After nearly six incredible years building spacecraft, I’m beginning a new chapter as an entrepreneur in residence (EIR) at @paradigm. Varda was a grand adventure and a one of one experience I’ll cherish forever. I had the rare privilege of joining the founding team and helping take a wild idea from zero to one, from a blank sheet of paper to hypersonic vehicles coming home from orbit. I’m incredibly proud of what we built together. Thank you to Will, Delian, and the whole team. Paradigm is giving me something incredibly cool. I’ll have the freedom to search for the next important thing worth building. This might look like a radical departure, but I see it as a chance to step back, look broadly, and follow my curiosity. An EIR sits somewhere between researcher, inventor, and founder in waiting. Paradigm feels like a natural home for that kind of exploration, full of earnest nerds who pair deep technical curiosity with research. My role is to explore important problem spaces, develop conviction, run experiments, and eventually turn the most promising direction into something real. In many ways, it feels like a natural extension of my hobbies and passion projects. I’ll be in SF during the week and LA on weekends. I want to use that time to meet as many interesting people as I can. Let’s get coffee and talk about energy, compute, artificial intelligence, and manufacturing. I want to hear about your most ambitious ideas and deepest technical rabbit holes.

Briefly, on why I pay attention to the EA/rationalists: Imagine you have an extremely nerdy friend who, in the mid-2000s, would not shut up about how Donald Trump was going to become president and reshape American politics. "Stop saying weird shit," you say. "He's a joke. He's a clown. The Apprentice isn't even good this season." But this guy won't stop. He's obsessive. Read McLuhan, he says. Read Postman, read Meyrowitz, read Ong, this is where everything is headed. God, he can be so incredibly annoying ... and then, ten years later, Trump becomes president and reshapes American politics. This is the most relatable frame I can think of to explain my experience with EA/rationalist people in the AI space. I became friends with EA folks after my mom died and I found really profound meaning in donating to Against Malaria and GiveDirectly, which struck me as a way to honor a life by saving a life. Then, these peple started talking about AI. And talking, and talking. Constantly. They said AI would solve impossible math problems; that it would mimic PhD-level achievement in a variety of fields; that it would change parts of life like education in ways we couldn't imagine; that it would become the dominant sector in the economy; that it might teach itself to code itself and escape test environments; that it would, in a decade, be the only thing many people talked about in the news. My response then: Stop saying weird shit! You sound deranged. Go back to talking about malaria nets and direct cash aid to poor families. And then, so much of what they said would happen actually happened. And, even crazier, they made it happen. Many of the ppl who contributed to, or were influenced by, all that EA/rationalist stuff ten years ago literally built the damn thing in the labs. Like every group, the EA/rationalist world seems uniform to outsiders, but it has a ton of internal divisions. I still think some of their predictions are nuts. I don't think AI will kill us all. I don't foresee Dyson Spheres in the 2030s or millions of robots making millions of robots in the next few years. These are crazy predictions, and I hope most of them are wrong. But when I see people shitting on the EA/Rationalist worldview, all I can think of is me, 10 years ago, thinking a lot of these folks were crazy for predicting that AI would by the mid-2020s be the center of the the news cycle, the engine of the economy, the hinge-point of geopolitics. That was an insane call. They got many of the details wrong. But they got the big picture right. They said: Pay attention. And they were right about that. The EA/Rationalists deserve skepticism, criticism, and doubt, like any other ideology. But I think it's wise to pay attention to the people who have been saying to pay attention.

New blog post: We had a million lines of Python to clean up. On September 2nd @Teknium asked Hermes Agent to do it. 1,393 subagents and nineteen hours later, the codebase was 34.4% smaller, saving us nearly $2m in engineering hours. nousresearch.com/refactoring…