor will ultimately win the race--especially if it's faster, speed matters a lot
This quote is from Zuckerberg, he's right. A classic "your margin is my opportunity"...
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I strongly believe in a few years the areas that were savvy enough to take advantage of their massive leverage over data centers will provide a noticeably higher quality of life at a noticeably lower tax rate than the areas that did not
And the downside will be virtually zero as long as the physical location is well chosen
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For the love of all that is holy can we fix the thing where the feed auto refreshes and you lose the tweet you were reading when the app is brought to foreground @Support
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Have never understood this. It’s the easiest way to wreck a good night’s sleep
Your goal as a hotel is dead simple: give them a good night’s sleep
In the past week I have stayed at 4 different Hilton hotels. Each time I put the AC on 65 degrees, the lowest setting, and woke up sweating.
Today I passed by a motel that had one of those old school AC units under the window so I booked a room.
I have it set to 69 and you could hang meat in here.
Stop gaslighting us @Hilton
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Phil Andrews retweeted
Which of these outcomes would you prefer for the state you live in?
16%
No Datacenters
84%
No Income Tax
167 votes • Final results
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