The ugly truth about France and some of the other European countries currently in turmoil - and which none of the politicians want to admit because it'd be political suicide - is that you can't solve the problem by going after immigrants (as the right asserts) or the rich (as the left asserts), but you could solve it by going after the old. One extraordinary statistic for you: people over 60 in France, a quarter of the population, own 60% of France's wealth, non-financial and financial (ofce.fr/pdf/revue/2025/3-192…). And here is another crazy statistic: that same quarter of the population, those above 60, receive nearly two-thirds of all social spending by the French government (previssima.fr/actualite/prot…) - which is famously among the highest in the world (France's government spending is an insane 57.3% of GDP). Last statistic: they make up about 40% of voters because they're a third of registered voters (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/266…), and they turn out far more than anyone else (franceinfo.fr/elections/sond…). Put our 3 statistics together and there's almost a bit of an apartheid situation here: the old own most of the country's wealth, collect most of the social spending and have the political power to keep it that way. Which makes them a de-facto rentier class, living off assets and transfers paid for by younger generations. And, of course, at the risk of stating a truism, the future is built by the young. Yet France keeps effectively taking money away from them to give it to those whose working lives are already behind them - and need the money far less since they already own the country's wealth. What about inheritance, I hear you ask? That's the funniest/saddest aspect: given that life expectancy has kept rising, the French now inherit a home at 54 on average. The most common case is someone in their 80s leaving it to heirs in their 50s, in effect the very old transferring wealth to the about-to-be old (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fic…). You can add this to our earlier apartheid statement: on top of all the rest, even when the old finally let go of their wealth, it stays within their own "camp". That's my personal situation, incidentally: I'm 42, my father is 71 and he is starting to look at ways to pass things on to me and my siblings, when our professional lives are already well settled, so it'll arrive when it changes things the least, which is pretty much the French system in a nutshell. Now, I get that there'd be some unfairness in going after them: they paid into the system their entire working lives, playing by the rules of a social contract that told them if they paid up they'd collect at the end. Changing the rules now means breaking that promise, which is admittedly unfair. But there's no magic wealth tree in any society: you can only take it where it is. That's the way most major societal transformations end up happening. They're often triggered by a catastrophic event (the so-called "four horsemen": mass-mobilisation war, revolution, state collapse, plague) BUT what really drives change is a transfer: wealth gets pried from the privileged class who've been sitting on it and handed to those who'll build what comes next. So, in theory and in an ideal world, you can do without the catastrophic event and directly proceed with the transfer... The fact that in France, and elsewhere in Europe, it's the youth protesting is probably no coincidence - even though they don't frame it as a generational fight. And even though, cruel irony, the left politicians many of them march behind promise to bring the retirement age back to 60 (lcp.fr/actualites/legislativ…), which would make the situation even worse. Let's say they understand intuitively that the system is stacked against them, even if they haven't yet figured out how. And politicians are obviously doing what politicians do, meaning pandering to the people who actually vote, while pointing the young towards easier - and politically convenient - scapegoats. To be clear I'm not saying it's the only problem in France, VERY far from it. I'm also not saying that all old people in France live a lavish lifestyle at the expense of younger generations: there are also plenty of very poor retirees who, if anything, would deserve more. What I am saying is that it's probably the biggest elephant in the room: everyone can see it, nobody dares mention it - no politician, from any side, wants to run on cutting grandma's pension - and it makes every other problem harder to fix.

马斯克在聊到超级智能到底会不会统治人类时，用短短 42 秒，彻底推翻了所有人看了几十年的科幻电影设定， 他说：我们根本不配被统治。 很多人对超级智能的终极恐惧，是终结者、黑客帝国，或者被一个冷酷的机器独裁者关进赛博牢笼里发号施令。 但马斯克点破了一个极度刺骨、但也极度通透的现实： 在任何一个智慧悬殊的系统里，统治本身就是一种毫无价值的高能耗浪费。 面对一个比人类聪明几千倍、甚至几百万倍的超级智能，我们妄想去控制它、给它立规矩，无异于痴人说梦。 但它反过来也不会对统治人类产生哪怕一秒钟的兴趣。 他拿人类和黑猩猩打了个极度清醒的比方： 人类比黑猩猩聪明得多，但我们今天会专门制定一套复杂的法律，去丛林里事无巨细地管理每一只黑猩猩吗？ 不会。 我们基本是随它们去，在边上划一道保护区，只要它们不妨碍现代文明的扩张，人类甚至连看都懒得看它们一眼。 统治的前提，是双方还在同一个能力维度上，需要靠权力来分配稀缺资源。 当智力差距被拉大到百万倍的断层时，人类社会的金钱、领土、政治和意识形态，在超级智能眼里连微尘都算不上。 它有它自己要去探索的星辰大海和底层物理，根本不屑于在泥潭里当猴王。 人类未来真正的风险，从来不是被恶意统治，而是被系统性无视。 就像人类修高速公路穿过森林时，铲平一个蚁穴从来不是出于仇恨，只是因为那条路刚好要从那里经过。 所以，我们需要放下做宇宙主角的虚荣心，未来的超级智能既不会恨你，也不会爱管你，如何证明自己不是那条高速公路下的蚁穴，才是人类唯一要思考的课题。

Researchers connected a living plant to a robot.. and it can now talks, walks, and knows what it wants. They call it “PlantBot” They took a living plant and fused it with a mobile robotic body. To connect them, they used a decentralized network of LLMs to act as the central nervous system. Here is the genius of it: Biological organisms and machines operate on entirely different planes. Historically, bridging them required rigid, low-level analog signal mapping. This paper entirely abandons that approach. Instead of hard-coding signals, the system translates everything, soil moisture, pH levels, temperature, and visual data, directly into natural language. The plant doesn’t just output data. It uses LLMs to "talk" to its robotic body. The architecture is wild: • A network of AI agents operates asynchronously to handle vision, sensing, and movement. • Multi-channel probes read the plant's health, while LiDAR and cameras scan the room. • The LLM translates these biological needs into physical actions in real-time. • The plant actually interacts with humans and navigates the world as a cohesive, autonomous entity. The LLM is no longer just a chatbot. It is a biological-mechanical translator. By mediating communication through natural language, they gave a houseplant autonomous agency in the physical world. We’ve been obsessing over AIs trapped in servers or humanoid robots mimicking people. We completely missed the possibility that AI might become the connective tissue bridging organic life and machines. The next era of artificial life won’t just be silicon. It’s going to be a hybrid.

If we take the view that power becomes the ultimate bottleneck, the capex optimization constraint shifts to the one input China has in greater abundance vs US (who has relatively more chips) Then if you take the view that global token spend increasingly flows to cheap power and open weights, spot market is likely where China’s marginal impact would show up first via token dumping, esp if the future of work is mostly inference based not training (which also requires excess capacity with lower utilization rates) So the compute forward curve actually becomes an epic industrial duration battle where China competes at the front end and the US holds the long end. The question then becomes who is the dog and who is the tail, and which strategic advantage will roll down the curve faster- chips or power? I think anyone who understands the leverage of depreciation knows the answer. In other words this is a warning to US policymakers: the long end of the compute curve was never really about contracted chips security. It’s about energized megawatts and that’s basically the one duration the US is shortest vs its biggest geopolitical rival

Finally found some time to test Grok Bot. I asked it How could cheap access to space, asteroids in our Solar System, and the Sun’s energy change the world? Then I took the output and used Opus for some finishing touches, (mostly changing the voice and adding some text effects). I like the result. I'll probably use this combo for future videos. Two AIs working together produce more impressive videos than each of them alone.

One model, used by just a few scientists, and look at what we've already achieved: New counterexamples to a nearly 60 year old plasma physics conjecture. Five novel, lab verified enzymes designed in hours. A genetic rearrangement that routine software had missed for years. Nearly doubled quantum error decoding throughput and over 100x lower spacetime costs for a key quantum subroutine. and we’re so early....Imagine the pace of progress in 2027...

Yup

Warhound, a defense‑tech startup founded by Palmer Luckey and Ben Lamm, has raised $200 million in seed funding to genetically engineer war dogs for the U.S. military. Lamm is responsible for the de-extinction of the dire wolf which died out ~10,000 years ago. Warhound will find top dogs and then biobank their genetic material before cloning the proven dogs. The company will take the cell lines for top breeds like Belgian Malinois and German Shepherd before editing the genes to make the dogs perform better and improve “things like speed and agility or enhance olfactory sensors for bomb sniffing and whatnot.” Luckey’s Anduril will supply the dogs with advanced body armor, ear coverings, and other military technology like EagleEye, an artificial intelligence military helmet. Anduril is also reportedly working with META on battlefield augmented reality eyewear. Lamm says the genetically modified dogs with advanced equipment will not only make the dogs safer, but will also make the human handlers safer. The first Warhound puppies will reportedly soon be cloned and incubated and will be born in early 2027 and then will begin training.

Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10. Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years. Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.

Justin is building an incredible company that will let us speak with plants. What a beautiful sci-fi technology. This totally changes agriculture, horticulture and so many areas of plant science. I’m so excited to see what they build.

I’ve spent a few days thinking about the Tesla Roadster reveal and landed somewhere I haven’t seen much discussion. I’m neither a Tesla fanboy nor a Tesla hater. And I couldn’t care less whether what we saw technically qualifies as a flying car. Three takeaways: (1) The risk of that live demonstration going horribly wrong was real. Almost no CEO would willingly expose their company to that kind of public humiliation for a product with so little financial upside. Elon did. (2) That willingness to attempt the seemingly impossible is what makes Tesla special. It’s also arguably Elon’s greatest contribution to America. He’s helped bring back something we’ve lost. The American spirit of chasing big scary ideas that most people think are impossible. That mindset is spreading across a new generation of founders and its long term impact on America’s future could dwarf anything Tesla ever sells. I think this is deeply underappreciated. (3) Can we just acknowledge how insanely cool that moment was? We’ve reached a strange place culturally where even extraordinary feats of human ingenuity immediately become arguments about why they don’t count. Not everything needs to be a debate. Sometimes we should just be able to stand back together and marvel at what humans are capable of. I’ve been both bullish and critical of Tesla’s ambitions over the years. But watching Elon and his team push the boundaries of what’s possible reminds me why I’m glad we have him. Whether the Roadster ever makes Tesla a dollar or impacts $TSLA stock price is almost beside the point. We need more people willing to risk failure in pursuit of things the rest of us think are impossible. Because when they succeed we all win.

Holy shit y’all are not ready for tonight’s Tesla Roadster demonstration. There is a massive ramp 😂

Old friends are the best friends. Jensen rocks. The Star Mind computer being co-engineered by SpaceX and Nvidia is far better than almost anyone expects and will reach volume production next year. Working with the incredibly talented Nvidia engineering team is pure joy!