I joined @stripe in January to build a new philanthropic initiative with @nanransohoff. Today we’re announcing Intercept, a $500m innovation fund focused on radically reducing the burden of respiratory viruses.

I’ve spent the past decade investing in vaccines and drugs for infectious disease, and this is the most exciting thing I’ve ever been a part of. Thrilled to be working with @Stripe, @AnthropicAI, @TheFluLab, @FoundationOAI, @coeff_giving and individuals from Jane Street.

We've raised the capital and now it’s time to get to work.

My brilliant friend and former colleague Vidya is hiring for her team at @FoundationOAI. Go help deploy an unprecedented level of resources towards addressing high burden diseases!
openaifoundation.org/careers/progra…

GiveWell aims to direct $2.5B+ in new malaria funding from 2027–2032. Malaria still kills around 600k people each year.

We’re exploring many strategies, including the Malaria Impact Accelerator, a proposed partnership with @GlobalFund. Learn more: bit.ly/4yNkD60

We’ve expanded our AI for Science program beyond individual teams to support some of the world’s leading scientific foundations, institutions, and research groups. anthropic.com/news/ai-for-sc…

Exciting updates on gene editing support from the U.S. Government!

We didn’t plan this… but just a few hours after our conference call outlining Beam’s vision to deliver increasingly customized genetic correction therapies to patients, even more news hit

incredible work. im in awe of anthropic’s pace, and am grateful for the transparency of process+results

i went through 3 out of the 5 case studies they released and wrote down my thoughts on each. in italics are LLM-summarizations for the cases for those who havent read them

I’m hiring an NYC-based Managing Editor for @stripepress. The ideal person for this role has substantial editorial experience at a publishing imprint or another publication and is fluent in our universe of ideas, but ideally isn’t my (or our) ideological twin.

Stripe Press is a small team with an unusual amount of autonomy. Right now we’re obsessively focused on the future: expanding our catalogue, rethinking our assumptions about the kinds of books we publish (fiction!?), and thinking about how to connect our readers w/ one another beyond the pop-ups we’ve been hosting since 2022.

Hoping to meet a lot of brilliant people who love books and are excited about building a world-class publishing institution: stripe.com/careers/listin…

Today we’re announcing the $600M Formation Bio Drug Development Accelerator Fund.

@lintaho and I started @formationbio because we believed the biggest bottleneck in bringing new medicines to patients wasn’t drug discovery, but drug development.

As AI dramatically accelerates eck is only becoming more acute. Without the capital and capacity to advance promising drugs through clinical trials, much of that progress won’t translate into medicines for patients.

Our new Fund brings together dedicated capital, drug development expertise, and AI-powered development capabilities to acquire promising drugs and advance them through the clinic.

@VitalikButerin I assume you know about @nanransohoff and the Intercept project! They're our best hope

interceptfund.com

@VitalikButerin This is why we started interceptfund.com.

For anyone getting into biology, please consider taking airborne disease resistance more seriously.

It's a super important area of medicine that is a huge cause of death and sickness but easily gets forgotten. We're likely to get many more airborne plagues in the future due to the combination of not just extremely dense and interconnected society (including city and farm animals), but also accidents from bio research and offensive biotech (both from random people and from secret government programs that can easily get themselves exempted from safety restrictions), all enhanced by powerful AI.

Right now, this area is getting way less love than longevity research (which continues to be super important!), but it's an area where there are lots of unclaimed wins that we know exactly how to do (but are not yet doing) with present-day tech:

* early detection
* passive universal testing
* filtration/ventilation/UVC
* better vaccines (including making them open source and open science)
* cryptography to make all of the above privacy-preserving

We can have China-level pandemic resistance with Sweden-level limited intrusion into people's lives, and then go even further. We just have to actually do the work for it.

Happy to announce I built a Greek/English reader site with all the surviving plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, & Aristophanes.
Multiple translations for each play; click to parse & define for any Greek word; full Greek & English search.
greekdrama.johnhboyer.com

Announcing Ikigai Grants:

Microgrants give early-stage, bootstrapped talent capital. But that’s not enough.

I’ve watched too many grantees become perpetual microgrant chasers, wasting time applying to one $5k grant after another. Worse, most programs encourage this by funding le doing cool things,” with no real conviction behind it.

I wouldn’t be here without patronage from @tylercowen & @jposhaughnessy. But looking back, the mentors & community were worth much more than the money.

So I built the program I always wished existed:
- $50k total, avg. $5k check
- Matched with mentors & community across @RenPhilanthropy , Fulcrum Science, and my personal network of founders, fund leads, investors & scientists.

Cohort 1 backs emerging talent in areas I believe are deeply underfunded and undervalued. Every application is reviewed by me.

Ikigai Grants is a program of @RenPhilanthropy, with support from Fulcrum Science. Advised by many wonderful friends & colleagues including: @AshleyNAbel @RaianyRomanni @NeuroStats Bonnie EJ Maven @idatin @ashleyz413 @JackScannell13

Apply by Nov 9th, 9a PST:
alexaraki.xyz/ikigai

Today, we’re announcing an open call for guest investigators in life sciences. Over 8–12 weeks, guest investigators will work directly with my team and other Anthropic researchers to produce analyses and tools for their work. We’ll run our models and harnesses, at no cost to them. We’ll work together to open-source the resulting data, artifacts, and code, and write preprints about what we find.

We want humans to remain at the center of scientific discovery, deciding what questions to pursue, and how to pursue them. Those decisions are not ours to make alone. This open call is part of our ongoing efforts at Anthropic to support researchers and accelerate scientific discovery.

I’m looking for principal investigators and their research groups at academic institutions, nonprofits, or government labs, working in causal human biology, structural and computational molecular biology, medicinal chemistry, drug discovery, and clinical science.

Applications are open for about 14 days: anthropic.com/news/open-call…

And now you can preorder the NOMAD LETTERS (out December 1!): press.stripe.com/nomad-letters

For years these letters have circulated (at first, unofficially) among investors, acquiring a devoted readership. We wanted to give them a permanent home in print.

Nick and his partner Qais raordinary. The letters are the account of how they got there, featuring everything from studying Amazon and Costco (Nomad’s defining investments)—to visiting cement plants in Zimbabwe, and beyond.

They’re candid about their mistakes and curious about the forces that shape investors’ behavior: incentives, psychology, and the wisdom (or foolishness!) of the crowd.

Since closing the fund, they’ve devoted their time to philanthropy, a journey Nick recounts in the lovely foreword he wrote for this edition.

I’m thrilled to continue adding to the investing corner of our catalogue, and I can’t think of a better work to follow Poor Charlie’s Almanack. ❣️

Some big personal news: I'm moving to join Works in Progress as executive editor, starting next month. I have been hoping for an opportunity to work with @bswud and @s8mb for more than a decade, and I'm incredibly excited to finally have one.

WIP is expanding on every front right now. We'll soon begin coverage of business and finance, as well as putting out more reported features. To that end, we'll be hiring more writers and reporters in the year to come. I'm planning to remain based in the US to help build out our presence here.

The print edition of WIP has existed for less than 12 months, but sometime in the next week or so we will reach our 10,000th paying print subscriber. It's a group that now includes people who've been at the highest echelons of government and who run the world's biggest public companies. We’re already on track to 3x that number next year. We'll be in store at Barnes & Noble, Hudson News and independent newsagents next week too.

I think WIP is providing something that people are craving from physical media right now: fewer, extremely well-crafted pieces in a beautifully designed form. Issues now feature an amazing group of columnists, including Tyler Cowen, Dan Wang and Stephen Kotkin. Each edition is better than the last.

You'll see us in more and more places next year too. In January, our new weekly documentary films will launch on YouTube. We're expanding into the events space, with a new series in North America. The sky is the limit from here on out.

I had a nice "anti-debate" with @KelseyTuoc last week on whether we would have explosive economic growth from AI in the next five years. I say this is unlikely.

One of the things I think is most useful in these discussions is supplying an "error theory" of the other side. What is it specifically that they get wrong that leads them astray?

I think the error theory of people expecting an imminent economic boom is thinking about production in terms of tasks rather than theory of the firm.

The intuition I ascribe to most of the bulls is that if we can do X percent of tasks Y percent more productively, output should go up by X percent times Y percent. Sure, there could be some unspecified "friction" or "inertia" so the effect isn't instantaneous, but that is what equilibrium looks like.

Instead, I start from the observation that most of GDP is produced by companies, and particularly large companies. How these companies actually work is an important factor in the speed of production gains from powerful AI.

My assumptions:

* Most big companies (say, Fortune 500) are a giant tangle of complementarities. Think about Leontief production functions, but with many inputs, many of which are often intangible, stacked many layers deep.
* The deep complementarity means that you generally cannot increase the output of one unit or division and increase the output of the firm.
* The complexity of the giant tangle means that the company does not actually know its own production function. This is a radical assumption but I think it is realistic. Just as Leonard Read and Milton Friedman said no single person knows how to make a pencil, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company doesn't really know how his company works, no matter how much confidence he portrays publicly. The standard Coasian story is that the firm is "an island of central planning" but instead, I think giant firms are far more organic and far less rational than this implies. Every big, successful company is a minor miracle, and it is rare for CEOs to completely overhaul their main line of business because they know on some level they don't know how it works.
* Middle management is not a great answer to how firms will overhaul themselves because authority is ambiguous, they lack insight into the whole-firm context, and they put themselves at risk if something goes wrong.

Consequently, I think existing big companies are very unlikely to, say, lay off 80% of their employees and replace them with AI. Companies struggle with much more minor transitions, such as legacy US automakers trying to compete with Tesla.

I think that most big companies simply won't overhaul their production systems in response to powerful AI. They will make changes at the margins but they won't make the kinds of changes the bulls expect.

This means that a big part of the pathway by which powerful AI could generate economic growth is from new, AI-native firms. These will eventually drive some growth, but note that for many non-software products, scaling production and grabbing market share take time.

An exciting fact is that we will soon find out whether I'm wrong. I have been awaiting explosive economic growth for nearly 40 years, since I was a second-grader. I would be delighted to be wrong.

We’re delighted to announce that the one and only @tylercowen, our internet writing sensei, is joining Works in Progress as a regular contributor.

worksinprogress.co/issue/come-to-…

His first column is about Brazilian food, and like everything Tyler writes, it’s packed with hidden gems that make it much more than a food story.

Some of the nicest tidbits: on her first trip to Brazil, his daughter declared she had “never had a banana before” – this is how good Brazilian bananas are, apparently.
And Tyler and a well-traveled friend from Modena (of all places) agreed that Brazil is the third-best country in the world for Italian food, behind only Italy and Japan. If an Italian says that, we’d better trust him!

But as always with Tyler, he manages to draw larger lessons from apparently mundane and object-level stories. So, in a short read, we learn much more than just the fact that Brazilian food is really good.

First, food can be seen as a progress story. Brazil’s agricultural yields rival, and sometimes beat, those of the US, even though Brazil is a much poorer country. Abundant fertile land, high productivity, and short supply chains make ingredients plentiful and fresh. Tyler’s regret is that the rest of Brazil’s economy hasn’t embraced technology the way its food sector has.

We also learn how immigration shapes Brazilian cuisine. Brazil has roughly 2 million citizens of Japanese descent, which makes it arguably the best place outside Japan for Japanese food. Tyler had a 15-course omakase at a Michelin-starred São Paulo restaurant for $110, booked just half an hour ahead. Brazil is also home to about 30 million people of Italian descent, the largest Italian diaspora in the world, which goes a long way to explain why his Italian friend was so satisfied with the food.

The whole column is a delight, so do read it in full!

How does machine intelligence change how we should think about biodefense?

Looking forward to speaking tomorrow on this at the @OpenAI forum, and especially feeling grateful to be in conversation with the other panelists!

1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness.
New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.648… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)