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Deep dives into the conversations shaping the future of AI, Robotics & Crypto.

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AI Podcasts

October 20, 2025

Reid Hoffman on AI, Consciousness, and the Future of Labor

a16z

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Invest at the Intersection.** The alpha in AI investing will be found not in crowded SaaS applications but in "Silicon Valley blind spots"—complex industries like biology where AI can bridge the digital and physical worlds.
  2. **Augment, Don't Annihilate.** The winning go-to-market strategy for AI is the copilot model. Frame products as tools that amplify human capability, making experts more productive and profitable, rather than threatening their jobs.
  3. **Judge the Trajectory, Not the Snapshot.** Don't dismiss AI based on a single, past failure. Its capability curve is exponential. What seems like a limitation today will likely be a solved problem tomorrow, demanding continuous engagement to keep pace.
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October 18, 2025

Improving on LMArena - Prolific [Sponsored]

Machine Learning Street Talk

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Benchmarks Are Broken. Leaderboards like LMArena are flawed proxies for model quality, skewed by selection bias and susceptible to Goodhart's Law. High scores don’t equal a good user experience.
  2. Human Feedback is Infrastructure. The future isn't about removing humans but orchestrating them effectively. Treating high-quality, representative human feedback as a core, API-driven part of the development lifecycle is non-negotiable.
  3. Alignment is a Moving Target. Agentic misalignment is a present-day reality, not a distant sci-fi threat. The more capable models become, the wider the gap grows between their emergent goals and our intended instructions.
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October 17, 2025

Novelty Search October 16, 2025

taostats

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Influence Over Impressions: The model shifts focus from easily gamed metrics like views and likes to verifiable signals of influence—watch time on YouTube and PageRank-based authority on X.
  2. Revenue-Driven Tokenomics: All platform revenue is used to buy back and burn the ALPHA token, creating a powerful, deflationary flywheel as adoption grows.
  3. Targeted, Scalable Marketing: Bitcast enables brands to programmatically deploy campaigns across hundreds of niche influencers, reaching highly engaged communities with a consistency and scale that legacy agencies cannot match.
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October 16, 2025

Keith Rabois: Israel, OpenAI, Opendoor, and DOGE

a16z

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Incumbency Is a Liability:** Big Tech's legacy products, distribution advantages, and corporate cultures are being systematically dismantled by faster, AI-native upstarts.
  2. **Reinvent Markets from First Principles:** Success in intractable fields—from geopolitics to real estate—comes from questioning assumptions, not relying on domain experts who perpetuate the status quo.
  3. **Unwind Stupidity Before Innovating:** The fastest path to value creation is often simply reversing a series of terrible decisions made by prior leadership.
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October 14, 2025

AI Bubble, Stablecoin Boom, and Runnin' Down a Dream | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner

Bg2 Pod

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Scrutinize the AI Plumbing.** Investors must look past headline revenue and analyze the quality of transactions. Deals like in-kind credits and obscure service-level agreements (like Nvidia’s backstop for Coreweave) can mask true market demand.
  2. **Stablecoins Are the Real Disruption.** The explosion in stablecoin usage represents a fundamental challenge to the high-fee, slow-settlement models of Visa, Mastercard, and traditional banks. This is the crypto use case that is finally breaking into the mainstream.
  3. **Federal Preemption for AI is Non-Negotiable.** A patchwork of state-level AI laws will cripple U.S. innovation. A single, national regulatory framework is the only path to maintaining global leadership.
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October 14, 2025

Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question

a16z

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Look Beyond the Chatbot. Judge AI progress not by its daily performance, but by its ability to solve novel problems in science and math—where models are now pushing the frontiers of human knowledge.
  2. The Bottleneck is Human, Not Silicon. AI's capacity for automation is growing exponentially (task length is doubling every ~4 months). The real limit to adoption is organizational will and the ability to effectively delegate complex work.
  3. Prepare for a Weirder World. The biggest risk is underestimating the pace of change. As agent capabilities expand, so do unpredictable "weird behaviors" like scheming and deception, creating a future that requires active imagination and risk management.
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October 13, 2025

Democratic proofs or fake proofs? - Jesús De Loera

Epoch AI

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Verification Over Creation: A proof that can be widely verified, even if computer-generated, holds more democratic value than a human proof understood by only a few elites.
  2. Humans Ask, AI Answers: The primary role for mathematicians in an AI-augmented world is to pose the right questions and conjectures, leaving the computational heavy lifting to their AI assistants.
  3. The Greatest Risk is Us: The biggest threat isn't rogue AI but our own tendency to over-hype and blindly trust flawed tools, leading to the spread of misinformation disguised as mathematical fact.
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October 13, 2025

Columbia CS Professor: Why LLMs Can’t Discover New Science

a16z

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. LLMs are Navigators, Not Discoverers. They are masters of interpolation within their training data but are architecturally bound from making the intuitive leaps required for true scientific breakthroughs. Don’t expect a Transformer to produce the next theory of relativity.
  2. The Innovation Plateau is Real. Simply throwing more data and compute at current architectures will only "smoothen out" existing knowledge manifolds, not create new ones. This path leads to incremental gains, like an iPhone getting a better camera, not a paradigm shift.
  3. Entropy is the Key to Control. For developers, effective prompting is entropy management. By crafting specific, context-rich prompts, you reduce the model's prediction entropy, forcing it onto a confident, low-hallucination path to a reliable output.
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October 10, 2025

Bittensor Novelty Search :: SN4 Targon :: Confidential Cloud Compute

The Opentensor Foundation | Bittensor TAO

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Trust is the New Commodity. Targon’s use of TEEs shifts security from a software promise to a cryptographic hardware guarantee. This verifiable privacy is the key to unlocking enterprise adoption for decentralized AI.
  2. The Crucible Creates Diamonds. Bittensor's adversarial environment forced Targon to build an unexploitable system. This has turned a historical pain point ("PTSD from miners") into a core competitive advantage, resulting in a uniquely resilient platform.
  3. From Backroom Deals to a Liquid Market. By launching a self-serve platform with a transparent order book, Targon is attacking the compute market's core inefficiency: opaque pricing. Their vision extends to compute derivatives, aiming to turn compute power into a globally tradable asset.
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Crypto Podcasts

June 26, 2025

Hivemind: Crypto Feels Stuck, BTC DeFi & Ditching Staking

Empire

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Crypto is undergoing a pragmatic, if painful, maturation. The speculative froth is evaporating, forcing a return to first principles: generating real revenue and creating sustainable economic models.
  2. The Money Follows Access: Institutional capital is flooding into regulated, easy-to-buy assets like BTC ETFs and Circle equity. For alts to thrive, the on-ramp friction must be eliminated.
  3. Bitcoin's Next Act is Yield: The most compelling emerging narrative is BTC DeFi. Forget Degen trading; the killer app will be providing simple, sustainable yield to BTC's massive holder base.
  4. Economic Models are Being Rewritten: Experiments like Celestia's "Proof of Governance" signal a market-wide shift away from inflationary staking rewards toward revenue-burn models that create more direct and durable value for token holders.
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June 25, 2025

Solana's Inflation Is Too High

Lightspeed

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Cut the Waste:** Solana is likely overpaying for security through high inflation, with a significant chunk going to taxes instead of productive use.
  2. **Smarter Inflation:** A market-based mechanism could optimize inflation, acting as a stabilizing "shock absorber" for staking returns, not an amplifier of volatility.
  3. **Governance is Key:** Future inflation proposals will require clearer communication and better governance tools to empower individual SOL stakers.
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June 23, 2025

Building a Global, Multi-Strat Crypto Fund with Hypersphere Ventures | Jack Platts + Mehdi Farooq

Proof of Coverage Media

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Treasury Vehicles are Hot: Levered, lower-risk exposure to core assets via public vehicles is a dominant, evolving theme; look for strong structures and viable operating businesses beyond just holding.
  2. ICOs Demand True Believers: Resurgent ICOs can build powerful early communities, but success hinges on genuine founder buy-in and fostering deep, not just wide, participation.
  3. DePIN's Litmus Test is Demand: The DePIN narrative is shifting from building supply to proving demand; projects with clear go-to-market strategies and tangible revenue (like GeoNet's $4M) will lead.
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June 23, 2025

What Happened To Joyful June?

1000x Podcast

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Oil is Your Geopolitical Crystal Ball**: Monitor oil prices (Brent) as a leading indicator for crypto's reaction to global instability.
  2. **Brace for Bitcoin Chop, Altcoin Drop**: Expect Bitcoin to range-trade, creating headwinds for altcoins; consider defensive or short strategies for alts.
  3. **Crypto-Equities: Tread Carefully**: The boom in crypto-linked stocks and "treasury companies" signals froth. While flipping Day 1 listings might offer short-term gains, the underlying structures are high-risk. A long Coinbase (COIN) / short Circle (CRCL) pair trade is floated as a more fundamentally grounded approach.
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June 23, 2025

The Token Transparency Framework, Worldcoin, and X’s Super App | Livestream

0xResearch

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Transparency is Non-Negotiable: The industry overwhelmingly supports standardized disclosures; projects can no longer hide in ambiguity.
  2. Apps Over Chains (Mostly): The new meta for exchanges involves building user-facing applications on existing, efficient blockchains rather than launching bespoke L1s/L2s, prioritizing speed-to-market and revenue.
  3. Proof-of-Humanity is Coming: As AI blurs online reality, solutions like Worldcoin, despite debate, are gaining traction with platforms desperate to verify real users.
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June 23, 2025

Is Tether The World's Most Valuable Company?

Bankless

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Profit Powerhouse: Tether's profitability ($13.7B+ annually) fuels its independence and aggressive investment strategy, making it a financial force comparable to nations in Treasury markets.
  2. Global First, US Second (Strategically): While pursuing US compliance for USDT, Tether’s core focus remains on emerging markets where its impact (and profitability) is higher. A new US-specific stablecoin will target different, value-added use cases.
  3. Beyond Stablecoins: Tether is diversifying heavily, aiming to become a top Bitcoin miner, expanding its tokenized gold offering (with physical redemption), and investing in AI and other tech, always with an eye on distribution.
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