New Sovereigns clash with Old Governments
The States hint at what they will become: the new Churches
We’re a bit late to this, and have other topics top of mind at the moment (eg. the cost of the war, and modern society’s willingness to pay for it) which we’ll write about in a couple of days, but as of now wanted to really focus on the Anthropic vs the State topic.
We’ve recently written about the rise of the New Sovereigns, using Tether as one of the clearest examples. But Anthropic (and OpenAI and any of the mega-labs who will end up winning the AI arms race) are proper sovereigns themselves. Anyone that develops critical technology superior to the State’s own, and has full control of it, starts to acquire its own sovereignty over that realm.
The Anthropic clash with the Department of War is but a preview of what the world will look like in the future: new sovereigns will far and fast outpace old States in their ability to build new technology, new tools and new capital. Obviously, States will be pissed and employ all sorts of coercive controls. Today, this means giving the contract to OpenAI, tomorrow it will be boots on the ground in datacenters and nationalizing firms.
Starlink is the other big deal here: Elon can essentially (and has) shut down internet access, arguably the most vital of all infrastructures in the modern world, to whole sovereign entities. It really is a new world, that few people have explored intellectually (and on the ground / in the radiowaves).
Our friend Yoni at Slow Ventures has a brilliant framing of the situation, and tells us what Sama’s endgame really is: becoming a GSE (government-sponsored enterprise).
We have not really gotten used yet to the duopoly shaping up in the coming decades and centuries, but that is what it will be.
States become the new Churches
We’ve started watching a bit more news reports at home in these past few days for obvious reasons, and being in Italy, we get our share of Pope addresses and declarations in between the other news.
I’m probably incredibly slow for this, but I’ve just realized what will actually happen to our current States: most likely, the will end up being what the Church is today: a remnant of their glorious past, with an “imagined” and “moral” sway - but essentially no ability to project any sort of meaningful power.
If you had told a random person in the 1200s that at some point the Pope would just be an extremely marginal and mostly spiritual guide, segregated in an extremely small city state, with no authority whatsoever over any Christian alive in the world, they’d have you burned at the stake immediately.
But here we are: long gone are the years of Innocent III “ruler of all earthly rulers”.
Now, if you tell a random person on the street that a U.S. President, in the not-so-distant future (say 100 years?) will have the same power of a 2025 Pope, they will look at you like you drink Tide pods.
But honestly, is it really that hard to imagine? We will leave the reader with the excercize as homework.
We are organizing an event in London next week to speak exactly about this topic, we are at max capacity but if you think you have something particularly insightful to share hit us and let us know.
Links Roundup
AI & Compute
Mercury 2: Diffusion-Based LLM Inception Labs drops Mercury 2, a language model built on diffusion rather than autoregressive generation claiming 5x faster inference than anything else on the market.
Some Simple Economics of AGI Catalini, Hui, and Wu (MIT Sloan) formalize the economic constraints around AGI deployment: a useful antidote to both the hype and the doom.
Computation as Organisation A reframing of computation as an intrinsic property of organized matter, not just algorithms running on silicon. As we think about what comes after foundation models, or what biology already figured out, this is essential reading.
AI & the Economy
A couple of Citrin takedowns (I know we’re late, sorry, but still)
AI Will Bring On a Massive Baby Boom This was a fun read. We’ve been trying to find content that tells us we’re nuts for investing based on our view that depopulation is inevitable, so we get super excited when we see something in that direction. Sadly, this is one of the biggest bags of wishful thinking you could assemble. We remain unconvinced.
Bits In, Bits Out: Anti LLM-hype, a pessimist take for the optimists.
Manufacturing & Hard Tech
How to Build American Shenzhen, Fast A Blueprint for US reindustrialization modeled on Shenzhen’s ecosystem, arguing tech-enabled manufacturers are emerging as a new venture-backable asset class.
Sub-second Volumetric 3D Printing (DISH) Holographic light field synthesis enabling sub-second creation of millimetre-scale 3D objects. No layer-by-layer nonsense. We continue to contend that 3D Printing will change everything, and this is the direction we’re most excited about.
12-Metre Vessel 3D Printed in One Piece As per above.
NYT: The 3D Printing Industry And the NYT starts writing about it again, although still with old ghosts.
Asimov v1: open-source humanoid
Geopolitics & Governance
What Is a City When Its Wealthiest Leave? Portable sovereignty and jurisdictional arbitrage / competition at civilizational scale.
New York Considers Bill Banning Chatbot Legal/Medical Advice Oh. A State clashing with a new sovereign you say? How queer.
Science & Society
Blocking Mobile Internet Improves Attention, Mental Health, and Well-Being No shit. But still, good reminder.
The Return of the Energy Transition Nothing like a war to understand how insane it is to be reliant on energy from the weirdest parts of the globe. The tl;dr for the author here is:
Lean in to responsible gas
Bring on the nuclear renaissance
Keep pushing solar’s boundaries
2X the grid (at half the cost)
Bolster critical supply chains
Block laid off 50% of its co and people are split in two camps: “AI will eat all the jobs” and “Block sucked and used AI as an excuse to trim the fat”
Tools & Infrastructure
Google Workspace CLI Pretty awesome release by Google.
Crypto
Allocation Vaults: A Primer: rarely seem something written so well on vaults, strongly suggest giving it an attentive read if you want to understand where finance is headed (today. This is all happening already).
I’ll be in Cannes for the Vault Summit and the RWA Summit if any of you will be there!
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Just adding a final note that we now have to ask our founders based in California who they like sleeping with. This is what States are becoming. If you also are caught in this madness, the folks at AngelList have a free tool to comply with deranged governments.