Yes, AI is rapidly advancing mathematics (and theoretical physics problems that are essentially mathematical). Like Ramanujan’s notebooks, human mathematicians will spend months (years?) poring over the stream of papers that AI effortlessly generates, hoping to verify and understand them, probably until math itself (via Lean) becomes a branch of computer science like almost everything else.
However, after math and physics, there is still a next scientific frontier: chemistry, and especially biology and medicine.
I mean, it was already the frontier, but it’s the next one too. AI can crush deterministic math problems on the computer, but biomedicine is a highly empirical, noisy, multivariate, and yet often predictable domain.
Thus, AI radically increases our ambitions in biomedicine. All the omics data, all the messy literature, it can all be synthesized and analyzed in a flash. This is what the labs mean when they talk about curing all diseases. The tooling is available to take cracks at biomedical problems previously thought impossible.
Midjourney is doing this, Chan Zuckerberg is doing this, Anthropic is doing this, but there will be so much more.
One interesting irony is that computer science at Stanford started as a subdivision of the math department.
Now computer science has gotten so large that it’s acquiring math as a subdivision.
Similar to the military funding the Internet via DARPA, and now the Internet (via drones, robots, satellites, and the like) turning the military into a division of the Internet. All part of the network taking over functions from the state that gave it birth.
purl.stanford.edu/rc200wt231…
AI will make virtual reality visually indistinguishable from physical reality.
Or: the metaverse is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.
Or: what’ll people do if AI actually does take their jobs? Play amazing AI video games while robots do all the work. That future is also already here, and also not yet evenly distributed…
Towards the New York City Network State?!
Mamdani has still unfortunately declared himself the tribal enemy of many of my colleagues, but one has to be bullish on him as the future of the Democrats after this. He’s a live player who can jettison democratic socialists for venture capitalists in one week — and rise to power on abolishing the police while then very publicly embracing the police.
Like Trump, the man is not really ideological. He can pivot, he’s smart. This is a real problem for the Republicans. Along with Xi overseas, Mamdani’s faction of immigrant strivers represents an IQ bailout for otherwise mathless American wokes.
After all, it doesn’t actually matter how Mamdani’s check to a quantum lab is written. In order to overcome his party’s reflexive anti-tech, pro-state orientation he had to emphasize at least one part of this initiative, which was the statism. Talking up the (arguably real) benefits to the public thus blesses a quasi-venture-capitalist action as democratic socialism, a sort of Dengist maneuver in which communism becomes capitalism through sufficient legalism, lip service, and legerdemain.
It’s similar to how Trump justifies state venture capitalism through nationalist rhetoric. MAGA has an understandable skepticism of the centralized state, but anything that invokes nationalism (or national security) can mollify that skepticism.
And yeah, one can talk about price discovery, and who knows if this $30M investment was market or whatever. The point is that the most important Democrat in America is taking an action which is NOT anti-tech, and is indeed pro-tech. If this continues, only the most retrograde, reactionary Democrats will remain anti-tech.
I mean, look…if one must pipe some NYC budget into quantum mechanics at NYU instead of syringe-distribution at NGOs in order to keep blues in the style to which they are accustomed, so be it.
Basically, what Mamdani is doing here is very similar to Trump’s sovereign stake in Intel, or any sovereign fund’s for that matter.
At a structural level, we’re seeing the network (meaning tech, meaning the Internet) fuse with the legacy state. Yes, Trump’s Intel stake represents a right-coded variant, while Mamdani’s stake in quantum computing is left-coded, but the outcome is the same: the network state.
Blue cat, red cat, doesn’t matter if it advances tech.
When the public invests in new tech, the public should benefit.
That’s why our investment in a Quantum Fabrication Lab at NYU includes a first-of-its-kind agreement to give the city seats on the board and a share of the revenue from the lab — all while making our city the quantum capital of the world.
We’re creating a new national model for economic development that gives working people a say and a stake.
Mamdani is interesting. Shows a kind of Deng potential. To be clear, he’ll use leftism to tax and harass his tribal enemies till they leave town. The Curley Effect.
But once he’s consolidated power for life, he could ally with Chinese communism to bring a stern order to New York City. Similar to Mark Carney’s emerging playbook in Canada. Ultimately he’s a pragmatic and ruthless statist, not an anarchist.
Mamdani is far less ideological than the typical woke. He’s an accomplished actor (literally) who can emote on demand and then return to sobriety once the cameras stop rolling.
Due to his identity, he has so much clout within his party that — like Trump — he can reshape it. He can even meet with Trump, without consequence, something that more insecure blues simply couldn’t do.
Just like Mark Carney is several standard deviations smarter than Justin Trudeau, Mamdani is far smarter than his predecessor’s predecessor De Blasio. Neither Carney nor Mamdani are the naive anarchistic wokes who actually believe the slogans.
Sure, they do both define themselves as “not MAGA”, but MAGA itself contains so many contradictory tendencies that both Carney and Mamdani could embrace a harsh Chinese abundance communism — a synthesis of abundance liberalism, symbolic anti-MAGA “communism”, and MAGA’s own desire for law-and-order — which would legitimize itself by an anti-MAGA blue nationalism, but which would otherwise be devoid of ideological content.
After all, “ICE out” means “reds out.” It’s a kind of blue nationalism that still endorses the idea of borders and deportations; it just says that blues want to deport *reds* from their territory, and implement their own immigration policies instead of having MAGAs implement them. And NYC and Canada do have the port access to run their own economies independently of DC, and have done so before in history.
Anyway, it’s possible that Mamdani one day holds up a hand, cuts off the NGO grift, and makes the crime stop…but only after he’s secured total control of the city, by “taxing the rich” and driving out every last donor who might conceivably oppose him. And, possibly, by securing a new flow of funds to NYC from Xi rather than DC.
🚨 At the U20 Mayors Summit, Mamdani Says the Left Has Ceded “Quality of Life,” “Efficiency,” and “Fraud and Waste” to the Right
This was one of the more interesting arguments Zohran Mamdani made today at the U20 Mayors Summit, and a reminder that he can be genuinely sharp when he drops the “central casting” routine.
“In New York City, there are certain words that have taken on ideological associations.”
“Quality of life has come to be seen as somehow a right-wing concern. Efficiency… has been taken on as a right-wing concern, rooting out fraud and waste, a right-wing concern.”
Mamdani’s argument is that refusing to engage those issues actually helps the Right.
“If you are staring at an example of social disorder or social inefficiency, and the left refuses to explain either why it has happened or how they will fix it, then the right gets to point at someone in the immediate area and say, ‘That’s who did it.’”
The harder question is how much of the broader Left is actually prepared to follow the advice.
The post-war order is the pre-Internet order.
And the rise of the Internet means that order is ending.
But what comes next?
Decentralized democracy — or American monarchy?
Curtis makes the case for centralization.
I make the case for decentralization.
Live in Singapore later today.
And streaming online for free.
This is Network State Conference 2026.
ns.com/conf2026
ALT Balaji Srinivasan advocates for decentralized democracy, and Curtis Yarvin supports an American monarchy at Network State Conference 2026.
We'll be streaming online for free. And if you're in Singapore today, come see us in person. We have ~5000 registrations, but you may still be able to get a ticket.
Watch online: youtube.com/@nspodcast
Attend in person: luma.com/ns2026
Watch the full conference online here:
xitter.cf/balajis/status/2108371…
This is the livestream for Network State Conference 2026.
xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1qKVmyeOl…
You can watch the Network State Conference 2026 online here: xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1qKVmyeOl…
This is the livestream for Network State Conference 2026.
xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1qKVmyeOl…
It’s important for your future that you understand Zcash. You can’t have zero knowledge about zero knowledge.
Thus, this year's Network State Conference will include a Zcash Zummit, featuring Zcash leaders Zooko Wilcox (Shielded Labs), Sean Bowe (Tachyon), Eli Ben-Sasson (StarkWare), Josh Swihart (Zodl), Josh Lee (Vizor), Dev Ojha (Zakura), Evan Forbes (Valar Group), Maxime Desalle (Winklevoss Capital), and Tom Howard (Zcash Labs).
In-person attendees will even receive some free ZEC. So: come to Singapore on October 9.
ns.com/conference
Impressive. This set of talks, along with the new America dot gov website, has the unmistakable feel of an Apple launch event. They're rebooting the federal government as a tech startup. Several observations.
(1) First, with this new AI interface to the entire federal government, if it works as promised, there won't be a single American who can't say their life wasn't helped at least in part by AI, or that the benefits accrued solely to zillionaires. This in itself cannily mitigates anti-datacenter sentiment.
(2) Second, Joe Gebbia and Marco Rubio's talks on simplifying name changes and passport filings introduce a completely new era where the US government is actually launching tangible features that benefit users.
(3) Third, this launch event in and of itself may visibly drive reform. It could become much more important than the State of the Union. Unlike laws, code is user-visible, and can be instantly audited by the public, as Obama found out with the failed obamacare website launch. So: the annual America dot gov event may be substance, whereas SOTU is traditionally optics. I wouldn't be surprised to see the President present at the next one.
(4) Fourth, this kind of event is a perfect example of where tech and red cooperate best. They both hate bureaucracy. Automating paperwork with code reduces the power of statists over both capitalists and nationalists. It's also hard to undo by other admins: once you digitize a process, hard to turn it back to paper.
(5) Fifth, it's an obvious point perhaps, but think about how much influence YCombinator has had in 20 years. From Gebbia's Airbnb joining their 2009 batch to a complete overhaul of the user interface of the US bureaucracy, and thus the US government.
(6) Sixth, this is another take on the network state. The functional part of the US (the network, meaning tech) is merging with and partially reforming the dysfunctional part (the state, meaning bureaucracy) by automating 20th century paper forms.
As a tech startup, there will no doubt be bugs and user issues and so on, but unlike with paper laws those issues will be visible and the code fixes will be verifiable. A new era of AI America. Rooting for them.
See also @jgebbia's talk below:
xitter.cf/RapidResponse47/status…
Chief Design Officer @jgebbia officially unveils America.gov, the new online home for the United States of America
Balaji retweeted
See you there
Democracy is the consent of the governed. In the Internet age, that means voting not just with ballot, but feet. So: if you’re one of the democratic capitalists of the Internet, vote with your feet for new communities by joining us in Singapore on Oct 9.
ns.com/conference2026