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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 13, 2025

Takeaways from the SEC Roundtable and Privy Acquisition | Weekly Roundup

Empire

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Regulatory Thaw: The SEC’s new leadership signals a more accommodating stance on crypto, potentially unlocking significant growth for DeFi in the US.
  2. Market Structure Evolution: Tokenization is increasingly viewed as the key to modernizing capital markets, with on-chain IPOs and improved secondary market liquidity on the horizon.
  3. Infrastructure is King: Acquisitions like Privy by Stripe highlight the race to build and control the foundational layers of the crypto economy, especially around wallets and stablecoins.
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June 13, 2025

Institutions Pour Billions into Crypto! Stripe’s Bold Move & Genius Act Explained

Bankless

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Institutional FOMO is Real: Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs are magnets for capital, and Circle's IPO success signals massive pent-up demand.
  2. Regulation is Maturing: The Genius Act is poised to legitimize stablecoins, while the Clarity Act could reshape token classifications.
  3. Adoption Accelerates: Stripe's crypto acquisitions and Poly Market's X integration show crypto moving beyond niche use cases.
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June 13, 2025

Standard Chartered: The Bull Case For Solana | Geoff Kendrick

Lightspeed

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Solana's Next Act is Crucial: Current memecoin activity, while impressive, is viewed by institutions like Standard Chartered as less sustainable than diversified utility; a pivot to tokenized equities or social is key for long-term valuation.
  2. Perception Battles Performance: Ethereum's established "trustworthiness" gives it an institutional edge, even if Solana offers superior tech for certain applications. Solana must overcome its "memecoin" image to attract serious TradFi.
  3. Near-Term Headwinds for Solana Relative to Ethereum: Kendrick suggests Ethereum might outperform Solana in the near term (though both underperform Bitcoin) as Solana navigates its transition phase, while Ethereum benefits from incumbency in stablecoins and tokenized RWAs.
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June 12, 2025

The Digital Payment Race That Will Reshape the World

Forward Guidance

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Currency Cold War:** A "currency conflict" is unfolding, with the winner set to define the financial backbone of the next-gen internet and global commerce.
  2. **Stablecoins vs. The State:** USD stablecoins are pitched as the West's best bet for the internet's future currency, directly competing with state-backed digital currencies like China's e-CNY.
  3. **Agent-Powered Internet:** The dream is an internet where AI agents, fueled by ultra-low-cost stablecoin transactions, manage our digital lives, moving incentives away from human attention.
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June 12, 2025

The Last Mile Problem For Stablecoins | Analyst Round Table

0xResearch

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Solve Real Friction:** The "last-mile" challenge—seamlessly converting stablecoins to local cash in emerging markets—remains the critical bottleneck and prime opportunity for stablecoin protocols.
  2. **Moats are Real:** Overcoming established players like Tron requires more than just better tech or lower fees; it demands superior distribution and user migration strategies.
  3. **Align Incentives:** Morpho's structural changes offer a compelling model for aligning team, investor, and token holder interests, potentially setting a new standard for Web3 projects.
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June 12, 2025

Hivemind: Circle Valuation, Pump.Fun Token & What We’re Bullish

Empire

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Deficit Tailwinds: Persistent global fiscal deficits are expected to continue fueling appreciation in risk assets, including cryptocurrencies.
  2. Stablecoin Tsunami: Stablecoins are not just a crypto niche but a fundamental disruptor to the traditional banking system, with significant investment flowing into leaders like Circle, despite valuation concerns.
  3. App-Layer Alpha: Value is increasingly found in specific applications (like Pump.Fun) and companies leveraging crypto (like Galaxy Digital's AI/crypto blend), sometimes even diverting attention from base-layer L1 tokens.
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