i like golf and systems @voltcapital | prev @Delphi_Digital
Joined June 2011
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Rob retweeted
had fun going through all my favorite financial history books and putting this together
as a wise man once said, alpha is hidden in the texts that many are too lazy to read
Our report “The House Always Wins: Why Speculation is a Theme of the Decade” is out now.
Speculation runs rampant when new tech rearranges what’s possible or the system stops working for most. AI and crypto are now fueling both.
Read it for free here.
delphi.link/Speculation
Rob retweeted
Alex is right here. Don't trust the eval industrial complex.
Most public benchmarks are terrible, and top rank there is a negative signal. If you're building products, you need to create your own private evals.
The private evals need to deeply correspond to what your users want and the unique knowledge and know-how you have in the domain. You also need to avoid open-source code as much as possible.
META’S HEAD OF AI SLAMS AI BENCHMARKS
"it’s some PhD student who made these benchmarks"
"you’re kind of outsourcing all of your product thinking to this viral benchmark"
"so clearly that’s wrong"
I think there is something to this. the whole industry developed so rapidly that there was hardly any time to establish proper benchmarking. companies used what was available, competitors then had to catch up on the same benchmarks, and some of them eventually became industry standards
apparently there is quite a lot of randomness and chance in how we are measuring AI progress today
Rob retweeted
big one. we teamed up with Matera and @solana to bring X9.150 into business payments
X9.150 is the first US national standard for QR payments, built by 70+ orgs, and the biggest US banks are lining up behind it
we're putting it to work in @altitude bill pay: signed recipient details on the invoice, verified through the X9.150 standard, settled in usdc on solana with the invoice that marks itself paid on the recipient's end
catch live demo at money20/20 this week
Find us at Money20/20 USA this week for a demo of Altitude Bill Pay using the new ANSI X9.150 QR payment standard.
See signed payment instructions, USDC settlement on Solana, and payment status updates in action.
Learn more: altitude.xyz/blog/raising-th…
Rob retweeted
agents are getting smarter and everybody will have an assistant helping them run their business
these agents are becoming the interface for how we use our tools. your assistant should be able to work with your finance stack using the context it already has about your business
@altitude MCP is live and this is our first step towards making Altitude the business account your agent loves
Ok @bot, analyze my entire transaction history and figure out how to turn this into a trillion dollar company. Make no mistakes.
Say hello to Altitude MCP v1.
Connect your AI agent to Altitude and put your transaction data to work.
Get started: docs.altitude.xyz/mcp/overvi…
Rob retweeted
we just bumped @altitude earn to 3.5% APY
the altitude earn setup is what we wished we had at squads all these years:
— backed 1:1 by short-term U.S. Treasuries custodied at BlackRock
— no minimums, no lockups, T+1 liquidity
— fund it with stablecoins or fiat
— powered by stablecoins and formally verified code running on the fast chain
— available in 100+ countries
businesses can open an Altitude account today, complete verification and move funds into Earn
rewards accrue daily and are paid monthly. withdraw back to your main account at T+1 when it's time to deploy capital
built for onchain teams managing stablecoin treasuries and global businesses that want to earn on their dollars
app.altitude.xyz/signup
Rob retweeted
Paperwork no longer needs to be a side quest.
Download account statements, balance summaries, account details, card statements, transfer confirmations, and more directly from Altitude.
Learn more: altitude.xyz/blog/financial-…
Rob retweeted
Better have a better long term business than selling data to labs
6-12 months ago the large labs started buying bio data
this spend is starting to ramp very aggressively. the labs are somewhat indiscriminate buyers with enormous budgets. the therapeutics market has long had buyers of data (large and small pharma) but they've historically been the exact opposite of huge-budget and indiscriminate
this shift will distort the bio startup market in a bunch of ways. there will be a lot of short-termist behavior to try to get in front of this capital firehouse. but unlike the AI data labelers (mercor, et al) and the robotics labelers (mecka, et al), the bio startups serving up this data have a chance to emerge from this period with businesses that don't rely on selling data
the best bio startups will use these sudden resources the labs are dumping on them to supercharge their novel assay and work towards independently powerful models and eventually directly produce therapies
bio is the final frontier and its a very exciting time ahead for bio startups IMO
Rob retweeted
Just like with oil, the market outside the majors is the true marginal market for compute.
Rob retweeted
SPVs have become a commonly used structure, especially in AI financing.
The valid uses are well understood, such as letting a lender take exposure to one slice of a business, keeping a failure siloed, and managing capital rules that don't make sense.
They become questionable when used to keep obligations off the balance sheet, which contributed to Enron's downfall, or when unregulated companies keep reaching for them.
@austincampbell from @ZKZeroKnowledge
How is the AI buildout financed?
Austin Campbell, founder of Zero Knowledge and adjunct professor at NYU Stern, dives into the ins and outs of the AI buildout, especially how it is financed, who's doing the financing, the role of debt, and how the AI boom compares to past bubbles.
03:39 Components of the physical buildout
07:41 Capex spent so far vs. future commitments
10:13 Why Big Tech buybacks are dropping
13:18 How SPVs are structured: good vs. bad uses
20:13 AI makes money, but can it pay back the capex?
20:59 Who takes the hit if demand falls short
24:33 How today's SPVs compare to 2008
32:25 Minsky's three stages of a bubble, applied to AI
Rob retweeted
cant miss. hosting a small dinner on 10/8 for those staying the week in LA
.@DiscipulusVent Fall Cohort Starts Today in El Segundo
Build for America 🇺🇸
More coming soon...
Rob retweeted
How is the AI buildout financed?
Austin Campbell, founder of Zero Knowledge and adjunct professor at NYU Stern, dives into the ins and outs of the AI buildout, especially how it is financed, who's doing the financing, the role of debt, and how the AI boom compares to past bubbles.
03:39 Components of the physical buildout
07:41 Capex spent so far vs. future commitments
10:13 Why Big Tech buybacks are dropping
13:18 How SPVs are structured: good vs. bad uses
20:13 AI makes money, but can it pay back the capex?
20:59 Who takes the hit if demand falls short
24:33 How today's SPVs compare to 2008
32:25 Minsky's three stages of a bubble, applied to AI
Rob retweeted
i hear (frequently) from people who try to over-intellectualize reindustrialization through various lenses in finance, economics, labor, technology, "free" market competition, etc. it's quite simple and doesn't require hardly any justification at this point. let me paint you a picture: the final crescendo of super intelligence is total mastery of atoms, and a semi-likely multipolar world of superpowers. the intermediate step that's missing right now is to build as much net-new tech-enabled capacity as possible. the transfer of tribal and process knowledge into compute is critical and very similar to how we've learned to control self-driving cars and robots. this is not something even the smartest model can predict/simulate with the level of necessary precision for real production, and these are glaring open deficiencies in all frontier models until they have data (live factories) to feast on. that learning rate will increase vastly as a function of overall tech-enabled capacity, and potentially displace frontier labs because they lack production experience and actual capacity themselves once intelligence is commoditized. the faster we do all of this the faster we create the potential for actual abundance.
Rob retweeted
I don't think this causes a run, just an upward pressure on deposit rates and therefore, all else equal / as a first order effect, lower bank margins. There's been extensive research on how reduced search / transaction costs affect deposit rates (hint: it's not great). But! Lower search / transaction costs don't magically take deposits out of the system.
Lots of people think agents will be like ozempic for human decision-making (i.e help people resist temptation / become more disciplined and "rational"). I suspect they'll instead make us more effective at actuating on our desires as they currently exist, not as we wish them to be.
If someone wants to spend more on the things they enjoy, an agent that helps them discover and access more of those things likely increases their spending.
Agents will also help us enumerate latent desire (sense and act on desire we didn't even know we had). Finding better uses for money generally increases the desire to spend it.
Increased consumer spending = more business revenue. Whether businesses retain that cash or pay employees and suppliers, those payments generally move deposits between accounts. Unclear the longer-term effects on deposits and bank margins. Lots to consider here.
But the broader corollary is more interesting IMO: the easier agents make it to satisfy our desires, the more consequential it becomes how those desires are formed.
Therefore, the most important work of our time is to find ways to increase the QUALITY of our desires: to make our desires a function of epistemic novelty rather than sensory novelty.
For this to happen, new institutions and institutional incentives are required. And there's not enough people doing meaningful work here. To me, this is a concrete alignment problem. An agent could become extraordinarily good at satisfying our preferences while the institutions shaping those preferences remain terrible.
Rob retweeted
Hardening critical infrastructure should be a priority for policymakers, state and local officials, and operators today. Rather than stand up a new grant program or write new rules, let’s find a solution that can keep pace with the rate of technological change.
"Federal tax incentives for cybersecurity software investment offer a faster solution than creating new government programs."
In @CyberScoopNews, @JoshuaTLevine and @LarsESchonander call on the executive branch to clarify how the tax code applies to cybersecurity expenses.
Rob retweeted
lots of things to unpack:
1. our largest deal yet (big size)
2. our 1st investment-grade offtake deal (great credit)
3. a new product offering to help scale our business - that k3 annc was a part of it
you think you know what USDai is, but the design is improving each month
Rob retweeted
Dry Run has a new direction!
It has been a blast building the podcast out with @khushii_w. We've met and interviewed many incredible thinkers and builders, and are excited to double down on making frontier technology more legible.
We see a lot of abstractions thrown around in frontier tech, which is partly due to uncertainty. However, we think there’s an opportunity to put more deliberate effort into explaining, educating, and making these ideas accessible.
These rabbit holes have been fun, we love getting into the weeds, and can't wait to share more with you!!
Frontier technology is scaling rapidly. Understanding lags far behind.
Dry Run began with a narrow focus on innovation in fintech. Since then, we've been drawn to a broader goal: explaining frontier technology.
By frontier technology, we mean fields where capabilities are outpacing the answers around them, including AI, robotics, biotech, and digital assets.
On Dry Run, we bring on technical experts in their respective fields and ask them to explain the open questions that need to be answered to push the frontier forward.
We break concepts down to first principles, give an unvarnished view of where capabilities and limitations stand today, and look at how these advances change the systems around us: work and labor, software and product development, business and organizations, hardware, and research.
As progress accelerates, these technologies will increasingly affect how people work, create, build, and live. We want to shorten the distance between progress and understanding, because understanding leads to better questions, greater participation, and a clearer view of what is at stake.
Technological change can be empowering, but there is still work to do to make it understandable. We want to make that work a bigger part of Dry Run.