holyn retweeted
I joined @GoogleDeepMind to develop a research program on the economics of AGI. Today, together with Andrew Koh (@andrewjkoh) and Shane Legg (@ShaneLegg), we are incredibly excited to release The Economics of Intelligence, the first in a series of projects from our group on how AGI will change the economy.
How do capability improvements transform the economy, and when? In this project, we define thresholds of economic capabilities, e.g., minimal AGI, based on how they transform the economy. We then track how the economy–market structure, employment, and wages–changes during the transition across capability regimes.
We have seen exponential increases in what AI agents can do but the broader economy seems almost remarkably unchanged. Part of the reason is that the solo AI agent is the wrong economic object; economic transformation is an equilibrium outcome where organizations compete. Looking at how intelligence functions within organizations, transformation will depend on when two key capability thresholds are crossed: competence (gains on individual skills, e.g., coding, math) and coordination (gains on ability of agents to cooperate and work together).
We show that what economic transformation looks like depends on whether AI becomes supercompetent, supercooperative, or both—the regime of artificial superintelligence (ASI). Tracking this transition shows why the real visible transformation may come from improvements in coordination—a capability most benchmarks don’t yet track. Past a certain threshold, AI capabilities can break the Coasian ceiling on firm size and lead to an economy that looks drastically different than the one we see today.
Two main takeaways:
1. To understand the path of transformation, we should be tracking agentic coordination more closely.
2. The impact of AI will likely show up in wages before market structure or employment.
We are really excited about this paper. Excited to hear people’s thoughts.
Link: institute.deepmind.com/essay…
holyn retweeted
I went to Phoenix to spend time with the Taiwanese community. TSMC will invest $265 billion and send thousands of engineers and their families, which marvel at their new lives in the Sunbelt
My first feature as a contributing writer to the New York Times:
nytimes.com/2026/10/23/opini…
holyn retweeted
it's good for you to be relied upon. it's good for you to talk a friend through something at 3am. it's good for you to offer advice and be accountable for it. it's good for you to recommend an outfit. it's good for you to be supportive. it's good for you to be tired from it
holyn retweeted
For decades economic development has relied on tax breaks and subsidies for the largest corporations, a trickle-down approach that too often falls short.
@NYCMayor and @NYCEDC are charting a new path.
In the first deal of its kind in NYC history, the public is investing $30 million in a quantum lab - in exchange for three board seats and 15% of the revenue generated from technology it creates.
And if any firm coming out of the lab merges, gets acquired, or IPOs, the city gets a payout.
When public dollars are invested, the public should share in the wealth and innovation those investments create.
nytimes.com/2026/10/14/nyreg…
holyn retweeted
'Digger' Digs a Grave Hollywood is Happy to Fill. New musings on the future of original cinema are now available on loreobsessed.com/blog
holyn retweeted
We were able to fine tune an open weight model (Qwen3.5-9B) on proprietary internal data at @coinbase, and it out performed frontier models, at much lower cost and speed, for a specialized task (fraud prevention in this case).
I think we'll see more of this pattern inside companies. The frontier models are amazing generalists. But increasingly you'll see specialist models out perform on more narrow tasks, either working on teams, or by themselves.
We're making it easy to fine tune models internally for our employees. We even have a skill for it in our internal harness that makes it easy to spin these up and start training them:
"/fine-tune-and-serve-llm I want to fine-tune Qwen for payments risk review. help me get started"
I imagine we'll have some backend services that could be replaced entirely by this new architecture.
holyn retweeted
Actually, Tao is right and this is being misread.
He’s talking about keeping human understanding of how the AI got there, so we can detect misalignment (e.g. gaming a weakness to mask a result that isn’t truly a good cure). Verification of the proxy alone doesn’t guarantee the real outcome is safe or aligned. The AI could be gaming the system to satisfy the request, or worse. Without understanding how it arrives at its results, we lose the ability to spot and correct such failures before they scale.
This differs from not fully understanding how something like Tylenol works, because the intent and process behind those were human and aligned with our goals.
holyn retweeted
I am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue.
holyn retweeted
Mustafa Suleyman's whole piece criticizing Anthropic, and the way it's imbuing Claude with some sense of self-hood is really worth reading IMO mustafa-suleyman.ai/a-warnin…
holyn retweeted
🚨🗞️NEW: Clarity Act Heads to Pivotal Senate Vote as Democrats Make Eleventh-Hour Counteroffer
Everything you need to know ahead of this afternoon’s vote, including details of the Dem counteroffer, GOP pushback and a new White House initiative. ⬇️
cryptoinamerica.com/p/clarit…
holyn retweeted
Nearly a year in the making…
This is the best thing I’ve ever read about one of the most important people shaping the world around us.
Set aside an hour tomorrow. You don’t want to miss it.
holyn retweeted
Today we're announcing Robo.
We build affordable, useful robots that anyone can deploy (get yours below)
Our first robot is a wheeled humanoid now deploying in logistics, manufacturing & healthcare.
Robots will be everywhere. But first, they have to be affordable and useful.
holyn retweeted
personally i am not really impressed when a computer is good at math — since a computer is math . i am a lot more intrigued by things like , for example , a rat being an exceptional cook — since that’s not really expected
holyn retweeted
I’ve been building on this thing w/ my internet homies for like 10yrs and I’ve never believed more in building something with the sole purpose of making your life more interesting.
Side projects are serendipity machines. Just start shipping things relating to your deepest interests, even if what you put out is a tiny seed of a larger idea, just start moving. It’ll help you find your people.
This lil site/app has spawned the fastest growing sun care company in America, we’ve thrown parties all over the world - in a mansion with Ralph Lauren - in the legendary Pikes Hotel in Ibiza - with 1000 ppl poolside at the Standard Miami - and I feel like we haven’t even scratched the surface of what we can do with this thing yet. 10 years in! Still excited! Because I haven’t burnt myself out chasing money with it.
People burn themselves out building a business to make money, to buy a more exciting life. But you can also just build a thing that gives you the exciting life, and that can be a side project you spend a couple evenings a month on…
We’re launching a new internet club in the next couple wks, I’d love you all to be part of it, make sure you’re on the newsletter!
All the love to everyone who has followed along, come to the parties, bumped the radio.
+ thank you @AppStore!
holyn retweeted
Status is "Sims but social media." And it grew to 1M users within 19 days of launching last year. The platform now has more than 5 million user-created characters.
It's an AI-powered social RPG where users can create alternate identities, live inside simulated social worlds, and scroll simulated social feeds.
"Create your persona, join 100s of different fandoms, and watch as you gain your favorite characters as followers, post with them, become famous, or...get cancelled."
Here's our full interview with cofounder & CEO @faionur:
0:30 - What is Status?
1:16 - How the app works; growth metrics
3:16 - Monetization strategy
4:20 - Why AI creates a new form of immersive entertainment
6:35 - Why younger users embrace Status, but reject AI
7:29 - Entertainment companies exploring AI experiences to keep fans engaged between seasons
holyn retweeted
Status has raised $17M in seed and Series A funding led by @AbstractVC, @generalcatalyst and @usv to let anyone step inside their favorite stories, become famous, and live a million different lives.
We quietly launched Status last year and grew to over 1 million users in 19 days - making us the fastest growing AI app since ChatGPT.
But we hit a (predictable) snag - the app was incredibly expensive to run. How do you serve millions of users without degrading the product with a cheap LLM?
So the team locked in: we rebuilt the whole experience, and our technical bets paid off. Our users now spend 35 minutes on average to (90 minutes each day for power users!), and millions of characters and worlds have been created. All by our users.
The next frontier of entertainment is mobile-first and deeply personal. Traditional mobile games take years to build and rarely stick. TV shows are fleeting in the age of streaming. Status is different. It is not a game you finish, it is a world you can live in.
Status is a new category entirely: Immersive Social Entertainment, and we believe strongly that it is the next great entertainment paradigm. We’ve 10x’d to millions in annual revenue in Q1 2026, we're just getting started.
On Status, you can be anyone.