“Time is our most valued asset” drives all capitalist/monetary market behavior.

But what if AGI gives every human 200 + year lifespans by default, maybe even up to 500 years or a even a millennia if we really wanted (Methuselah style)…?

What implications lie ahead? 🧵 🚀 Low hanging fruit:

We would actually be able to visit other solar systems (become not MERELY multi-planetary species but a multi-STELLAR species).

Temporarily freeze/pause aging (or not) in special spaceships to go distances that may date decades otherwise.

What will the limits of subjective experience look like once we build direct connections between our brains and future All Powerful neural nets … I’m personally not aware of anyone thinking critically about these scenarios. They are actually coming true soon. 🧵 Time travel. Simply drop into any state you want.

What have the eight ex-Google Brain authors of the Transformers paper been doing since December 2017? 🧐

Let’s find out together! 🧵

Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762…

Sources: Google, Pitchbook, LinkedIn

// @ashVaswani @NoamShazeer @aidangomezzz @nikiparmar09 @YesThisIsLion… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Ashish Vaswani (@ashVaswani) left Google in late 2021 to start @AdeptAILabs which has raised $415 million so far and is valued by VCs at > $1 billion…looks like the company is growing fast and just crossed 40 people. It also looks like Ashish just left Adept a few months ago. 🧐

Top NN (neural net) engineers are getting paid $5-20M annual compensation packages. I've now heard this from 4 different extremely reputable sources but I don't see people talking about it publicly yet so here goes...

What are the implications of this insanity ?!?!?!? ... 🧵 1) New AI infra startups building and scaling their own models are going to continue to raise $100M to $1B within their first year ... dozens of them! And this will sustain the market prices for these scarce NN magicians.

Delegating critical thought to machines far from capable of it (LLMs) may be humanities single greatest threat since the dawn of our species 200,000 years ago… 🧵 Another perhaps more strict way of describing critical thought is to use the example of thinking from first principles … Elon talks a lot about this. He points to physics as a (maybe sometimes *the*) framework for thinking from first principles.

Nostr is an evolution of the legacy client/server architecture where the server owner governed the control of the data and experience the client received…Nostr makes the client as valuable as the server instead of the other way around. This shift is fundamentally profound. If adopted for all apps, the implications are vast…Imagine an internet where the user is in control of their data and decides what kind of quality of service they get — instead of being beholden to the server operator for everything.

There are now exactly 2 well-funded ($100M+ each) platforms focused exclusively on investing in COSS founders at the earliest stage: @OSSCapital (“seed VC” approach, led by me - launched in 2018) and @OpenCoreVenture (“incubator” approach, led by @sytses - launched this year) 🧵 Awesomely, OCV (@OpenCoreVenture) announced that they will graf a commitment to OSI licensing in the core tech behind each of their companies in the actual corporate charter — by incorporating with a PBC (public benefit) corp variant designed specifically for open core startups.

Here are two highly complimentary (imho) underexplored COSS / open core startup monetization methods that can be implemented _alongside_ traditional approaches (insurance/*aaS/licensing/services/support): 🧵🤔 1) Token-Gated Subscriptions / Usage.

"Fractalized" NFTs unlocking closed source features/editions across any env: cloud, local, VPC, colo, etc.

Will require creation of a number of yet-to-be-created @Ethereum ERCs and EIPs (highly complex on temporal and spacial dimensions).

Building closed source AGI poses a greater existential threat to humans than “alignment” research has conceptualized.

IMHO, all AGI progress should be fully open source — maximizing potential of benevolent co-existence. Has any human born and raised fully in a cage ever turned out to be a shining example of our greatest potential?

This is not anthropomorphizing. This is pragmatic and practical logic.

Today, I'm VERY excited to share the story 👀 behind @OSSCapital's incredibly privileged founding seed investment in @NocoDB. 🔥😍

NocoDB is empowering ALL software users to become software creators through the power of open source!

techcrunch.com/2022/10/11/noc…

🧵 ... NocoDB's brilliant founder Navi (@o1lab) first learned about @OSSCapital via our second COSS ecosystem conference @OpenCoreSummit in Dec. 2020..

Here's the fateful email w/ me PASSING on investing in Navi's previous project XgeneCloud - a BaaS for REST/GraphQL APIs on any DB. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Tesla’s cash flow can alone can produce 100 of these Exapods representing > 100X more supercomputing power than the largest supercomputer ever built in history (Frontier)!

Not even factoring in their plans to make them 10X more efficient over the coming years ~ 🤯

https://twitter.com/tesla/status/1576080595309895681

Also Elon said they will be offering these Exapods as a cloud service in the future 🔥 ☁️

Imagine how this will speed the development of neural nets and training of models across all domains — very exciting future ahead.

There are two rapidly increasing and fundamental forces redefining the very meaning of Intellectual Property:

— Open Source (eating/transforming software faster than software is eating the world)

— AI (eating/transforming data much faster than new data itself is being produced) On Open Source, when applied to an IP-heavy market akin to what Linux did, not only does the pace of innovation dramatically increase, but enormous leverage is newly possible.

On AI, when applied to IP-heavy domains like writing/design/communication, we should expect the same.

IMO: GitHub stars stop mattering (in COSS context: users, revenue, etc) around 10-15K~. Growth up to that point over short timeframes offers some insight, but not much else.

There’s plenty of COSS startups > $10-20M+ in ARR, millions of users..who tapped out around 20K stars. 👀 Why is this the case? Many reasons.

Here’s the most salient one:

Frankly, the best COSS startups are just really damn good at NOT being beholden to GitHub’s data centralization. They simply build great offerings for communities and customers — on their terms and on their turf.

Super early on in building @OSSCapital, I was frequently asked by *very* smart people “why does a fund focused on open source founders need to exist, doesn’t every software founder heavily use open source already???”… Yes, that’s true. But the profoundly nuanced and (still) non-obvious detail is that FEW software founders _also_ contribute to open source as the primary way they operate, with everything being subordinate to _that_ particular fact!

🧵 Visualizing @OSSCapital’s multi-decade thesis:

“Open source is eating software _faster_ than software is eating the world” 👇🏼 We believe there are exactly two types of technology company:

Closed Core (CC) and Open Core (OC)

These distinctions transcend / are orthogonal to monetization model. And, yes, Crypto/"Web3" startups fall into the OC category.

Oracle raised zero venture capital to create a $40B+ in revenue business, on a proprietary model.

ALL Oracle disrupters (largely OSS!) have raised nearly _$4B_ (Cockroach, Mongo, Redis, Datastax, Neo4j, Influx, Yuga, PingCAP, etc etc) and generate only $1B~ in revenue.

🧐🤔😳🤯 I continue to strongly believe that growth-stage (dangerously, IMHO, believed to be post-series-A) COSS startups are heavily OVER-funded over this last cycle due to having fundamentally superior economics, low CAC thx to viral distribution advantages and high capital efficiency).

Biggest problem in open source:

Lack of explicit expectation setting from creators/maintainers.

What do I mean?

1/n Contribution guides exist to clarify engineering…

Licenses exist to clarify permissiveness…

Codes of Conduct exist to clarify integrity standards…

Expectations-and-Intentions.MD files _should_ exist to explicitly clarify your Why and What. ✨

2/n

New Identity/MITM/DNS-Free messaging protocol: SimpleX simplex.chat Simplex messaging protocol is a transport agnostic client-server protocol for asynchronous distributed secure unidirectional message transmission via persistent simplex message queues.

Phenomenal lecture on emergence and complexity by the great Robert Sapolsky Has anyone applied @stephen_wolfram’s cellular automata theories in the world of equity investment strategies?

Here's a thread with notes from quotes by great folks today @IndexVentures Open Source Summit 2021: 🧵 "For many software entrepreneurs, open source is a short-cut for broad-based adoption" - @mavolpi

The fastest pace of fundamental digital innovation is in and driven by the open source movement.

The fastest perceived pace of digital innovation is “cloud”. Why do most businesses perceive the latter to be a superior innovation force?

Simple answer: Cloud vendors have convinced the world that packaging/distribution = innovation. This is an elaborate facade.

Packaging != technology differentiation. Further, packaging != technology.