Christian Catalini
@ccatalini
Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer @Lightspark. Founder @MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. Previously: Co-Creator of ≋ Diem / Libra.
1/ AI doesn’t need a sci-fi upgrade to upend the economy—current models, and the cheaper, more capable versions already in the pipeline, are set to disrupt nearly every corner of the labor market.
4/ But the cornerstone of our advantage is our highly plastic, densely wired prefrontal cortex. This neural command center lets us spin endless "what-ifs," rehearse counterfactual futures, and pivot strategy the instant conditions shift.
Grok 4’s leap forward confronts us yet again with the inescapable power of exponential growth. 🤯😱
16/ Stack those three ingredients and you get a general-purpose automation engine. Two data trends now accelerate the flywheel. First, models can mint limitless synthetic examples—for instance, generating virtual "driving miles" that cover every oddball scenario, rather that…
Three scientists (Christian Catalini, Jane Wu, Kevin Zhang) have written a very interesting article in the Harvard Business Review whose views I share; a scientist wrote to me via email and talked to me about the article. The message: the potential danger for the labor market is…
1/ Humans are evolutionary generalists, selected to navigate half-drawn maps. We don’t merely survive unknown unknowns—we thrive on them, and that resilience is our defining edge.
Embrace chaos
26/ Some creative acts and discoveries amount to little more than clever recombinations of the familiar, but the truly ambitious hinge on our singular ability to envision genuinely new and complex counterfactual worlds.
10/ Back in the mid-2000s, @drfeifei saw that the field of computer vision was dealing with a bottleneck: algorithms were pixel-starved, ingesting too little visual data to reach human performance.
1/5 When thinking about what's to come, we looked back at ImageNet -- not just the herculean effort of Fei-Fei Li to collect the dataset, but the real stroke of genius: a leaderboard that defined a metric and let researchers race to win. paperswithcode.com/sota/image-cla…
2/ Over countless generations we fine-tuned our vocal cords and social brains until language emerged—opening the door to cumulative knowledge, abstract reasoning, and symbolic thought.
Stablecoins are the latest meme-stonk x.com/business/statu…
Stablecoin issuer Circle's stock has become a symbol of investor belief in the promise of tokenized dollars — and a live test of how much future is too much to price in, this early. Read more in the Bloomberg Crypto newsletter. bloomberg.com/news/newslette…