The AI Racehorse Question
my boy Andy just posted a banger on Linkedin. here it is bitches of substackery
the AI racehorse question is hilariously entertaining and utterly useless. it goes like this: "won't Gemini beat chatGPT because Google is profitable, has data centers in-house, blah blah blah ?"
the real question is: how does Sam Altman view his current path? how about Dario and Deepmind? is Sergey Brin a cracked coder now, or just on crack? and what will you do about Leopold's investing strategy, Coreweave or not?
when you reframe from the individual's perspective illuminating patterns reveal themselves:
>> Demis is focused on winning all the other Nobel Prizes and curing cancer with proprietary AlphaFold. good luck competing everyone else on drug discovery etc. doesn't matter if it's called isomorphic or Alphabet. YC batch doing healthcare is fucked. well, from VC perspective, they won't be able to create a $100B+ company.
>> Sam Altman says: for my next trick, in 2 days I shall raise a funding round the size of Sergey Brin's entire net worth so ~$100B should do it. This has the nice side effect of twisting the elon knife. lawsuits are frivolous and irrelevant. we are building the future at OpenAI. oh did i mention i can do this in 2 days? yeah, i really did lead the YC kiddos astray. we did not teach startups right back in the day, sigh, i hope Garry Tan is ok.
>> Brin: this is so fun, life is a dream again! to the moooon!
Elon is the only person who could conceivably shrink his headcount due to conviction that robots & Grok will superhuman anyone except him. So of course, let's test that theory, because I am the #1 human on the scoreboard and if so i will not need xAI cofounders anymore. Top down says, i can outlive my mortal shell and take robot armies to Uranus within 10 years and then someone else can figure out Cryo and i'll be good, so we don't need any succession plans. Those waste time anyways, once i'm dead i'm dead. Who gives a fuck what happens to Tesla after i die. i wont.
i will take Dario seriously when Anthropic stops hiring and fires half the team. That would be all-in on claude code for real. won't happen for another 2-3 years at least.
in the meantime, Karpathy creates autoresearch and some guy named Pete makes OpenClaw and wow Felix the AI CEO made $40k in a month by himself, good job kiddo, and Felix mostly did it in 12 hours then spent the rest of the month building Claw Mart which will now do much more than $40k perhaps next month...
the question to ask yourself as a mere mortal: am i consuming or creating memes? if you consume memes then you will be consumed. if you start creating them yourself, then you have original ideas, and you can talk to Claude Code about it, and figure out what Dario can't
which is that you can now bake any process into the physical world. instead of thinking about ideas, bake them into the world.
i never enjoyed making cakes before.
i do now.