Thiel Vs. Altman and The Future of AI
What Sam Altman's Stanford... and St. Louis... reveals about Open AI
St. Louis, Missouri
"The lights of St. Louis looked like a promised land to me."—Joseph Pulitzer.
When my eldest uncle, fresh from Stanford University, went away to Antarctica he was, of course, officially there to study.
It was the Vietnam War and you were expected to make yourself useful if you weren’t on the frontlines. As the son of a rear admiral he was expected to go. And sure enough there’s a fish and a bluff named after him. But the real reason he — and the mission he was a part of — was in Antarctica was to look for resources, predominately coal. You can get a sense of that when you read about the research he helped with and which the U.S. Navy curiously funded.
Antarctica hadn’t officially been prospected yet and, though it was officially a kind of no man’s land, that might well have changed had the U.S. Navy gotten involved. My other uncle went to Harvard, the Navy, Vietnam and then Langley — a sort of military industrial education — but my eldest Uncle became a kind of fixture of Palo Alto and he has more or less remained there after his divorces and his children and grandchildren are long grown. Though his home was falling down around him he paid close attention to all that was springing up in Silicon Valley, investing his attention if not his money.
It was from my uncle and Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World that I learned the truth: Stanford is about extraction.
Stanford is a mining school and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Look closely and you’ll see mining everywhere — from Thiel’s parents extracting uranium to the latest data mining project. Thiel’s fund Clarium blew up before he bet wrong on oil.
But whereas previous generations mined the earth — Herbert Hoover, our mining president, has his archives there — the Stanford types learned how to mine and extract from people. This is ultimately why Mark Zuckerberg and Paul Graham could never have stayed in Boston — and why Peter Thiel (Stanford undergrad and law school) and Sam Altman (Stanford drop out) ultimately took over.
Gay men, in particular, are good at noticing small details and elaborate storytelling and few noticed the pedigree of Thiel, the son of the German deep state, and Altman, the scion of a St. Louis mob family. They are ambitious gay men trying to shape reality and to create something if not lasting at least certainly profitable for them.
You might think of the future of AI as a fight between Palantir, newly British, and Open AI, totally Chisraeli mob.
Will we have AI that uses data to make us safer — or AI which cannibalizes that which we love—our artists, our writers and our creatives? Could it be that Open AI is just another example of mobsters ripping off hardworking creative people?
You got a sense of that when you read a recent profile of Josh Kushner in Fortune magazine. The profile goes on at some length about how Kushner is such a great investor but reading it, I wonder if maybe there’s a far simpler explanation for the affinity between Altman and Kushner. Maybe it’s just the ethnic nepotism. Or the reality of what both Jerry Altman and Charles Kushner did for a living — slumlording with mob cash. Maybe there isn’t such a firewall between the Kushner family’s assets as they’d like you to believe. Maybe they are a crime family and maybe the world’s crime families have a kind of alliance where they shakedown the world’s pension funds, endowments and smaller foreign governments.
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"I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful."— Sam Altman.
Gina Raimondo g ets it. She told an audience that the move fast and break things era of technology development was over particularly when it comes AI.
She knows that AI is about mining too — mining our clickstreams, mining our behavior, and making predictions about what we might do.
We’re learning the limitations now — “hallucinations” which make things up and self-driving cars which kill people — of a move fast and break things world.
And that move fast and break things company? Well, Facebook is in trouble for exploiting our children, notwithstanding all of Sheryl Sandberg’s boosterism. All of those cons made sense in a low interest rate world but as interest rates rise and Joe Biden’s No Malarkey America rolls on, this stuff simply won’t do.
I am interested in AI for reasons biological—and geological. That is what it is best for.
You know my views about Clearview and Traitwell — about how every person is going to have their face and their DNA in a database — but what we haven’t really gotten into are my views on geology. I helped create Clearview to steal back the photos of — and put them into the hands of a responsible public. I created Traitwell — literally trait-well — to draw out the genetic traits within our population and ourselves.
You might say it’s in my blood: Charles C. Carlisle — my namesake — was a surveyor who invented the swinging oil pump, among other inventions.
There’s a discussion in the Getty book about how the family would employ geologists to look at the land surrounding major digs. It was hard to do but it paid off — the Gettys became one of the richest families in the world. I’d highly recommend Getty’s book, As I See It. Getty understood his duty — to be the WASP bridge with the Arab world. It wasn’t enough merely to know what was under the ground with a high degree of confidence. You had to master the politics. Oil — and how to find it — was a solved problem.
But might Getty’s approach work with other resources? If you squint and extrapolate you might even imagine a map of the world where knowing the similar fauna, flora, and geological formations you could predict what lay underneath the Earth’s crust. With a little reasoning you might even consider a fleet of satellites, patrolling the Earth, cataloguing the discoveries and predicting where they might occur through machine learning.
I suspect we are just waiting to take all the photos. “I can’t shake the thought that over the last 10 years, machine learning techniques have revolutionized almost every aspect of digital imagery and computer vision… and yet the last revolution in SAR image formation was the invention of the polar format algorithm in 1971, over 50 years ago,” says Joe Mission of Umbra, a satellite company where I am an investor.
You probably don’t think of the Gettys often but an adopted son of theirs — Governor Gavin Newsom — just cleaned the clock of Governor Ron DeSantis. For what it’s worth I don’t think either will be President — Newsom is viceroy of California while DeSantis (Harvard, Yale) is the presentable face of the Mob — but it did make for good entertainment. Neither California nor Florida offer a plausible model for the future of the American empire given that they are both colonies.
I want you to keep these things in mind as we consider artificial intelligence… and St. Louis... and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s western campus.
Mapmaking has always been the province of the sovereign. You get a real sense of this if you read Seeing Like A State. The U.S. government spends lots of money building up to date maps. Mapmaking is where the adventurer and the bureaucrat meet up in much the same way as the aristocrat and the mobster meet up in real estate. You can think of St. Louis, home of Louis and Clark, as our gateway to the West, yes, but also a doorway between the organized crime world and America.
A quick word about Y Combinator…
A history of Y Combinator is probably beyond the scope of this post but you can see it as roughly an age old tale of WASP inventor (Paul Graham), Jewish commercializer (Sam Altman), and Chinese mass producer (Gary Tan).
Paul Graham’s history is well worth it own post but suffice it to say, he’s the grandson of the chief inspector for the Met and the son of a nuclear scientist. It’s easy to see the face of the British deep state, albeit with a Chinese sheen given the closeness to Jerry Yang and Yahoo.
Graham’s a scholarship boy who is living the toff lifestyle in the British countryside. His American wife Jessica Livingston was at Fidelity and before that, Bucknell and Andover. Over the years Fidelity, like a lot of finance, became awfully Chinese, and indeed got in trouble for running some kind of elaborate venture capital scam.
I met those F-Prime guys through a Chinese spy I knew and yeah, more or less concluded, “Scam.” And, come to think of it, I thought the same thing when I first encountered Y Combinator. (I preferred my Boston-Chinese relations when they were intermediated by the Forbes family.)
Where did the money for Sam’s Y Combinator side investments come from? From St. Louis, of course, and his family.
One of the dirty little secrets is the role of the Special Purpose Vehicle. Oftentimes these instruments are little more than dirty cash finding their way into the latest, honest tech deals. That’s what happened with Square. It’s what happened with SpaceX. Sometimes Uncle Sam looks the other way. He’s usually too busy on other matters.
Speaking of Square, Jack Dorsey was always expected to return to St. Louis, so, too, was Sam expected to return to St. Louis.
When we stopped Thiel from becoming the new Sheldon Adelson — you’re welcome, Peter — Altman was put into position. He is to replace his mentor Barry Diller and we should pay especially close attention to the SEC investigating Diller’s efforts to insider trade with Microsoft and Activision. You can think of Open AI as a way of raiding Microsoft in much the same way GRAIL raided Illumina.
It’s long been my view that different countries often know a lot more about ambitious Americans than even our federal government. And that they develop — or neutralize — us accordingly.
We must play this game much smarter.
Both Thiel and Diller are known for grooming much younger men...interesting that those are his two mentors