June 16 2023
- Chamath flew Southwest to Vegas poker tournament
- Brad Gerstner is on in place of David Sacks!
- Fed rate hikes
- IPO market picking up again?
- Arm filed documents
- Arm acquisition by NVidia was cancelled by regulators
- Seems Softbank is seeking some liquidity - they have had this position for 6-7 years now
- Tech had a bad year 2022
- Now Tech is going up again so its just reversion to the mean
- Hard to cut rates when China will print trillions soon
- AI boom has been amazing for market
- It will change all kinds of businesses
- Will we have many AIs or 1 big AI like search
- Instead of client server model where all data was at server and you got data in and out of it now users will be data repository and apps/AIs will come to you
- Zuck also said on Lex Fridman that there will be many agents
- But there is real leverage in having 1 personal assistant
- Web search has been $20T market and could get disrupted
- Bard and ChatGPT demos are getting quite impressive
- Bard can serve better experiences and use that for better ads
- Google will do well in AI but won’t have same dominance as they do in search
- Bad mistakes by CalPERs
- Low allocation in tech
- Horrible partner selection
- Reddit strikes
- Many subreddits went dark to protest Reddit pricing policy
- No need to build app network on top of a social network that is already quite self sufficient
- Reddit is unique that most of the value is in community and users and they have the power to organize and unionize and decide where value goes - not in employees, or management team or VCs, etc
- Facebook quelled this kind of stuff unemotionally in the past - Reddit might do the same
- Reddit should just cut the users a deal
- Facebook is launching Project92 - text based social network
- Creators to be compensated
- Apparently inspired by BlueSky
- Mistral AI raises 105M euro after 4 weeks
- Might be better to invest in Nvidia instead
- Just subsidizing capex - paying money to just rent equipment
- Instead Comerica Bank or JP Morgan or someone should just give a lease line
- In the US, replace mergers and acquisitions with copy and compete - what incentive structure is in place for entrepreneurs to build businesses - coz big tech isn’t allowed to acquire but will copy instead
- $100M capital spent training today will be $1M spent training 18 months from now - so why spend all this now? What’s the bet it will pay off with this immediacy?
- Alternatively invest in places where cost curve is not coming down - build shipping port, toll booth system on a road, space exploration, etc
- Bill Gates funded mosquito project in Colombia
- Each year 400M people infected by Dengue, 100M get sick, 21000 deaths
- Edes Egiptia is the species of mosquito that are carrying this and Yellow Fever, etc
- Wolbachia bacteria - natural - 40% of mosquitoes infected with it - interferes with their ability to spread viruses
- In Indonesia they observed a 75% reduction of infection when they did this experiment - no genetic modification - just exposure to bacteria
- What is natural is for people to get infected with bacteria and viruses and die
- What is human progress but engineering?
- SideNote: Friedberg recommends only zinc-oxide sunscreen
- He doesn’t use anything with TinOxate, OxyBenzone, etc
- These are endocrine disruptors
- Side effect is that you look weird
- People ignore linear improvements incrementally by technology but when something goes bad its a big step down and people want to withdraw
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