To live well is to contribute

I've come to realize even though to exist is enough, meaning comes from earnest contribution to the world. It's difficult to feel motivated about your life's work if there isn't a philosophy grounding it. As Brendan McCord asks in his essay, the Philosopher-Builder: What should I build for?

Needless to say, if it doesn't feel exhilarating to work on the problem you chose most days, maybe you shouldn't work on it regardless of its impact. There's plenty of worthwhile problems, and work should be fun with people you feel inspired by!

We're entering a strange time where machines will be cognitively and physically more capable than humans, and as a result, we need to re-think our place in the world, and abolish stale identities around our work. This is, however, also the time to work on the hardest and most ambitious challenges, to name a few: curing out of reach diseases, scaling renewable energy, and personalized education to every human. It is profound how you can learn and become sophisticated in any field in a compressed amount of time with models like Opus 4.7. This is the time for autodidacts!

What should I build for?

Inspired by the intelligence curse, a cause that feels urgent to me is to amplify people instead of automating them out of the economy. I don't trust that institutions, public or private, will distribute the wealth generated fairly, and so we should take this problem personally and do something about it.

One path is to own your data, models, and compute. Open-source models will continue to get better, and eventually, converge in capability and arguably in safety with their closed counterparts. We're seeing examples of this path today: nations and enterprises are building their own models and clusters instead of outsourcing to Anthropic and OpenAI, as this risks their relevance in the long run. The enduring play is to own the full stack of intelligence.

More on how I'm approaching this soon. Feel free to reach out if any of this resonates!

Cheers :)