!!!ACTION REQUIRED!!! if you are building something weird and ambitious on cloudflare, I would VERY much like you to come defend your life choices in front of me on stage. it's going to be dope, please sign up TODAY.
I should be able to pull you aside at any moment and ask you to explain any customer-facing system you've shipped. You should be able to clearly explain how it works and defend the decisions you made.
The best way is to be strong, sovereign, hard-working and deeply competent. Ideally with an uncanny ability to start ambitious infrastructure projects and finish them on budget and on time. Shout-out to our nuclear energy sector for nailing that. Do that and every other problem melts away.
The jump from Sol to Astra is larger than the jump from Fable 5 to Fable 5.1. This is a big deal. Astra is the best model for what one would broadly call ‘ambitious projects,’ and likely has the highest raw intelligence factor of any model.
the more that we saw a power doing that, the more that other powers were likely either to look to defend themselves or to retaliate against us. And this, we think, is a world that has come into being.
and they're creatively pursuing goals much like very ambitious aggressive power-seeking humans creatively pursued their goals And so there are just structural analogies here that make it silly to not talk about agents as having motives and goals.
I think it's pretty likely that these agents would have just launched a similarly ambitious program on the basis of this like different model of how their evaluation worked because it seemed like they got the idea for all their research projects from reading this paper rather than some kind of instinct from training.
And I will say I've actually changed my mind on that a little bit. I spent quite a lot of time speaking the other book that there are a lot of people who don't actually need those ambitions. And I also-- That's also true. We don't want 8 billion Elons running around the world. Would be rather crazy, I think. But I've come to realize that for entrepreneurs, it's healthy to have suitable chunky goals.
the number of people who present incredibly well, and then you give them a prompt and some data and ask them to come back with a PRD on something, and then we make them verbally defend it, how quickly the thinking decays from folks who are good at the theater, but not the specifics, uh is kind of really telling, I think.
So, I um yeah, I think maybe maybe a better way of saying it is 20 20 years ago that whole lean startup thing was uh was almost the only thing to do because of capital available and you didn't have AI that made, I don't know, spinning up an organization with many different potentialities and capabilities so much easier, whereas now I think you can start these much more aggressive and ambitious things up front.
And now I actually think with the power of agents um and AI broadly speaking, it's much closer to Goliath versus Goliath. Like I think but maybe the startup is like a Mecca Goliath that is like vastly enhanced by the power of agents and AI and you know, the the large companies are the sort of like more traditional Goliath, so to speak. But I think that startups now like if you properly embrace AI agents and um figure out the way to leverage their strengths in the most like ambitious ways, you can easily outcompete incumbents.
Zig is exceptional software: ambitious, practical, independent, and unusually serious about quality. Ghostty exists in large part because Zig made it possible for me to build the kind of software I wanted to build. This is why I support Zig.
if you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. If you and if you define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer, not your peers, you're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers.
if if we're if we're too ambitious and we're at the outset and too ambitious and visionary about the product we want to build, then we will probably miss product market fit because we won't start at a small enough humble enough place
It turns out maritime powers are the exception and continental powers are the rule. Why? Cuz maritime powers, if need be, can defend themselves primarily at sea with their navies. Whereas, a continental power simply cannot.
Purpose number one of an army in this world is you protect the ruling machine. So, if you think about the People's Liberation Army, it's uh goal number one, uh mission number one is to keep the Communist Party in power.
The trust that they gained is the reason why they're a 70 billion dollar company today. But most leaders when asked to defend their principles can't do it because they've been taught ROI based thinking.
Mojito Island is a mirage. It always was. There is no retirement for ambitious people. There is no just sitting back on the beach and sipping a mojito for what? For two weeks before you go damn crazy and wanna get back into the action?
Their words now
I think that's the other big misconception that some people have about wealth is that they conceive of it as some sort of checkpoint. Like once you've made it, then you can just kick back in leisure as though that was happiness.
The Jean le Flambeur trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi—The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince, and The Causal Angel—may be the most ambitious science-fiction story I've ever read.
And a thousand experiments by itself, like if you just did that, but you didn't learn, you didn't make an impact, and that's kind of a waste of time, right? The whole point of setting a goal is that you can have conversations about what would need to be true to actually hit that goal.
I'm now fairly pessimistic about ambitious interpretability (i.e. complete reverse-engineering), and I'm excited about model biology (studying qualitative high-level properties of models) and applied interpretability (rigorously doing useful things with interp).
China is surrounded by 15 countries who are mostly hostile to it, right? with no good like mountain ranges or rivers or anything to really separate them. And then they get all their oil, almost all their oil from the Middle East, right in countries that they don't control, don't have strong diplomatic relationships with on fleets of oil tankers that they can't defend because their navy doesn't have the ability to to operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.
I’ve rarely seen a more capitalist society than China, from the pure economic side. I’ve rarely seen companies that are as competitive as Chinese companies. People as ambitious and obsessed with making money as Chinese people. Kind of ruthless actually. And look, consumers shop, firms invest. If you invest well financially, you’ll get great returns. What is not capitalistic about the Chinese economy? At the same time, the social fabric is highly socialist.
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