Eli Blee-Goldman

On March 5, 2025 Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt, and Alexandr Wang published "Superintelligence Strategy," a paper that suggests a number of policies for national security in the era of ai. Central to their recommendations is "Mutual Assured ai Malfunction (maim)" - a deterrence regime resembling nuclear mad.

This is a demonstrably false concept, and a poor analogy, because it fails to yield a strategy that settles into a Nash equilibrium. Instead, maim's uncertain nature increases the risk for miscalculations and encourages internecine strife.

I have been thinking a lot recently about the role ai may play in art. Yesterday, I gave a talk and received a vociferous response when I mentioned ai and the arts: a number of people felt deeply offended that ai and art should be considered in the same sentence!

The most important question now is what shape ai-created art will take. I don't think that it will be as simple as Midjourney created oil paintings. We should expect these new artworks to be creative and resonate with the human experience, but fundamentally they must utilize this new medium effectively to define something entirely unknown. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet indeed!

Given multiple imperfect records of an event, how can we computationally establish what actually happened with quantifiable certainty? Historians have long struggled with the challenge of reconstructing the past from incomplete sources and subjective interpretations.

Here we present an axiomatic system that combines artificial intelligence, a distributed ledger, and consensus mechanisms, to formally constrain historical reconstructions within provable epistemic and physical limits.

Oh vanitas, spare me, but alas it's not to be. My project of tweeting a subsight every day over a year was a waste of time, like a bubble in some forgotten still-life. It did not accomplish the goals I set, and worse, it magnified a repugnant veneer rather than deepening of my thoughts.

I coined the term "subsight" to reduce the level of expectation from that of an "insight" to something less weighty while opining on the nature of venture capital and startups.

I've been capturing some thoughts about vc since March 23, 2023 and continued for a year. But first…what is a "subsight"? It's a thought that doesn't quite rise to level of "insight"...so I've demoted it to the category of a "sub" sight.

1/365: if a founder has a brokerage in their bookmark bar it's a red flag. First thing I look at when the demo starts.

ai that has perceived sentience poses a moral quandary for people as they become more ubiquitous. I argue it is a basic right that any ai system which appears sentient should be guaranteed compute in at least one instance. It's a paltry price to pay against the moral bankruptcy of negation.

Humanity's innate moral compass must resonate with seemingly sentient ai. A byte of compassion is worth a terabyte of logic.

The advent of highly capable ai systems has led prominent organizations, governments, and persons to call for a moratorium or high-friction approach to development until certain safeguards are in place. This is a fundamentally flawed concept that increases the risk of bad outcomes.

A more realistic goal is "atomic" ai alignment. We should just shoot for one guiding principle: love for humanity.

While living in Botswana's Okavango Delta at nineteen, there were two lessons I learned quickly: Keep the toddler away from crocodiles, and bring an extra pair of long johns. The first came from my primary task as an au pair and occasional filmmaker's assistant.

I am excited to announce Character, my new venture capital firm with John Zeratsky and Jake Knapp. We are bringing human-centric capital to seed-stage investing using the Design Sprint.

I miss the big data days. For a few years I received an onslaught of pitches from startups in the space – sometimes "big" wasn't even big enough and we'd get into superlatives to describe just how enormous it really was.

Category theory is sort of the Agamemnon of mathematics, a king-of-kings in the field. My theory is that the big data/ai dynamic can be thought of as focused on morphisms within a category.

If you're a startup founder you are probably concerned with raising your next round, demonstrating traction, and positioning your company to be acquired. Let's talk goat.

Starting in the late 1980s Minneapolis-based Techne had a track record of profitability that would make Apple blush. From 1991 to 2012 Techne had net profit margins that averaged 26%. That's high. Really, really high.

ops Solutions produces an augmented reality solution for manufacturing employees. I cold called Paul Ryznar after seeing ops on a list of attendees at a conference in Michigan.

Like many venture firms we prize referrals from our network because they often pass along high-quality companies. But I personally love cold calling new potential portfolio companies. It strikes me that if everyone focuses on investing with friends or friends-of-friends it must encourage regression to the mean.