📣 Personal news: Today is my last day at ARK. It's been an absolutely amazing six years with Cathie and the team.
I'll be headed back to Silicon Valley to work on the next generation of AI software. Meanwhile I'll be cheering on the ARK team every step of the way! 🙌
Between Stripe, Square, Bitcoin, and DeFi—banks are so, sooooo dead.
Stripe eats business banking.
Square eats retail customers.
Bitcoin eats fedwire.
DeFi eats lending.
Banks are dinosaur displays at the Smithsonian. They just don't know it yet.
Nvidia is now worth more than Intel + AMD combined.
That's the market's way of saying: x86 is a legacy architecture.
The workload of the future is SIMULATION.
Light -> raytracing
Physics -> n-body, CFD
AI -> neural nets
..and these will run on GPUs.
ARK's Big Ideas 2020 deck is here—a year of research packed into 80 slides covering AI, robotics, autonomous, genomics, bitcoin, and more.
Download:
Here are 5 slides that really hit it home. Thread:
You cannot learn about crypto by reading blogs and listening to podcasts. You have to *do* it.
Put $500 in metamask and try the top protocols. Think of gas as tuition fee. After a week you’ll know more than 99% of CNBC talking heads.
Ethereum isn't just a crypto currency. It's a software platform with users, revenue, and applications.
If you cover software like AWS, MSFT, SNOW, or TWLO you should cover Ethereum ($ETH). To get started, check out its Q1 'earnings' results:
Netflix will spend more on content this year ($17B) than TSMC will spend on capex ($15B).
One makes Tiger King and Ozark. The other makes 50% of the world's computer chips.
Naval has many great lines but perhaps my favorite is: “do what feels like play to you but work to others.“
It encapsulates so much in so little. And it is infinitely better than the common refrain of “follow your dreams.”
What is DeFi?
> Borrow money without a bank (Maker)
> Trade stocks without a broker (Uniswap)
> Launch ETFs without a sponsor (Enzyme)
> Raise money without a VC (token sale)
> Print money without a central bank (Olympus)
If climate change was solved by a billionaire using technological invention rather than societal change, most climate activists would sulk rather than rejoice.
A year ago SoftBank sold its entire stake in Nvidia at $218 a share, plowing the money into private companies like WeWork.
Nvidia closed on Friday at all time highs of $340. WeWork never IPOed.
1/ Apple's upcoming ARM MacBooks isn't just going to save them some money and run a bit faster. It marks the beginning of the end of the x86 era and Intel's four decade empire.
Thread⬇️
If you can understand AWS, you can understand Ethereum.
It's just a cloud computing platform. Like AWS, you build and deploy apps to it. Instead of $, you pay in ETH. It has tiny throughput but a unique kind of security. And many people find that valuable.
cc:
@TrustlessState
Bitcoin is going to become the reserve asset of crypto. But actual money is going to be programmable currencies on Ethereum like OHM. This is clear to me now.
Did my first $1,000 gas fee transaction. Ethereum is just legalized ransomware.
Don't @ me with your Cardano, Solana et al takes. You guys don't have anything worth paying ransom for.
1/ Cerebras just built a chip with 50x the transistor count, 1,000x the memory and 10,000x the bandwidth of Nvidia’s flagship GPU. One such 'chip' could replace an entire rack of Nvidia GPUs.
What the heck is going on?
The final analysis on Slack is simple. Startup vs. incumbent is a race of innovation vs. distribution. Microsoft achieved feature parity faster than Slack reached distribution parity.
I've had this conversation like a million times:
"But ARK made all its money through bitcoin"
"We also did Tesla"
"Okay so you had two flukes"
"We also did Nvidia"
*grumbles*
Tonight I had to pay an artist in Spain.
He asked if I wanted to use wire or PayPal.
I said: how about crypto?
He received the $ETH in 10min for $7 of network fee.
GG banks.
Spotify needs to stop "thinking" about Clubhouse and buy it pronto. You can't clone it, you can't beat it, it's an asset as compelling for audio as Instagram was for photos in 2012.
Have gotten lots of questions on *why* Tesla built its own AI chip and the right way to compare vs. Nvidia's Xavier/Pegasus.
Here's a short blog that explains it all in plain English.
If you want to have a year's worth of experience in three months join a startup. If you want to have a year's experience over three years join a Fortune 500.
Forget business school—watch company investor day videos instead. The CEO and top brass prepare for weeks to explain everything from engineering to sales.
Eg.
@nutanix
investor day is a veritable master class in enterprise computing. And it’s free.
"We think Dojo could be the world's best AI training computer..we might offer it to others as a service. Dojo could be a business line by itself." –Elon
Tesla just entered the AI hardware business. 🤯🤯
It's so hard to convince friends to buy crypto.
Half the time they just won't do it.
Half the time it goes up 50% and they sell it.
Half the time it goes down 50% and they sell it.
So 150% of the time it just doesn't work.
With $NVDA nearing $1T, everyone is now calling AI the next internet.
Who could have known? You could have – if you had read
@ARKInvest
's whitepaper on Deep Learning in 2017. Those exact words, six years before it happened:
Netflix ML: every row in the Netflix UI (trending, drama, documentary etc.) uses a separate algorithm. The row order uses an ensemble. 300 person machine learning team. All research done on AWS.
#NIPS2017