Super intelligence accord

 

David Sacks

@DavidSacks

Democrats are trying to dismiss the White House Accord on Super Intelligence as optional self-policing. But although the agreement was entered into voluntarily, the governance that follows from it is not. As Gavin Baker points out, once an independent auditor reports a safety issue to an independent board committee, directors have a fiduciary duty not to disregard it, and a D&O carrier can use a bad-faith finding to deny coverage.

So although the agreement starts with internal controls, these are verified by external audit and board oversight — and then existing FTC and securities law still apply to any public claim the company does not keep. This is far more practical than what Democrats want — a freeze on frontier development while China races ahead.

Democrats should applaud what President Trump has accomplished. But they would rather use SI safety as a campaign issue than admit the Accord represents major progress.

https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2105722354114723844?s=20

Gavin Baker

@GavinSBaker

The White House Accord on Super Intelligence will have a positive impact on safety. Committing to hire third party auditors who will report to an independent committee of board members has more practical near term significance than almost any conceivable regulatory action. These board members will have a fiduciary duty. If they ignore a report from the third party auditors then a bad faith finding from a court is a real possibility. A D&O carrier could use this to deny coverage. Really good outcome for ordinary Americans. More effective and elegant than some ridiculous new regulatory body that would take months to do anything, then almost certainly done the wrong thing and along the way probably created a regulated oligopoly at the frontier which is the scariest potential outcome* As I read the articles about the accord, it did occur to me that they were mostly written by political reporters who may have not understood the significance of the accord given their reporting beats are generally focused on public policy instead of corporate governance. *Scariest because I do not trust any 5-20 individuals to make the best possible decisions about the direction of this technology. I want as many AIs as possible to maximize the odds that they encompass the diversity of human values across the world and richness of human variation. And I want an AI that shares my own personal values. Safety, freedom and the maximization of human agency through democratization, distribution and diffusion vs. centralization. History has spoken on the dangers of the latter path. **Also SI not AI still adapting to the change but I do think better branding. Who wants artificial ingredients in their food?

Replacing the institutions that hijacked school

 

Brivael Le Pogam

@brivael

Translated from French

I don’t know if you realize what’s happening. Alex Karp, the head of Palantir, is no longer recruiting his talent from Harvard. He’s training them himself. Young people of 18, without degrees, selected solely on their talent, who code on real projects and read political philosophy between two sprints. He calls it “the Palantir degree.” And today the New York Post headlines that tech companies are launching their own programs because they can no longer rely on the Ivy League. This isn’t an HR anecdote. It’s a civilizational shift. For decades, entrepreneurs entrusted universities with the most sacred mission there is: to shape minds. They now understand that this mission has been betrayed. The institutions meant to produce free thinkers are churning out conformists. Merit has been replaced by opaque criteria. Teaching has turned into catechism. Paul Graham saw it before anyone else. So they’re doing what builders do when a system betrays them. They don’t reform it. They build another one, right alongside. Elon didn’t wait for NASA to wake up; he created SpaceX. He didn’t reform the media; he bought the public square. Entrepreneurs no longer seek to convince the state. They become the state, wherever the state has abdicated. Reread Ayn Rand’s *Atlas Shrugged*. We’re there. The bureaucrats keep the titles, the budgets, the buildings. But they’re losing the only thing that matters: trust. In the United States, barely 28% of people still trust the media. A historic low. No one believes those who claim to tell us what to think anymore. Everywhere you hear that school is over. I think exactly the opposite. It’s not school that’s dead. It’s the institutions that hijacked it. School, the real one—that of the Athenian Academy, the Renaissance workshops, the master and apprentice—is going to be reborn. More demanding. More just. Without debt, without dogma, without a degree as a lifelong annuity. A school that will no longer produce graduates, but polymaths. Free minds, capable of coding, thinking, building, and doubting. They’re the ones who will create the value of the next fifty years. I taught myself to code at 12. No lecture hall taught me what I learned by building. I know what happens to talent when you let it breathe. The university had centuries to shape the best minds. Entrepreneurs will do it in a decade. The great rebuilding has begun.

New York Post

@nypost

Tech companies launching their own programs to train grads because they 'can't rely' on Ivy Leagues https://trib.al/Fi2miAG

How banks make money

 

Peter Girnus

@gothburz

I run consumer deposit pricing at JPMorgan Chase. Our standard savings account pays 0.01%. That's one one-hundredth of a percent. Leave $10,000 with us for a year and we'll pay you $1. Leave $50,000 and we'll pay you $5. We publish this on a rate sheet. We don't hide it. We don't have to. On Sunday, Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo, published a note called "Is an Agentic bank run coming?" I read it at 6:40 in the morning. I read it twice. It was the most frightening thing I've ever read, because it described my job. "If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system." The cheap deposits are you. Online, Revolut, SoFi, Wealthfront and others pay between 3.3% and 5%. Your $10,000 would earn between $330 and $500 there. With us it earns $1. That difference is what we call the relationship. People think banks compete on rates. We compete on you being busy. On the password you forgot. On the routing number you'd have to find. On the eight minutes it would take you to move your money, and the weekend you'll do it, and the weekend after that. In the second quarter, JPMorgan Chase made $25.6 billion in net interest income. My division, Consumer and Community Banking, made $5.3 billion in profit. Our average consumer deposits went up 3%. You stayed, and you brought friends. We call you loyal. I've built a 30-year career on that word. Here's what scares me. An AI agent doesn't get busy. It doesn't forget the password. It doesn't put things off until the weekend. It reads every rate in the country before you finish your coffee, and it doesn't care how long you've banked with us. It has no relationship with me at all. Meta has an agent called Muse that can already see your accounts. It can't move your money yet. Slok is careful to say this hasn't shown up in deposit data. It's a scenario. So I'm treating it like one. We have a plan. First, we'll promote our relationship rates. They're a little higher than 0.01%. You qualify by meeting the conditions. The conditions are on page 3. Second, security. We're very concerned about agents moving your money without you. So any agent that wants to move funds will need to verify by phone, during business hours, with a human, who will be at lunch. Third, we'll tell you the agents are dangerous. My father worked at a branch. He knew every customer by name. At Thanksgiving, people came up to him and thanked him for keeping their money safe. He paid them interest you could feel. He thought that was the job. I pay them $1 a year on $10,000 and they still thank me. I think this is the job. Slok called it "a problem for the entire financial system." He's right. The system needs you not to check. So I'm not that worried. You did the math. And tomorrow your $10,000 will still be with us, earning $1 a year, because the transfer form is long and it's almost the weekend. I'd bet the bank on it. I'm the bank.