I don't think this causes a run, just an upward pressure on deposit rates and therefore, all else equal / as a first order effect, lower bank margins. There's been extensive research on how reduced search / transaction costs affect deposit rates (hint: it's not great). But! Lower search / transaction costs don't magically take deposits out of the system. Lots of people think agents will be like ozempic for human decision-making (i.e help people resist temptation / become more disciplined and "rational"). I suspect they'll instead make us more effective at actuating on our desires as they currently exist, not as we wish them to be. If someone wants to spend more on the things they enjoy, an agent that helps them discover and access more of those things likely increases their spending. Agents will also help us enumerate latent desire (sense and act on desire we didn't even know we had). Finding better uses for money generally increases the desire to spend it. Increased consumer spending = more business revenue. Whether businesses retain that cash or pay employees and suppliers, those payments generally move deposits between accounts. Unclear the longer-term effects on deposits and bank margins. Lots to consider here. But the broader corollary is more interesting IMO: the easier agents make it to satisfy our desires, the more consequential it becomes how those desires are formed. Therefore, the most important work of our time is to find ways to increase the QUALITY of our desires: to make our desires a function of epistemic novelty rather than sensory novelty. For this to happen, new institutions and institutional incentives are required. And there's not enough people doing meaningful work here. To me, this is a concrete alignment problem. An agent could become extraordinarily good at satisfying our preferences while the institutions shaping those preferences remain terrible.

Hardening critical infrastructure should be a priority for policymakers, state and local officials, and operators today. Rather than stand up a new grant program or write new rules, let’s find a solution that can keep pace with the rate of technological change.

lots of things to unpack: 1. our largest deal yet (big size) 2. our 1st investment-grade offtake deal (great credit) 3. a new product offering to help scale our business - that k3 annc was a part of it you think you know what USDai is, but the design is improving each month

Dry Run has a new direction! It has been a blast building the podcast out with @khushii_w. We've met and interviewed many incredible thinkers and builders, and are excited to double down on making frontier technology more legible. We see a lot of abstractions thrown around in frontier tech, which is partly due to uncertainty. However, we think there’s an opportunity to put more deliberate effort into explaining, educating, and making these ideas accessible. These rabbit holes have been fun, we love getting into the weeds, and can't wait to share more with you!!

bring back sub 4 hour golf rounds and handshake deals

many high-TAM surfaces remain ‘unverified'

lack of structure (credit, supplier, offtake)

“andy, we’ve successfully thwarted the Muse swarm. our walled garden remains secure. surely the agents will stop trying…”

great weekend

You turn search into learning through actuation and feedback. Therefore, "alignment" (in terms of both real-world safety and "being beneficial to all humanity") requires decentralized deployment. Specifically, it requires deployment to the local information environments most likely to produce useful feedback in this vein. Otherwise we are creating superhuman searchers, not superhuman learners. And superhuman searchers are more dangerous, because they can mutate environments arbitrarily without having any conception of which mutations are beneficial vs. harmful (and in which contexts). So, alignment, in one sense, is the responsibility of every firm in the economy. But more specifically, the responsibility of the organizations that have access to and are best at searching / learning over the most important (information rich) subsets of economic reality. What follows is that banning open source would be a disaster for alignment. The firms that are the best at alignment through deployment are generally the most differentiated and therefore least likely to want to use closed-source frontier lab models and infrastructure. Sovereignty = safe and valuable machine intelligence.

abundant intelligence leads to scarce context. the hot ball of money continues moving up the stack (states, permissions, workflows, etc.)

vinod's got mike tokenmaxxing and it's not even week 2

live thinking: spice banks - who actually wants to bank the businesses buying compute hours? most prefer assets, but what about flows. finance purchases across suppliers, understand what is earns via capacity, commitments. - take inference business collecting from customers / paying suppliers on a slew of schedules. how do you get comfortable to lend against the cash left over? - customer has cash sitting w/ supplier before token gets served. finance portion of it. get access to collections, margins, contract expiries. small wedge into much larger purchasing decision. you now know 1) when they need more compute 2) what they paid 3) whether they used it wisely. - opens door to matching supply&demand. this is where a lot of people comp to marc/glencore. renewals come up, bring suppliers, negotiate terms, finance the purchase. - keep finding things worth financing because youre already on the inside. starts to look like a merchant bank. layer on a bunch of products.

"...restoring the combined US manufacturing and defense industry to its share of GDP in the 2000s would require $2 trillion in incremental investment. Returning to 1980s levels would require a staggering $6.5 trillion."

ZEC5L might be the best performing token on HyperEvm right now Feels like spot, hits like perps

so much pain as a fan

friction premium is probably the right way to think about a lot of that margin. businesses where some % of take rate exist because the customer has better things to do than reprice the relationship every day. so maybe the question everyone should be asking is what % of gross margin is value creation v. exhaust. likely brand/trust/underwriting/proprietary supply survive (allocated accordingly).