Naval Ravikant
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8 October
7 October
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Their words
Expect more software to retreat to the server and resist “distillation.”
30 September
28 September
24 September
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Their words
Every functioning institution is merit-based, not participation-based.
18 September
From one piece @naval on X 2 beliefs · x.com
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korrents.com
Effective Altruism lets people appear both rational and moral and is the ultimate ego trip.Their words
Effective Altruism lets you appear rational and moral - the ultimate ego trip.
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Their words
People who want to appear moral are attracted to the left. People who want to appear rational are attracted to the right.
16 September
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korrents.com
The best way to pace the AI frontier is to hold labs fully liable for their models' behavior.Their words
The best way to pace the frontier is to hold the labs fully liable for the behavior of their models.
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Their words
The future is more likely AIs fighting AIs (on behalf of humans) than AI fighting humanity.
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korrents.com
If AI is risky like fire, everyone should have it; if it is risky like a nuclear weapon, no one should.Their words
If AI is risky like fire is risky, then you want everyone to have it. If AI is risky like a nuclear weapon is risky, then you want no one to have it.
14 September
13 September
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Their words
On the way to killing all of us, AI will likely kill some of us.
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Their words
Strong liability enforcement could be helpful in the AI debate. If your agent swarm goes rogue, you’re liable. If your weakly protected model gets jailbroken, you’re liable. If you serve a weakly protected OSS model, you’re liable.
12 September
10 September
From one piece @naval on X 2 beliefs · x.com
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Their words
Today's AI hunts and feasts upon the Mozarts, Einsteins, and Shakespeares of our age. To birth a gang of ghostly geniuses that write our code, drive our cars, do our work, and run our world.
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Yesterday's AIs ate the Internet and became a patchwork mediocrity.
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The Frontier Lab flywheel is to get the smartest people to use the leading models. Then distill their inputs, your own model’s outputs, and resulting synthetic data and environments. And the people have to use the leading models because they’re locked in mutual competition.
1 September
24 August
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Their words
The left is on a project to enforce equality, despite biology and markets. The goal of equality gives claim to the moral high ground, but contradicting biology and markets requires censorship and violence, which makes the whole project immoral.
23 August
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Their words
The people who want to censor (code, speech, money) are the bad guys.
21 August
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Frontier Labs are incented to be fearful as it provides a moral justification for staying closed. Chinese Labs take the consistent position of doing what’s good for all and being open. So the little guys find themselves in the uncomfortable position of rooting for the Chinese…
19 August
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korrents.com
All user interfaces will converge on the same shape: chat and gestures in, chat and video out.Their words
Eventually, all UI will be chat and gestures in, chat and video out.
3 July
1 June
30 May
29 May
27 May
11 May
4 May
28 April
19 February
From one piece A Motorcycle for the Mind 30 beliefs · nav.al
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Their words
And all abstractions are leaky. So when you have a computer programming for you—when you have Claude Code or equivalent programming for you—it’s going to make mistakes.
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Their words
And so the solution to that anxiety is action. The solution to anxiety is always action.
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korrents.com
AI may be a motorcycle for the mind, but it still needs a person to ride and direct it.Their words
And so now maybe we have a motorcycle for the mind, to stretch the analogy, but you still need someone to ride it, to drive it, to direct it, to hit the accelerator, and to hit the brake.
+ 27 more
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Their words
There’s another form of creativity where it starts inventing entirely new scientific theories that then turn out to be true. I don’t think we’re anywhere near that, but I could be wrong. The AIs have been very surprising, so I don’t want to get too much in the business of making prophecies and predictions, but I don’t think that just throwing more compute at the current AI models—short of some breakthrough invention—is going to get us there.
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I actually don’t think that’s correct. I think creativity is much more in the domain of coming up with an answer that was not predictable or foreseeable from the question and from the elements that were already known.
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Well, AIs can’t create a new genre of painting. AI can’t move humans with emotion in a way that is truly novel. So in that sense, I don’t think AI is creative.
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korrents.com
An AI model that is right 92% of the time is worth almost infinitely more than one right 88% of the time.Their words
The model that’s right 92% of the time is worth almost infinitely more than the one that’s right 88% of the time, because mistakes in the real world are so costly that a couple of bucks extra to get the right answer is worth it.
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Their words
So these are incredible tools for self-directed learning. The means of learning are abundant. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.
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korrents.com
To invest in the future you have to live in the future, as an avid early user of technology.Their words
This is why I always say: to invest in the future, you want to live in the future. You want to actually be an avid consumer of technology, because it’s going to give you the best insight on how to use it
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korrents.com
In adversarial games, freely available AIs will cancel each other out and the edge that remains will be human.Their words
So in that sense, intelligence is measured in a battlefield—in an arena. It’s a relative construct. I think the AIs are actually going to fail mostly in those regards, or to the extent that they even succeed, because they’re freely available, they will get outcompeted away, and the alpha that will remain would be entirely human.
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Their words
So I would argue, and I think it’s one of my more popular tweets: the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.
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Humans are universal explainers. Anything that is possible with the current laws of physics as we know them, a human can model in their own heads. Therefore just by enough digging—enough questioning—we can figure anything out.
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korrents.com
AI still lacks core human skills such as single-shot learning and the raw creativity to connect anything to anything.Their words
However, what they lack still is a lot of core human skills, like single-shot learning. Humans can learn from just one example. The raw creativity of human beings where they can connect anything to anything.
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Their words
The goal is to have your material needs solvable by robots, to have your intellectual capabilities leveraged through computers, and for anybody to be able to create.
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korrents.com
Within a few decades it will be unimaginable to get rid of AI just to keep obsolete jobs.Their words
And within a few decades, it’ll be unimaginable that you roll back the clock and get rid of AI, or any kind of software—any kind of technology for that matter—just to keep a few jobs that were obsolete.
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korrents.com
Today's AIs are not alive: they lack embodiment, desires, survival instinct and therefore agency.Their words
Right now the AIs are not embodied. They don’t have agency. They don’t have their own desires. They don’t have their own survival instinct. They don’t have their own replication. Therefore, they don’t have their own agency.
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Their words
In fact, I would summarize this by saying the key thing that distinguishes entrepreneurs from everybody else right now in the economy is entrepreneurs have extreme agency.
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korrents.com
Entrepreneurs do not worry about AI taking their job; to someone attempting something very hard, any AI is an ally.Their words
So no entrepreneur is worried about an AI taking their job because entrepreneurs are trying to do impossible things. They’re trying to do very difficult things. Any AI that shows up is their ally and can help them tackle this really hard problem.
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korrents.com
Being an entrepreneur is the opposite of a job, and in the long run everyone is an entrepreneur.Their words
First of all, being an entrepreneur isn’t a job. It’s literally the opposite of a job, and in the long run, everyone’s an entrepreneur.
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korrents.com
It always helps to have knowledge one layer below your abstraction, because you get closer to reality.Their words
You can take this all the way down, but it always helps to have knowledge one layer below because you’re getting closer to reality.
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So it is more of a level playing field. I really do think this is a golden age for programming.
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I think every other job out there is going to get eaten up by programmers one way or another over the maximally long term.
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korrents.com
Intelligence, leverage and judgment are not normally distributed, so outcomes will be supernormal.Their words
Intelligence is not normally distributed. Leverage is not normally distributed. Programmability is not normally distributed. Judgment is not normally distributed, so the outcomes are going to be supernormal.
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So I don’t really worry about unaligned AI. I worry about unaligned humans with AI.
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Their words
But otherwise, I wouldn’t bother learning how to use an AI—rather let the AI learn how to be useful to you.
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korrents.com
Traditional software engineering is not dead; software engineers are now among the most leveraged people on earth.Their words
Does this mean that traditional software engineering is dead? Absolutely not. Software engineers—even the ones who are not necessarily tuning or training AI models—these are now among the most leveraged people on earth.
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Their words
Fundamentally, what we’re doing is a new kind of programming, but this is the forefront of programming. This is now the art of programming. These people are the new programmers, and that’s why you can see AI researchers are getting paid gargantuan amounts because they’ve essentially taken over programming.
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korrents.com
With AI coding, wealth goes to the aggregator and the long tail, and medium-sized software firms get blown apart.Their words
As the Internet reminds us, the real power and wealth—super wealth—goes to the aggregator. But there’s also a huge distribution of resources into the long tail. It’s the medium-sized firms that get blown apart
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Their words
First, the best application for a given use case still tends to win the entire category. When you have such a multiplicity of content, whether in videos or audio or music or applications, there’s no demand for average.
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korrents.com
Vibe coding is the new product management.Their words
So that’s what I mean—product management has taken over coding. Vibe coding is the new product management.
8 November 2025
7 October 2025
1 October 2025
From one piece Find the Simplest Thing That Works 6 beliefs · nav.al
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korrents.com
Tinkerers are always at the edge of knowledge because they use the latest tools and parts to build things.Their words
The tinkerers are always at the edge of knowledge because they’re always using the latest tools and the latest parts to build the cool things.
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korrents.com
In social science you can hold cuckoo beliefs and may end up with 10% real knowledge and 90% false.Their words
Whereas if you’re somewhere in social science, you can have all kinds of cuckoo beliefs. Even if you pick up some of the abstruse mathematics they use in social sciences, you may have 10% real knowledge, but 90% false knowledge.
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korrents.com
Physics trains you to deal with reality because it is unforgiving enough to beat the falsities out of you.Their words
The best people that I’ve met in almost any field have a physics background. If you don’t have a physics background, don’t cry. I have a failed physics background. You can still get there the other ways, but physics trains you to interact with reality, and it is so unforgiving that it beats all the nice falsities out of you.
+ 3 more
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Their words
It’s funny—everybody says “I’m a generalist,” which is their way of copping out on being a specialist. But really what you want to be is a polymath, which is a generalist who can pick up every specialty, at least to the 80/20 level, so they can make smart trade-offs.
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Their words
The most critical person to take a great product from zero to one is the single person—usually the founder—who can hold the entire problem in their head and make the trade-offs, and understand why each component is where it is.
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Their words
There’s a theory in complexity theory that whenever you find a complex system working in nature, it’s usually the output of a very simple system or thing that was iterated over and over.
29 September 2025
From one piece Good Products Are Hard to Vary 2 beliefs · nav.al
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korrents.com
Good writing is dense and interconnected enough that readers meet its knowledge at the level they are ready for.Their words
Good writers write with such high density and interconnectedness that their works are fractal in nature. You will meet the knowledge at the level at which you are ready to receive it.
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Their words
That doesn’t just apply to good explanations. It applies to product development. Good products are hard to vary.
26 September 2025
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korrents.com
To learn epistemology, read David Deutsch.Their words
If you just want to know epistemology, read David Deutsch—full stop.
24 September 2025
From one piece The Best Authors Respect the Reader’s Time 2 beliefs · nav.al
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korrents.com
The best authors respect the reader's time.Their words
But the best authors respect the reader’s time, and Schopenhauer is very much in that vein.
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korrents.com
On human nature read old, time-tested books; for specific knowledge you get paid for, stay on the bleeding edge.Their words
When it comes to anything about human nature, I say go read the Lindy books—the older books, the ones that have survived the test of time. But if you want to develop specific knowledge, get paid for it, do something useful, then you want to stay on the bleeding edge.
22 September 2025
From one piece It Is Impossible to Fool Mother Nature 3 beliefs · nav.al
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korrents.com
A company optimising for magazine covers or industry awards is failing; customers are the real feedback.Their words
If you’re optimizing your company to end up on the cover of a magazine, or to win an industry award, you’re failing.
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korrents.com
Real feedback comes from free markets and nature; feedback from other people is usually fake.Their words
Feedback from other people is usually fake. Awards are fake. Critics are fake. Kudos from your friends and family are fake.
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korrents.com
From what he has observed, people who work hard, persist and take responsibility succeed on a long enough time scale.Their words
From what I have observed, the truth of the matter is: People who work very hard and apply themselves and don’t give up and take responsibility for the outcomes on a long enough time scale, end up succeeding in whatever they’re focused on.
26 August 2025
7 August 2025
3 August 2025
31 July 2025
30 July 2025
26 July 2025
25 July 2025
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