Co-Founder and General Partner @MF__xyz prev @aptoslabs @Meta @BCG @BlackRock @ConsenSys @MeridioRE
Joined July 2010
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Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
Austin is on fire. $12.8B in VC funding YTD, blowing past last year's record of $7.5B.
Top 5 Q3 Deals
• @boringcompany: $3B Series D
• @basepowerco: $1B Series D
• @fab2: $500M Series A
• @function: $450M Growth
• @TerraFirma_Inc: $115M Series A
We see you Boston 🤠🚀🦾
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
Meta is back. Google will be back. Everyone with the right context & data will increasingly compete with the frontier labs. We're rapidly heading towards a world with many competing intelligences. That's great news for consumers, businesses, and society. xitter.cf/ccatalini/status/21075…
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
"The invention of the boat reduced the importance of swimming, but enabled the discovery of new lands."
Beautiful analogy from @ylecun about the opportunities and changes with AI, in mathematics and in science more broadly.
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
SpaceX has arrived.
We announced an agreement to acquire a nationwide low-band spectrum license portfolio that will pave the way for @Starlink to become a major mobile carrier in the US.
With this new spectrum and our Gen2 constellation, Starlink Mobile can ensure Americans have access to high-speed mobile broadband no matter where they are → spacex.com/updates#starlink-…
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
Amazon banning agents is the first opportunity I've seen since Amazon was founded for a startup to create an Amazon competitor. People will want agents to buy stuff for them. It will be one of the main use cases. And they won't want to use some Amazon-supplied agent to do it.
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
Alexandr Wang says constant overdoing makes you improve faster than anyone else
he credits focus and going the extra mile for what he built
the extra 10 miles are where the gap over everyone else opens
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
As with every other general-purpose technology before it, value in AI will accrue to holders of complementary assets, not the models! xitter.cf/ccatalini/status/20871…
Fifth question on AI.
AI is currently viewed as a centralizing technology – with ever-larger models, trained on much of the world’s knowledge, running on massive, concentrated compute, overseen by a few companies, and aiming to control and deploy all of that knowledge
But many early computer scientists and pioneers thought of digital technologies as powerfully decentralizing, as Simon Johnson and I discuss in our book Power and Progress (hachettebookgroup.com/titles…).
One such pioneer, Lee Felsenstein, wrote “The industrial approach is grim and doesn’t work: the design motto is Designed by Geniuses for Use by Idiots.” In the words of one of his collaborators, Bob Marsh, “We wanted to make the microcomputer accessible to all human beings.” And this wasn’t just an aspiration; they believed it was both feasible and natural that computers would empower individuals.
The first newsletter of People’s Computer Company also captures this optimism:
“Computers are mostly; used against people instead of for people; used to control people instead of to free them; time to change all that – we need a…PEOPLE’S COMPUTER COMPANY”.
Should we accept centralizing AI? Or is there a way in which the promise of artificial intelligence can be realized while data, capabilities and control are much more decentralized both across domains and across people? Wouldn’t decentralized AI be more consistent with human agency and control?
(Some of the ways in which greater decentralization can happen are discussed in my first post in this series.)
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
YC and dropout culture have convinced us the ideal founder is 22, straight out of school, but the data tells a different story.
Some interesting data:
- An MIT study of 2.7 million US founders found that the average founder was 47 when starting a company that later exited through an acquisition or IPO.
- The same study cited that the founders of the fastest-growing 0.1% of U.S. startups were 45 years old on average when they started their companies.
- A 50-year-old founder was approximately twice as likely as a 30-year-old founder to produce an acquisition or IPO.
- Founders with at least three years of relevant industry experience were twice as likely to build a top-0.1%-growth company as founders with none.
So it seems that experience is one of the strongest advantages a founder can have.
Two lessons here:
1. It's never too late to start
2. It might actually be TOO early to start; getting work experience is worth considering
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
Freckle is the first kids phone built for real-world adventure.
Shipping in December. Pre-order today: freckle.tech
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
High skilled immigrants are powering America into AI dominance.
Most attendees at the White House top AI leaders meeting are immigrants, and some of the U.S. born are children of immigrants.
One quarter are from India.
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
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.
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
I’ve seen a couple of posts about this so wanted to demystify. Today, every Muse user gets a free computer in the cloud. It's a real computer, and we’ve designed the security architecture of the Muse Secure VM carefully so you and your Muse can do almost anything you could with a computer sitting under your desk while keeping you and the system safe from threats like prompt injection. We wrote about this at length in our security blog post – security.muse.ai. Activity in the “runtime cell”, which you share with your Muse is unfettered, but sensitive actions are all overseen by the Sentinel, which runs outside of that cell. Similarly, all sensitive secrets - like the passwords you enter into Muse’s secure credential storage - are also stored outside the runtime cell.
The runtime cell gets its own root filesystem (including a full Ubuntu linux image) separate from the host filesystem where your other more sensitive data lives. Because it is isolated from the sensitive stuff that runs on the same box, this means that we can, and do, offer users full visibility and control over the files in the runtime cell. Just as you can when you install Linux on your home computer, you can poke around and see all the files that make the system work - both debian system files and the binaries and data files that implement the parts of Muse which run in the runtime cell.
This was a very deliberate choice - your Muse Secure VM truly is your own computer in the cloud. You can install software in it, write and compile code, use the browser to surf the web: it is your own Linux box that you can operate as you choose with your Muse. Poking around in this computer doesn't give you any privileged access to Meta infrastructure, or to other people's data
If I may geek out a little here for a second… As a kid I loved to take things apart to see how they worked. As a teenager I got into computers and soon found myself drawn to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM and the system registry, later Slackware’s /dev/, /proc/ etc – I could see how the system was laid out and as I explored what DLL files and .so files actually did, I gradually became able to meld the computer to my own will.
We’re really proud to be able to put a real computer in millions of people’s hands with a similar level of transparency. We built a file explorer right into the Library tab of the UI. We want you to be able to see the markdown files Muse writes while it thinks about how to serve you better, and explore the internals of the system if you’d like to.
So, when you ask your Muse to show you its entire filesystem, and receive gigabytes of files you’re seeing the full contents of the runtime cell. It’s yours to explore and enjoy!
If you’re not a geek like me, or simply want to download the data that you personally have created directly with your Muse, we added a feature for that too in Settings > Data controls > Download your agent data.
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
1/ When we designed Libra, we worked with top domain experts to estimate probabilities and stress-test the ecosystem across a wide range of scenarios, including 1-in-1,000-year events.
Hardly a science, but much more disciplined than today's AI risk debate.
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
Our house in Toronto had this fancy glassed wine cellar, but we are not big wine drinkers.
Anyways, it had good climate control so here is my rack cellar.
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
To be a good founder, you have to be a very harsh judge of everything around you. Most painfully, of people.
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
The innovation exemption is an actual thing: sec.gov/newsroom/press-relea…
Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 retweeted
Last month I wrote about how we can build a positive and safe future for everyone: meta.com/thefutureisforevery…
Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens.
The reality is:
- People won't want to use agents that are misaligned with them and that don't do what they ask, so labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned.
There is a lot of debate about slowing progress on capabilities until alignment catches up. My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models. Any lab that doesn't focus on alignment will fall behind.
- Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well.
Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety and security. We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would. We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us. I'm proud of the security foundations we've built.
- Engaging independent evaluators and advisors is industry best practice. MSL already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work. Other labs can just do this too. In general, it would be helpful for there to be a larger and more diverse ecosystem of evaluators.
- Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely. Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well.
I believe the key to building a positive future for everyone is maintaining the right balance of power. This is within our power to do.