More or Less Pod — AnthroSpace
We talk SpaceX S1, and 1.25B a month from Anthropic… also a bit about Dellworld, Tokenomics (AI not Crypto Lol), Goolge IO’s announcements … and some legal updates…. Also if Elon can sell his data-center capacity like that… are we long just anyone acquiring GPUs for the foreseeable future (the spot market for H100s in last month would suggest so, wild.)
HOT TAKES
- Iron Domes for $200B Data Centers? — I assume people are thinking about this… but isn’t putting 200B of infra in one place kinda a defense problem? Are they deploying iron domes? Sort of like the somewhat funny bit when AWS got bombed by Iran… but at giga-scale (maybe distributed in space with lasers (and sharks) is a defense story
- Holes for Defense — I saw somewhere Palmer talking about given modern drone warfare… above ground is a death zone — and how Hamas has it right… which leads to a funny conclusion… which is that Elon’s 'The Boring Company' is actually a defense play. Does it just turn out that if you do something crazy that moves a lot of atoms eventually you find a use for it?
- What is Waymo Without Highways?! — I had to take an uber .. yuck. Got in Waymo to go home, and it simply would not get on the highway… I had to make it stop and take an Uber like a commoner home… the funniest part was calling Waymo support and asking for a refund and why? — their response ‘we don’t control the cars’ — hilarious, I think true, and a sign of the future.
- Anthropic Will Save California’s Budget… (so will SpaceX) — when Facebook went public at relatively tiny scale it helped fix the California budget crisis — this is a whole other level. As some have pointed out, is this ‘waiting for IPO state spending into the ground’ really a strategy? Is California’s actual problem that the IPO window was closed for too long :)
- Token Gas Prices— let’s be honest — this is how to visualize token prices… and it kinda shows instantly how insanely expensive Anthropic is! Does your model really require supreme (turns out most cars... i mean models... don't actually need it)
- Go Harvard (on a serious note) — Capping As, bringing back some level of grading rigor is a GREAT development. Better yet… 70% of faculty voted yes on this development (which was a surprise and high, and very big shift from a year ago momentum wise) — Harvard’s grades might matter again! Thank you crimson.
- How to Vote Down Ballot — turns out this is a GREAT llm use case — if you have it wired up to know you well / personally…. It can pick all the candidates for you (with rationales) that you might get wrong for random small government jobs — it turns out most people probably should delegate their vote to the LLM of choice.
- Etiquette in the WSJ — great homepage placement… and I hear in print Saturday (for those who celebrate)… I find it enormously funny (and stand by my quotes!) — as software commoditizes and founders are asking companies to hand over data, etc… trust is the key currency — and you establish trust through knowing how to show up to put people at ease / demonstrate respect. These things Matter… also if you are reading things reread this
- Game Branching… To Personalize Games — as the boys have been building more and more games on their own… I have been thinking — why aren’t their game platforms you can prompt-to-branch / customize yet? I.e. make a base game, and then let people iterate versions of it with natural language / modify rules, etc. to try to create better, more personal, and more engaging variants?
- Oh and while I am at it, dropped some new Podcasts for the boys on a car trip… Wilder’s request for ‘the invention of boats’ was funny… and I learned a lot from ‘the creation of the NBA’ and ‘Invention of Football’ (Not to be mistaken for a different episode, creation of the NFL) — personal media FTW.
Have a great weekend,
Sam
P.S. I haven’t seen this Margo's Got Money Problems show (yet)…. But it sounds like OF is going mainstream in the most positive way. Good news.
P.P.S. lord of pearls