Tech investor currently focused (almost) exclusively on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning startups. Director at @MercatoPartners

Salt Lake City
Joined May 2022
Josh Christensen retweeted
if @elonmusk paid 100% of his net worth ($1.4 trillion) as a tax it would only cover federal government spending for 77 days. this isn’t a tax problem…
If Elon Musk paid my ultra-millionaire wealth tax, we could pay for child care for all three and four year olds in America.
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one of the biggest gaps in enterprise adoption of AI has been solved. in case you missed it at @nvidia GTC Taipei this week, @nvidia showed off their Confidential Compute system with @protopia_ai showing that enterprises can now use their most sensitive data with frontier models on multi-tenant infrastructure while keeping data confidential throughout. demo here: protopia.ai/zero-trust-ai-fa… nvda.ws/4obE1pA
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Hey @Kalshi thanks a lot for not submitting my prop bet for Kyle Whittingham going to Michigan when his name wasn’t on the slip yet… I tried to buy $200 at less than 1%…,
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People always look at me funny when I drink Diet Mountain Dew at 9am, but the second ingredient is orange juice, so how is this not a morning drink?
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If you missed it the first time, go back outside right now
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I've been saying the MIT report on 5% of companies finding positive ROI was a poor survey design. This one seems more robust and much more aligned with what we are seeing in the field. Great job @Wharton, bad take @MIT ...
👀New data on the corporate ROI from generative AI from a large-scale tracking survey by my colleagues at Wharton. They found that 75% already have a positive return on investment from AI, less than 5% negative return. Also 46% of businesses leaders now use AI daily themselves.
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Every day when I ask my kids what they think of something (usually their food) they respond with a very slow and exaggerated and dramatic thumbs up or thumbs down, as if they are putting someone to death. No idea where they got this from, but it always makes my day.
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I canceled my @manusai subscription a while ago because it could never keep up on accuracy. Pretty skeptical about this ChatGPT Agent release, but according to @sama 'll have it by end of day today... so let's see what it can do. What @OpenAI claims it can do: - Browse websites, click/scroll/type like a human - Create editable slideshows & spreadsheets from scratch - Run code, analyze data, conduct research - Handle full workflows: "plan Japanese breakfast for 4" & then shops for ingredients - Calendar integration: brief you on upcoming meetings based on recent news - Competitor analysis & auto-generate slide decks - Convert screenshots into presentations - Plan & book entire travel itineraries - Schedule appointments, rearrange meetings - Update financial models with new data Basically all the stuff I tried to get Manus to do for me in the past. We'll see if it lives up to the hype or if it's another case of impressive demos that fall apart in real use openai.com/index/introducing…
Today we launched a new product called ChatGPT Agent. Agent represents a new level of capability for AI systems and can accomplish some remarkable, complex tasks for you using its own computer. It combines the spirit of Deep Research and Operator, but is more powerful than that may sound—it can think for a long time, use some tools, think some more, take some actions, think some more, etc. For example, we showed a demo in our launch of preparing for a friend’s wedding: buying an outfit, booking travel, choosing a gift, etc. We also showed an example of analyzing data and creating a presentation for work. Although the utility is significant, so are the potential risks. We have built a lot of safeguards and warnings into it, and broader mitigations than we’ve ever developed before from robust training to system safeguards to user controls, but we can’t anticipate everything. In the spirit of iterative deployment, we are going to warn users heavily and give users freedom to take actions carefully if they want to. I would explain this to my own family as cutting edge and experimental; a chance to try the future, but not something I’d yet use for high-stakes uses or with a lot of personal information until we have a chance to study and improve it in the wild. We don’t know exactly what the impacts are going to be, but bad actors may try to “trick” users’ AI agents into giving private information they shouldn’t and take actions they shouldn’t, in ways we can’t predict. We recommend giving agents the minimum access required to complete a task to reduce privacy and security risks. For example, I can give Agent access to my calendar to find a time that works for a group dinner. But I don’t need to give it any access if I’m just asking it to buy me some clothes. There is more risk in tasks like “Look at my emails that came in overnight and do whatever you need to do to address them, don’t ask any follow up questions”. This could lead to untrusted content from a malicious email tricking the model into leaking your data. We think it’s important to begin learning from contact with reality, and that people adopt these tools carefully and slowly as we better quantify and mitigate the potential risks involved. As with other new levels of capability, society, the technology, and the risk mitigation strategy will need to co-evolve.
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🧵Waiting 90 mins for a burger in Sun Valley got me thinking: State-by-state tech regulation is just as frustrating - but history shows it's survivable. Remember the 1990s internet chaos? Georgia banned online anonymity, NY made 'harmful' content a felony. Courts struck most down. open.substack.com/pub/joshjd… #AI #TechHistory
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I also talk about Bill Clinton using a laptop
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7-month doubling is wild. AI has ~80% success on 1-hour tasks. but only 10% on 8-hour projects. It just loses the thread after a few hours. We have all felt this. At some point you just want to start over with a new project. By mid-2026, if doubling every 7 months is real.. that flips - suddenly 6-8-hour delegation becomes viable. That's when things get weird. Not because AI gets "smarter" (although it probably will) ... but because it stops forgetting what it was doing 3 hours ago. First company to figure out async AI workflows while everyone else is prompt-engineering their way through 30-minute tasks will print money... I mean, until somebody else figures it out a few days later. metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-mea…
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Does this mean I'm better off taking a picture of my skin and sending it to o3 than sending that same pic to my dermatologist?
1. Microsoft presents medical superintelligence Microsoft's LLM is not only designed for multiple-choice questions, but also for real medical diagnoses in realistic scenarios – and outperforms even top models such as o3. This is a bigger breakthrough than much of what we are currently seeing. Let's take a look:
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I analyzed 150 public SaaS companies with k-means clustering Some "profitable" 25% growers trade at 13.6x revenue Others at 7.3x Same growth. Same "profitable" label. Nearly 2x valuation difference. The hidden variable? Whether you have 7% or 25% FCF margins 🧵 open.substack.com/pub/joshjd…
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There's a 17% interaction premium for nailing both dimensions. The market rewards companies that can walk and chew gum. Started thinking about this during a drive with my carsick kids (don't ask). Sometimes the best insights come from the worst car rides. Full analysis with clustering visualizations: open.substack.com/pub/joshjd…
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