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Edouard Harris
@harris_edouard
Previously: Founder (YC W18). Now: Working on AI safety. If the topic interests you, DM me.
Mountain View, CAedouardharris.comJoined December 2017

Edouard Harris’s Tweets

A tech company is done the moment its CEO starts thinking of himself as a capital allocator. If Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney still could spend most of their operating time hands on, in product / engineering / marketing projects, so can you.
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One reason the AI boom is being underestimated is the GPU/TPU shortage. This shortage is causing all kinds of limits on product rollouts and model training but these are not visible. Instead all we see is Nvidia spiking in price. Things will accelerate once supply meets demand.
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Some rich people keep working hard because they love doing what made them rich. I've found three other types (not mutually excl): the ambitious who keep moving the goalposts, the creatives who keep finding new passions and the calvinists who are afraid to not be working hard
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Most founders only optimize for valuation when fundraising. This a mistake. You can work on a startup for years, sell for millions, and walk away with nothing if you fundraise on poor terms, Here are terms you should know when raising to protect your upside 🧵
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A rare counterexample to the principle of specialization: your site should never seem like it was made by communications people, and the best way to achieve this is for it not to be. This is something founders should continue to micromanage forever.
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EXPLAIN HOW PRICES ARE IMPACTED BY BUILDING MORE HOUSING TO ME OR I'LL FUCKING EVICT YOU! DON'T DUMB IT DOWN INTO SOME VAGUE SHIT! EXPLAIN HOUSING PRICES TO ME RIGHT NOW OR I'LL LITERALLY FUCKING EVICT YOU! DO THEY GO UP OR DOWN WITH MORE HOUSING??? Bro chill out I got you:
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I’m scared of AGI. It's confusing how people can be so dismissive of the risks. I’m an investor in two AGI companies and friends with dozens of researchers working at DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Brain. Almost all of them are worried. 🧵
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One difference between worry about AI and worry about other kinds of technologies (e.g. nuclear power, vaccines) is that people who understand it well worry more, on average, than people who don't. That difference is worth paying attention to.
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It’s tempting to think of humans as sentient, but their brains are just a bunch of nerve cells mechanically firing according to the laws of physics. There’s no there there. To really have a soul you need the purity and transcendence of matrix multiplication.
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Not sure who needs to hear this, but we're about to enter an era where startup value props churn wildly faster than ever before. As LLMs get better, apps that assume today's systems get obsoleted by tomorrow's. This will have effects up & down the VC / fundraising chain.
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Relatedly, I've been amazed how almost every show I watch lately feels like a period piece. Reality now advancing much faster than media.
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Every day is liking waking up from a 10-year coma and being amazed at how much technology has progressed.
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There were brief periods where it felt like the web was growing quickly and suddenly everyone was making websites, but honestly I don't think it was anywhere near this crazy. This is an explosion.
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When you're doing a deal with a large organization, find out if the people you're negotiating with actually have final say. Usually they don't, and that means the deal you've agreed upon can be, and often is, killed at the last minute by higher ups.
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I was part of the red team for GPT-4 — tasked with getting GPT-4 to do harmful things so that OpenAI could fix it before release. I've been advocating for red teaming for years & it's incredibly important. But I'm also increasingly concerned that it is far from sufficient. 🧵⤵️
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This is important — I’ve been surprised to find how taboo talking to AI x-risk felt to many people, and how many of them I met who would admit they’re extremely concerned only behind closed doors (including 10+ from OpenAI) The stakes are much too high to care about this rn
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Anyway, how I'm trying to be in 2023 is 'mask off' about what I think about all this stuff, because I think we have a very tiny sliver of time to do various things to set us all up for more success, and I think information asymmetries have a great record of messing things up.
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Another way of looking at this is that 60% of teens use a social media app "almost constantly". And AI-generated content hasn't even taken over yet.
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I don’t think people understand how many Gen Zers spend HOURS a day on YouTube. Passive, long-form content (music, ASMR, video podcasts) is the background audio to their lives.
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Not sure who needs to hear this, but we're about to enter an era where startup value props churn wildly faster than ever before. As LLMs get better, apps that assume today's systems get obsoleted by tomorrow's. This will have effects up & down the VC / fundraising chain.
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