Garry Tan is extremely socially conservative, seemingly unabashedly so. I would not be surprised if Garry had donated to Trump, etc.
Note that whatever it once meant to be "conservative", wanting less government control of markets, etc., today's GOP is the party of economic central planning and limiting economic freedom, and also authoritarian rights violations on US soil.
There is absolutely no excuse for supporting the Trump approach / agenda unless one intentionally wishes to see laws broken and democracy subverted.
On what evidence do you make this claim? Garry is a Christian, but not all Christians are socially conservative. I know Garry and went through YC. If "socially conservative" means anti-LGBT, anti-welfare, anti-immigrant, I've yet to see any evidence.
Nothing like government run housing, markets, price fixing, rent control, pushing industry out, eliminating unfovorable resource use, selective government benefits, like the opposing side
Uh, yes it is quite a lot like it and more invasive/harmful. Trump has also removed many transparency and accountability mechanisms, etc. There is absolutely no reasonable justification for supporting it at this point.
I'd push back on that. Trump is the uhh... Trump... of 'economic central planning and limiting economic freedom'. He's clearly an idiot who can't even utter a single sensible sentence about economic policy of any kind.
The GOP itself though, really serves one important role: They interfere with Democrats getting and holding power. The Democratic Party has become the party of unserious economic policymaking, especially in California, where they've doubled and tripled down on their "no amount of taxation is enough" ideas - they will likely pass a wealth tax this year, setting a precedent for outright confiscation of property. "Just for billionaires!" Until they are accustomed to that extra money but the billionaires have all left, of course. Then where's it gonna come from?
If I had money to blow on politics, I'd give to Republicans in this cycle, even if I was pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage, anti-gun, irreligious, and pro-free-trade[1], because the Democrats have, much as the Republicans did in 2015, let their loons take the wheel and I don't want them to be given more power and influence.
Trump will pass away of natural causes someday and at that point, grown-ups will take over the policy discussions at the GOP. The opposite is happening in the Democratic party -- the old, retiring Dems understood economics and also how to negotiate with Republicans to get things done. The young ones that replace them learned everything they know about economics and politics at protest marches or perhaps on TikTok. And it shows.
It's somewhat amusing to read a defense of the GOP focused on a state over-taxing. Federal over-spending is possible without short-term tax increases b/c the federal government runs a big deficit. If the Federal government had to keep a balanced budget, Trump's policies would have raised everyone's taxes far more than anything the state of California would ever dream of.
(future generations will be taxed for all of Trump's gravy train)
when you think about all of the advancements since Attention / GPT a lot of it has been somewhat more obvious than in other fields, as is typical with the massive flood of innovation that follows a big breakthrough.
Paul likely assumes there will be a sequence of additional papers with the same impact as Attention is all you need, which will spawn a lot of opportunity for a larger group of experts who are conversant enough to advance the field even if they do not themselves create such a major innovation. Not only is this deeply exciting, it is also highly meritocratic as there is still scarcity of the kind of intellect and creativity necessary to swim there.
Machine intelligence might soon surpass it, though, and Deepseek is 100% Chinese mainland educated. Paul's description of building an LLM from scratch is meant as a vague starting point for being an innovator of the highest value aspect of modern AI innovation, not as a specific prescription.
over time greater intelligence will be expressed in smaller and cheaper models. we are still somewhat near the beginning of this bc we are finally starting to understand what makes a model truly intelligent/capable.
With Sol we see openai making the model extremely slow and paranoid about process/ceremony. Sure this is a good guardrail against AI going rogue, but it also sets the stage for companies to charge for 2x, 4x, 8x performance, with 1x being barely tolerable and frankly slower than last year's models (though less error prone).
The irony is that the smarter the model, the more it can be trusted to do with less supervision, so one engineer can manage a team of 20 fable subscriptions more effectively than a team of 3 of last year's model subscriptions.
At this point nobody should assume good faith on Trump's part... not citizens, not allies, not adversaries engaged in negotiation. It turns out "The Art of the Deal" is simply lying.
Yes, thanks for this, Deepseek! (I did start using the Deepseek harness and v4 flash due to the crazy low usage limits on sol and I'm quite pleased to have discovered how capable both of those are -- both have now earned a place in my agentic workflow).
Google is in direct meetings with Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick and is prudently keeping dangerous frontier models out of the hands of customers until reasonable precautions can be taken.
It's a bit ironic that in a country with free markets, so much of the data that is relevant to modern finance is proprietary and quite expensive.
The exchange/marketplace is the oldest business in the world. How absurd that in 2026 seats on exchanges cost millions and the entities that control exchanges are mechanisms of gatekeeping rather than quality control -- the cronyism shown to SpaceX reveals just how corrupt it's become.
A stock exchange is nothing more than a marketplace. Anyone can start their own (the challenge being, getting a bunch of companies to want to list their stock with you).
That freedom is actually why it's hard to create a Bloomberg competitor - in order to provide their data stream, Bloomberg has to have partnerships with hundreds of companies worldwide who run exchanges for stocks, bonds and other instruments. If exchanges were government-controlled rather than free-market, there would be more centralization and getting the data together would be easier.
> A stock exchange is nothing more than a marketplace. Anyone can start their own (the challenge being, getting a bunch of companies to want to list their stock with you).
Not really true. I can't just start a stock exchange. I need to comply with a bazillion regulations. Then I need a license, which I won't get.
As much as the crypto space is disliked, it also showed what happens when regulation isn't stopping you. Exchanges would pop up and anyone could create one. You didn't have to be already wealthy, a spin off from a hedge fund, a connected family, a connected person. You could just do it, and if it was good enough, people would trade on your venue.
Then, probably correctly, regulation came, and now that is all gone. The little person can't do that any longer, it is now reserved for the elites again.
There was also a lot of fraud and mismanagement. People's crypto vanished and no one at the exchange was able to reconstruct how because there was no sufficient security and no real bookkeeping.
There is a lot of regulatory capture in the financia sector, but that does not in imply that no regulation is necessary at all
Not sure why anyone has a taste for the kind of butch, chest-pounding performative foreign policy we have these days. Not only does it not work, it's dangerous to national security.
reply