"Not Even Wrong" Podcast
Investing in fundamentally new concepts and engineering practices with large impact.
We discuss a potential solution to the current macro problem. What’s the problem? 1/2 Housing market bid/ask paralyzing economy. 2/2 Too much government spending. Solution 1/3 Slow adjustment of housing market by adding supply and lowering price closer to bid. Sour mortgages can be absorbed gradually by Fed. 2/3 Government constrained in spending. Must reduce entitlement spending. 3/3 Silicon Valley innovation drives productivity and growth.
Some things you can’t measure. For everything else, there’s Physics. Quantum Physics is the study of the limits of what humans can measure. Same applies to Economics. Liberty, prosperity and fairness don’t commute. In the limit they are not achievable concurrently. This is analogue to Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Also Goedel Incompleteness Theorem. Continuously finding new, better solutions. Newer fully right. Connect Uncertainty Principle to Popper and Deutsch. But! In order to be wrong you have to be in the right path.
The Fed is talking a stance. Rebelling against being used as ATM by Congress. No more unlimited monetization of government debt. Short term bad. Long term good. Higher for longer means “Congress, stop spending!” See interview with Thomas Hoenig.
Discussing our essay “The World Runs on Compute”. 1/6 Most productive companies dominate supply chain and eventually market. 2/6 Productivity is driven by compute. 3/6 Libertarian Paradox. Software Eats the World meets The Innovator’s Dilemma. Disruption is good. But it creates high market concentration and dominant firms. 4/6 We call for a constitution for corporates modeled after the US constitution. 5/6 Implication for investments. Applying compute to solve real business problems creates wealth and outsized returns. 6/6 Society must protect innovation. Disruptors must share wealth creation with society.
We live in a Monetocracy. Discussing the repeated intervention by Fed in bond markets 2008 and 2020. Both events were nails in coffin of liberal market democracy. Fed killing price of risk and turning into central planning agency with political agenda. Now we have Fed officials talking about influencing climate policy etc. This must stop.
Discussing book “Solito” by Javier Zamora. 1/3 Hopeless journey to the place of hope. 2/3 Poetry. Describing sensual experience and phantasy, 3/3 Glimpse of humanity in the dark.
Discussing physics seminar attended at Berkley. Cosmology is like Economics. Lots of macro data, trying to figure out patterns, build models, calibrate parameters and use them for inference. AI drives physics and physics drives AI. AI drives physics with data analysis. Physics drives AI by developing better mathematical and statistical models for data analysis. In particular, find ways to reduce data analyzed while maintaining performance.
High productivity companies will dominate markets and grow to GDP size. New discipline in economics, political economy and constitutional law is required. How to govern government size companies? When firms become dominant and large, governing them is more important than braking them apart. We need more thought about how to deal with massive power. Productivity = Fast iteration, low cost of error correction and low cost of error. The ultimate function of Anti-Trust division of government is to limit power of firms and keep government monopoly.
Discussing two papers from SITE 2023. 1/2 Firms organize around productivity within value chains. Flip this around and state that value chains with high dispersion of productivity are not going to last. Either they vertically integrate (Tesla) or they turn into lemons (Uber). Productivity dispersion happens when new software enters market. Predict more vertical integration driven by software and AI companies. 2/2 Forward pricing of options shows that FOMC and CPI announcements are priced as more risky after 2022.
SITE (Stanford) seminar on asset pricing. Economists are like algo traders - all beta, no alpha. Interesting comment: "US would have gone above 150% debt/gdp in war with Japan if not dropping the atomic bomb and stopping the war. You see what you think and think what you see.
Is Web3 water in the sand or the build out of a modern area Golden Gate Bridge? Problem with Web3 is not the tech, it’s the investors. Venture Capital is too much about “capital” and not enough about “venture”. Currently Web3 is more water in the sand than Golden Gate. Long term business needs short term bridges like Space X with launch service or Starlink.
The AI opportunity = Emergence of a new compute architecture. Every technology revolution is driven by new compute. Accelerated compute = parallel + interconnect + memory. Low cost per AI training workload, scalable and low power. Ultimately it’s the emergence of entrepreneurs with guts that drive progress, neither science nor capital. Long term it’s gutsy decisions such as DOJO, CUDA, end to end FSD etc. that drive revolutions.
End to End is the Robot’s best friend. Tesla shows off FSD version 12 which is "fully End to End". Learn to drive by learning, no explicit programming. Big step towards real world AI. Tesla at the forefront because they are pushing for it and because they can. This is as important as launch of Model S, 3 and Y. Remove explicit programming from AI training and add it to data curation.
It's size by scaling not scaling by size. Wealth creation = scaling technologies. Exploration in academia, Exploitation by entrepreneurs. Scaling is the knowledge that creates wealth. Quantify. “What gets measured gets done”. How to deal with ever larger companies and increased market power?
Discussing Ritchie Robertson “The Enlightenment”. Explanations. People are the entity that generates explanations. Explanations are substrate independent. People don’t have to be human necessarily. Democracy of explanations (not just ideas). Risk of Enlightenment = Faust. Risk to Enlightenment = Central Banking. We are still living in the Enlightenment. Rationality-Newton-differential equations. Today new compute paradigm with neural net architectures. Away from pure rationality. Risk of relativism.
Discussing Nvidia Q2. Platform shift from general purpose compute towards accelerated compute and generative AI. Nvidia has scale, reach (data center, robotics etc.) and depth (GPU, Networking, CUDA). Key advantage is Architecture. GPU, networking and software (CUDA) are combo necessary to deliver solutions in modern compute environment. Scaling is key. Nvidia is good at scaling, like Tesla.
❤️ It matters what cats can do not logic. Hardware first, then intelligence. Jitendra Malik on Robot Brains. Small Science - Big Science. My opinion - Exploitation is for entrepreneurs, not science. Exploitation = Scaling. Science leaps when time is ripe. Imagenet needed GPUs. Self driving car needed vision. Robots require soft polymers to absorb falls so they can keep falling and learning.
Tesla shares underperformance. 1/4 Disappointing Earnings Call. 2/4 Price declines in China 3/4 Departure of CFO 4/4 Higher US rates - unwind of Yen Carry Trade
❤️ Discussing David Deutsch conversation with Naval and Brett. 1/4 Knowledge is explanations tested against nature. Don’t get drawn into definitions. 2/4 Tautology. Isn’t nature just a theory humans formulate to understand the world. Where is the demarcation line between theory and nature? Isn't nature just another word for abstraction of reality, i.e. theory? 3/4 If there is no absolute knowledge, no king of knowledge then what is? How do you control for Nihilism? 4/4 Good explanations proliferate throughout the multiverse. They solve problems created by previous explanations. Kepler - Newton - Einstein.
John Schulman on Robot Brains. AI can find better ways to read nature and solve problems. Self attention in Biology could lead to new insights. Leapfrog human constraints such as thinking in liner terms. LLMs could capture more complex relationships. For example tokenize nuclear spin of Atoms in brain and find quantum operations in brain. Matthew Fisher at UCSB looks at nuclear spin of Li6 vs Li 7 isotope and finds effects on cognitive functions. Conclusion is that nuclear spin might interact with brain through quantum operations. Spintronics vs. electronics.