A key consideration for me is that earth-originating civilisation first spreading to other galaxies seems likely to be a lock-in, where if the values/organising structures of those early space missions are bad, the future seems quite bad in expectation to me.

And it seems likely that such space colonisation will become possible soon.

Three Claude Code skills I find helpful:

• Urgent-watch: allows me to close Slack and email, and have Claude run a loop in the background to check every 30 mins if there is anything time-sensitive that means I should exit deep work and reply to things.
• Gdoc2md: I work mainly in Google Docs, often with many comments, and the native ‘download as markdown’ feature loses the comments. So I have a skill that take a doc url and downloads it as a word file, which Claude can parse to extract the comments and format them as footnotes in a clean md file for other Claudes to read and edit.
• Memo: When I want Claude to do some macrostrategy research/writing, it reads a detailed summary of my org’s beliefs, values, plans, etc. The summary links to many more markdown files with detailed takes on relevant topics. Interestingly, telling Claude to read all the memos and then write something on a new topic produces worse results than just reading the summary and the few most relevant memos.

I'm thinking of AI-thesis hedge funds like VARA and SALP, but they are difficult to get access to without being very wealthy. My understanding is @Austin is considering setting up a DAF vehicle for people to get exposure to such funds, so I would recommend talking with him.

But I think expecting returns something like 50-100% p.a. would be reasonable, based on historic performance of these funds. As one intuition pump, suppose that AI and robotics and semiconductors and associated supply chains are about 3% of total capital today, and will grow to be the vast majority of capital after an intelligence explosion, then just being exposed to those industries gives ~30x returns over the coming ~decade, and it is likely possible to do better than this with more targeted bets.

But one might think that this is all lunacy and we should rely more on base rates and the efficient market hypothesis. Seems mistaken to me, but I respect that view too.

Nice!

1. Include the investment rate of return.

This seems like a pretty key thing to include given the huge rates of return seen thus far (and arguably likely to continue) for AI thesis investing.

cG made more AI policy grants than this in 2025! E.g. just from the >$1M bucket, there was also Oxford AI governance Initiative, Global Shield Global Catastrophic Risks Advocacy, Center for a New American Security, GovAI, Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, and maybe others I am missing!

whoops, thanks, fixed

Good point. According to this manifold market an IPO within the next year is ~75% likely.

Fun! (the url at the top points to the /birds rather than /music page by mistake)

Anthropic revenue is actually about $20B I believe.

Good point, that seems like a big risk! I expect the fraction of sentience that is (post)human or digital to be quite high, especially compared to today, in the intergalactic future. But improving values wrt wild animals seems important.