What have we learned about AI in business that's relevant? And what I what I what I'm pretty certain is going to affect our culture and in philosophy which I was once going to be my metier and I realized should not be for lots of reasons including most importantly I thought it was more important to actually do things but it one of the things people forget about philosophy is the core concepts are actually downstream from things that were built in the world. modern architecture led to modern philosophy.
Postmodern architecture led to postmodern philosophy. And there's a weird way in which I think a lot of the trends that look inscrutable to us are actually downstream of tech and culture and are particularly pronounced in this culture which is the only culture that really really matters in AI. It's from chips and what we call ontology to large language models uh to the talent to the venture backing to the understanding of how to organize the talent.
they're in one country and this our country and this does not make sense because the it would have could have made sense in other trends but actually the mathematical basis of large language models started in in uh in Germany it was lineness's idea of how to do probability and then moved through France and the best mathematicians in the world are mostly in France and in Russia and so what was it and what is it about what's happening that is affecting things that look very odd. Why do um Ivy League trained humanities, highly privileged people vote against their interest seemingly to elect political figures with no experience and who clearly why are they misaligned with their own interests would be a question. And then why is it in America?
And I want to just start with the most obvious obvious point that is so obvious we we forget that the rights we have in this country are inaliable and they are given to us by God is if you compare this to say the German constitution which I wrote down the same it's where we talk about endowed by their creator with certain unalable rights the German con the German version which is translate roughly as a cons conscience of his responsibility before God. So not from God and mankind inspired by the will of an equal member it to be part of this is rough translation united to Europe and to contribute to world peace. Okay.
So we have these rights that are incorporated in our first and second and in our fourth amendment that aren't given to us by humans. They're given to us by a higher power. That's very very important in understanding when you look at businesses as an example.
Some businesses that look that are five years appeal to be 20 years old. Some businesses, you know, we have Rupert Murdoch here who seems to be getting younger every year. Every year.
Uh I've known you for a long time. Why is that? The principle and then you have this so you have this revolution.
It's happening in in a country which at least constitutionally obviously not historically is much much older than Europe. Is Europe United Europe is only it's under 30 years old and it's still not clear what it is really. You have a country which should not have been the leader of what matters in the world but is the leader in the world and then we have a very big moral problem and the basis of most humanity human rights historically philosophically legally except for in America have been based on our sec basically superior cognitive capacities and you know as Huntington once famously said we believe in the west that our values are superior the non-West understands it's our or it's our ability organized violence, which is an an intellectual and technological endeavor.
And that's the thing that has made us at the end of the day be able to be superior over nonhuman life forms. With large language models and AI, you actually have the first time where we how do we justify our obvious superiority, not just as a culture, but as a species visav something that may be able to do cognitive things that we can't do. And we are the lone country that has the basis for this.
Our rights are not given to us by our intellectual superiority. They're not given to us by consensus built in Germany or in the United Kingdom. They're not built to dedicate to world peace, although that would be nice.
They're given to us by our right that we were born here as Americans. And those rights are indelible. This is a very big distinction and it's one that we neglect and do not talk about and for lots of reasons many in the valley may not be interested in talking about.
And then there's and then what why are these so important first of all? So obviously we have our rights visa v the machine and and I think and then you also have what does it mean to be in a world where you have very high-end labor being exceedingly valuable formally high-end labor meaning you studied humanities and you would be working in a 501c3 dedicated United Nations not being objectively valuable I don't mean morally most of us here would look at scans at that as being misaligned with what they're saying but even if you don't view it that way. The reality is a large language model can do all of that work and if it's an ontology, we can do it much, much better.
So, it's objectively not valuable. What is valuable is workingass vocationally trained people with specific knowledge. And here I would see a I see a tethering between the specificity of America, that we have a constitution given to us by God, that we believe in higher principles, that we defend them if we need to with our own guns, with our own free speech, and with our own rights of privacy, and the specific things that create value in the world now, meaning specific knowledge of how to build something, how to target something, how to protect data, how to be a nurse or a doctor.
These skills can be very levered and excruciatingly important. So you have a constitutional and moral tethering of exactly what you would need in one specific culture and that's this culture. But you're going to have a lot of turbulence because we're now moving from people who believe they deserved empathy.
And this is when I think the biggest tensions, one of the very radical things about Palanteer that our enemies do not believe. We at Palunteer have maximal empathy for Americans, for the right of Americans to be free and for men, men men and women that actually do work and our society. If you look at any professions, what you'll see, we read the law.
So somehow the law will not allow us to protect Americans who are being murdered by fentanyl. But more than more Americans have died of fentanyl than have died in any war since World War II. If those were Stanford grads or Cornell grads, you can bet your last dollar the areodite uh jurisdictions would read the law so that you could stop that.
But they're not. They're working class. They're mostly male.
They're mostly white and mostly people don't care. And we have to change that when things go wrong because those people know that no one cares about them. That's also our fault.
Like not anyone in this room, but like we don't show empathy. If you look at if you look at for example the way analysts more neutrally do models they love the people they like it shows up downstream in the model that's why pound was undervalued we were undervalued and misunderstood because we were doing radical crazy stuff they didn't like if you look all across the world and what you're seeing go on in America now is an enormous shift towards we have to actually look at where the values created and have empathy with people who really deserve it and those people have not gotten enough empathy And technology is about to change that. And it's going to change everything politically because it is actually real.
The worker, the person on the front, the people that write the scripts that protect us. All those projects you saw are being done by people with vocational training in the military. They're creating enormous value.
And they deserve the respect that they're are going to ask for and they're going to get and Palunteer and all of us are Palunteer are behind that. And that and I this just and and then conversely, how do you get a situation in this city where you just vote for someone who has no experience in doing what they're going to do? None.
Even like I grew up I view myself as classically progressive. I care. You know what classically progressive is?
The government has to work. You know what that means? You need the very best people.
Who are the people? They have experience running complicated organizations. They have ideas on how to run software.
They understand the complexity of the law. They enforce it. If you're really serious about making the things work for the worker, those are the people you vote for.
Those are the people that need to be in charge. And that's that's why a lot of these crazy things are actually very much explicable based on what is going on in AI and who's creating the value and how they create it. Then last maybe not least on the AI front, one of the reasons we are in a kind of a doomer AI circle is because you can only explain the promise of AI if you understand and embrace the superiority of America and its culture because there are dangers in AI but the reality is there's only two cultures that are going to win in the next year.
It's going to be US or China. the Europe. I spent half my life in Europe.
At this point, we when we talk about Europe, we do exactly the same thing as when we hear about educational programs in led by mayors or safety programs in the inner city. We just say that I really hope it works out. Please, and I want Europe to win, but we're on our own.
Of course, there are dangers in AI, and AI is also and will never be anything other than a dual use technology. But we must must embrace our ability to build it, our ability to own the chips, to own the software, build the large language models and run very very quickly. Because again to quote Huntington again, if we are not the ones controlling the violence, we will not be dictating the rule of law.
The things we hold precious in this culture, I would say embodied by our constitution and especially in our first four amendments, those things will not be the same if we are not the dominant technological culture in the world. And while we may have tons of disagreements on these things, we must the those are really the alternatives. And most of what we can do in my view to counter our adversaries is also to build the technology.
And then one of the lessons of Palanteer is no one's coming to defend you. You have to defend yourself. We used to live in a world where you could rely on experts to articulate our vision.
But who showed up to articulate our vision in this last election in my hometown, formerly hometown? Like we if we're waiting for people to articulate and fight for us, we are cooked. And you know, the people who disagree with us are like often better organized and better motivated.
And that's a huge problem we have to solve. Palunteerians, half of the reason we succeeded is we were just motivated and very organized and very meritocratic. Meritocracy is the most underestimated, powerful, revolutionary tool that exists in any enterprise ever.
And that means, you know, Sham is a great example. Sham was not everyone's cup of tea. He advanced because he for really two reasons.
He advanced because I thought he was going to be an incredible human being. And second, and I'll leave you with this because I saw him interacting with his brother and I was like, if he could love Palanteer half as much as he loves his brother, we are going to have the most important enterprise in the world. And like the capacity to identify and advance people on American the progressive party and the Democrats by people who do not believe in this and by the way to my Democratic friends here and whoever sees this that we must stand up.
One of the most important lessons in the west is if you do not fight and in as importantly if you accept the logic that you can never vote for somebody because of they have some sort of belief structure you disagree with you are empowering the radicals in your own party and they will control everything whether it's immigration in Germany which functionally controlled by people that still believe in chain migration because you can never do a coalition with the right or whether it's the Democratic party that is functionally being torn apart by people who believe in anti-progressive, anti-ameritocratic values as embodied by not having a border. No progressive ever has believed in an open border. None never has never existed because that undermines the value of workers and their labor.
And if you want to see what happens to a culture when you don't fight, look at there's who's standing up in my former party to say this is ridiculous. Who stood up in Germany to talk about migration? We cannot allow ourselves to become Europe.
We really have to fight and I'm I'm sure many of the in here are going to be involved in that. And Palanteer I think has been at the forefront of this and I'm most proud of the fact that we've been able to shift the culture to being in Silicon Valley away from being skeptical of America to being pro-America. The idea that you would give tools to give Americans an unfair advantage in the on the battlefield was viewed as heretical until recently.
Now it's viewed as common sense. the idea that we have we enforced meritocracy when we were getting sued by the DOJ for just basically just hiring the most qualified people. And if you do that and you succeed, you can actually change the way people think.
