Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Joined June 2009
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Vaultic Ventures retweeted
Tim's making a really important point here and I think people fundamentally misunderstand it.
Let's paint a scenario. You are an indie developer and you want to make a game.
Traditional game development will take you 1 year and cost you $200,000 in outsourcing costs to buy art, animation, and additional programming resources.
AI assisted game development will take you 3 months and cost you $50,000 in credits + some additional resources.
In a good scenario your game could make $200,000 and break even, but in many scenarios you mortgage your house and no one sees your game and you are out your savings.
Now, with the anti-AI mania, Valve is forcing real economic harm on you because you get the equivalent of hate mobs at your door for your choice of tooling.
Your economic viability is harmed because Valve chooses to put a label on you that generates negative attention. It makes your economics worse.
Anti-AI proponents will point out that this proves their hate campaigns work. The appeal is not to them, because they are morons, but to developers to stand up to Valve and say remove these labels so that we can have livelihoods. And Valve makes money of you either way.
Stand up for your rights, devs!
There is a real economic cost to Valve’s foray into forced political disclosures. Besides taking 30%, they’re also taking a potentially even larger fraction of developers’ revenue and livelihood by undermining their business with these AI hate campaigns.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Steam requires disclosure of generative AI for player-consumed content via its standard Content Survey (alongside ratings), shown on store pages for transparency, not as political statements. Steam's base 30% revenue share matches major console platforms.
partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingsta…
eurogamer.net/steam-revises-…
Vaultic Ventures retweeted
🧵1/10 Given the recent reactions of mathematicians over rapid advances in AI, I think it is important to remember that technological change has historically been a very personal event for people.
Over the history of technological progress, looms have fallen silent, switchboards have gone dark, and factory lines have shrunk bringing with them a human crisis of identity and what it means to be a master of one's craft.
Vaultic Ventures retweeted
Quick thoughts on AI: When in human history has there ever been a technology that was net negative?
What about fire? Fire makes noxious smoke, risks burns, can destroy homes and can kill. But fire liberated us from the cold and let us cook our food. Then we made stoves with pipes — and they were safer and warmed our homes, but still carried some fire risk and had pollution. So we invented the power plant, which solved some problems with at-home fire—and we found ways to make better gas stoves and furnaces. Over time, we've made power plants better and better, reducing the negatives while enhancing the positives. Nat gas beats coal, and nuclear should beat both.
So what about nuclear? I admit it's debatable whether nuclear weapons are a net positive or a net negative. I'd argue a net positive—because they ended WWII and made a mass-casualty great-power war unthinkable. But even if you disagree about nuclear weapons, you have to acknowledge nuclear is a technology category broader than weapons: nuclear power, nuclear medicine, and X-rays are part of the same fundamental technology. And there's no question nuclear writ large is a massive net positive for humanity.
What about smartphones? They've certainly had downsides we need to take seriously — but it's obvious we are better off now than we were in the flip phone or landline era.
This is the typical story of technology. And it's the arc of progress that lifted humanity out of the wilderness, that freed 90% of the population from back-breaking farm work while virtually eliminating famine, that enables any human with a tap of a finger to access the sum total of human knowledge, that allows us to enjoy comfortable climate-controlled environs any time of the year in any outdoor climate.
My conclusion is: every technology has pros and cons. The cons are real—and the pros always outweigh the cons. As technology evolves, the improvements enhance the pros while reducing the cons.
So what about AI? The question is not: are there cons with AI? Obviously there are; technology always has cons. The question is: are the pros going to outweigh the cons?
Right now, with AI in its current state, it's not even close. The pros dramatically outweigh the cons. AI enables anyone to have a personal tutor. To offload repetitive and boring work. Anyone with an idea can become a creator and a software engineer. Individuals and small teams can do what used to take gigantic teams and big budgets. Our cars are becoming safer. Etc. Sure — we don't want AI teaching kids how to make nuclear bombs or bioweapons. We don't want hallucinating AI weapons. There are cons to be managed, solved, reduced, and eventually eliminated.
History shows us that as technology develops, the pros are enhanced while the cons are reduced. So if we want better, more useful AI with fewer downsides — we need to accelerate AI development, not slow it down.
Vaultic Ventures retweeted
Shapes can look quite different, depending on your point of view.
v/@TheMathFlow
Vaultic Ventures retweeted
Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday.
What I should have said:
There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this.
On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way.
On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project.
On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns.
On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians.
On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers.
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries.
On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land.
Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged.
When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America.
I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw.
Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.
Vaultic Ventures retweeted
1/ I'm a cardiologist. I've practiced for twenty-five years, through a lot of "breakthroughs" that turned out to be press releases. So understand the weight of what I'm about to say: I have never seen a single week in medicine like the one we just lived through.
In the span of a few days, four separate scientific breakthroughs landed. The stock market treated them as four unrelated stories and sent a handful of biotech companies soaring. But that's the shallow read. Look closer and they are not four stories at all. They are four faces of the same story — the biggest shift in medicine since the discovery of antibiotics.
Medicine is becoming programmable. Individualized. Written for one human being instead of the average of millions.
Let me walk you through exactly what happened, in plain language, and show you where this is actually headed. Because the future arrived quietly this week, and most people scrolled right past it.
Vaultic Ventures retweeted
Poor people want no one to be rich.
Rich people want everyone to be rich.
One of these worldviews is superior.
Vaultic Ventures retweeted
Imagine telling someone in 1999…
The year is 2026.
The President is Donald Trump in his second non consecutive term.
The richest man in the world is PayPal cofounder Elon Musk… but not because of fintech or Paypal. Because of rockets, electric cars, AI, satellites, brain chips and something called “Boring Company”.
Apple is worth trillions but its main business isn’t computers… its selling glass rectangles everyone stares at for 9 hours a day.
People don’t watch TV. They watch teenagers explain geopolitics, finance, and relationship advice in ~60 second videos.
The biggest taxi company owns no taxis.
The biggest hotel company owns no hotels.
The most powerful media companies are social networks where everyone argues with strangers for free.
Kids are making millions filming themselves playing video games.
AI Robots write emails, code, legal memos, songs, essays, and breakup texts.
The internet is mostly bots arguing with humans who are trying to prove they aren’t bots.
You can summon a car, groceries, a doctor, a date, a private jet, or a dog walker from your phone.
People pay real money for invisible currencies, digital monkeys, AI girlfriends and pictures that disappear after 24 hours.
The richest companies in the world don’t sell oil, steel, or cars. They sell attention, compute, data, and addiction.
And somehow, after all of that everyone is still using Excel.
Vaultic Ventures retweeted
Ray Kurzweil is basically the modern Nostradamus of technology.
People mocked the exponential curves, the timelines, the confidence.
Then reality started catching up.
He saw where computing was going long before most people even understood the game.
Vaultic Ventures retweeted
What a difference 70 years makes: 3.75 MB in 1956 & 1 TB today.
v/@JonErlichman
Vaultic Ventures retweeted
We have just used the @Nvidia H100 onboard Starcloud-1 to train the first LLM in space!
We trained the nano-GPT model from Andrej @Karpathy on the complete works of Shakespeare and successfully ran inference on it.
We have also run inference on a preloaded Gemma model, and we plan to try more exciting models in the future.
Getting the first H100 to work in space required a lot of innovation and hard work from the incredible Starcloud team to make this breakthrough.
This is a significant first step toward moving almost all computing off Earth to reduce the burden on our energy supplies and take advantage of abundant solar energy in space! 🚀
Vaultic Ventures retweeted
Valve, the makers of Steam, Half-Life and CounterStrike, made ~$17B in revenue this year with ~336 employees.
That's >$50M per employee, the highest for any (non-crypto) company in the world. The average pay is ~$1.3M/person.
One of the most efficient businesses of all time.
Vaultic Ventures retweeted
Tomorrow #MSIgnite kicks off the next wave of AI transformation. ⚡️🌐
Join us live at 9AM PT as Microsoft leaders unveil what's next in AI, cloud, and security.
Save this post and tune in: msft.it/6019tRMz1
Vaultic Ventures retweeted
Today we announced our new Fairwater datacenter in Atlanta, connected with our first Fairwater site in Wisconsin and our broader Azure footprint to create the world’s first AI superfactory.
Fairwater exemplifies our vision for a fungible fleet: infra that can serve any workload, anywhere, on fit-for-purpose accelerators and network paths, with maximum performance and efficiency.
AI workloads have evolved beyond large-scale pre-training. Today, they encompass fine-tuning, reinforcement learning (RL), synthetic data generation, evaluation pipelines, and more. Fairwater is built to support this full lifecycle:
Max density: Fairwater’s two-story design and liquid cooling system lets us place racks in three dimensions and pack them with GPUs as densely as possible, minimizing cable runs and improving latency and effective bandwidth.
Fleet: Each Fairwater DC can integrate hundreds of thousands of the latest NVIDIA GPUs into a single coherent cluster. This provides flexible infra that can support the full spectrum of workloads, and ensure no GPU is left unnecessarily idle.
And that’s on top of the more than 100,000 GB300s coming online this quarter alone for inference across the rest of our fleet. For us, it’s all about turning every gigawatt into the maximum number of useful tokens. Not every GW is created equal!
Planet-scale: Every Fairwater DC will connect through our continent-spanning AI WAN to prior generations of AI supercomputers, forming a truly fungible pool of compute. This enables developers to scale beyond the capacity of a single site and dynamically land workloads on the right infra for their needs.
Together, these innovations let us bring together different generations of silicon and AI systems across DCs and geos into a single elastic system that scales seamlessly across training and inference workloads
And this elastic AI capacity is all available alongside all the other cloud services (compute, storage, databases, app services) that AI agents and workloads need.
This is what we mean when we talk about building a fungible fleet – a single, unified platform that pushes the limits of performance per watt and per dollar.
Read more: blogs.microsoft.com/blog/202…
Vaultic Ventures retweeted
🔥 It's here: OpenFold3 is now live.
THE open-source foundation model for predicting 3D structures of proteins, nucleic acids & small molecules. This is where the future of drug discovery and biomolecular AI lives.
Built by @open_fold. Hosted on @huggingface.
👇 more
Vaultic Ventures retweeted
For the first time, a humanoid robot can fold laundry using a neural net
We made no changes to the Helix architecture, only new data
