Latest news with #PayPalMafia
Business Insider
4 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Trump's AI czar says UBI-style cash payments are 'not going to happen'
Americans probably won't be getting a universal basic income as long as President Donald Trump's AI czar has a say in the matter. David Sacks, the cofounder of Craft Ventures and a member of the so-called " PayPal Mafia," which includes Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, is now a top White House policy advisor for AI. It's an important role as rapid advances in AI bring about generational changes in how the world lives and works. The technology is already reshaping the job market, as chatbots like ChatGPT begin to do the work of entry-level employees. Those at the forefront of the AI revolution have long warned about the risk AI poses to jobs, and have called for a universal basic income to soften the blow. A UBI is a government program that distributes no-strings-attached checks to all residents to spend how they please. Numerous cities and states are already experimenting with its humble cousin, a guaranteed basic income, which distributes checks to specific populations in need. The idea has a long history, and support for these kinds of programs has skyrocketed at the local level in recent years. Any consideration of a basic income at the federal level, however, will likely have to wait. Sacks is not a fan. The AI czar said on X this week that such government "welfare" is a "fantasy." "The future of AI has become a Rorschach test where everyone sees what they want. The Left envisions a post-economic order in which people stop working and instead receive government benefits," Sacks wrote. "In other words, everyone on welfare. This is their fantasy; it's not going to happen." Although reports from recipients who participate in basic income programs are overwhelmingly positive, they have faced political pushback. Last year, Republicans in Arizona voted to ban basic income programs in the state, and similar opposition efforts have gained traction in Iowa, Texas, and South Dakota. Lawmakers in several states have argued that the checks increase reliance on the government and dissuade recipients from working. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman helped fund one of the largest basic income studies, which found, in part, that it encouraged recipients to work harder. Elon Musk, who until recently was the face of Trump's effort to reduce government spending, has said a basic income will likely play a role in future economies as AI continues to rapidly develop. Sacks' comments came as another prominent AI leader, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, called for not just a universal basic income, but a "universal high income" at SXSW in London this week. When asked about AI's impact on jobs, Hassabis said there would be a "huge amount of change," but that "new, even better" jobs could replace affected positions and boost productivity. "Beyond that, we may need things like universal high income or some way of distributing all the additional productivity that AI will produce in the economy," Hassabis said.
New York Times
29-03-2025
- Business
- New York Times
The Story of Crypto's Rise: Tangled, Confusing and Frustrating
A few years ago, I met up for coffee in Miami Beach with a person named Keith Rabois. Along with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Rabois is a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia — the group that took that company public in 2002 and went on to develop a series of seminal Silicon Valley businesses. The topic of Bitcoin came up, as it tended to do then. Rabois pointed out that PayPal's original vision had been similar. 'I still have T-shirts with the PayPal logo,' he said, 'and on the back: 'The New World Currency.'' He showed me a video of Thiel speaking in 1999, proposing a world of private currencies exchanged on cellphones, where governments would be forced to cede their monetary sovereignty. 'That was the goal of the company, to reinvent finance,' Rabois said wistfully. 'Turns out it was really hard.' Even in 1999, the notion of a digital currency that bypassed nation-states and financial institutions was not a novel one. It had been fermenting for years in an ecosystem of online listservs, Bay Area potlucks and cryptography circles, where a nexus of crypto-anarchists and eccentric programmers experimented with an idea that seemed to them inevitable. It had appeared in the science fiction of Neal Stephenson and in techno-libertarian polemics like William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson's 'The Sovereign Individual.' But creating one that actually worked was, indeed, really hard. Benjamin Wallace's 'The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto' is a new attempt to unmask the identity of the figure (or figures) who eventually did so, introducing Bitcoin in 2008 under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Wallace, a writer for New York magazine and Vanity Fair, is well suited to the task. His first article on Bitcoin appeared in Wired in 2011, only a few years into its existence. That year, he attended the first Bitcoin convention, in New York, where a small group of participants tried (and failed) to use crypto to pay for dinner. As the price of Bitcoin has skyrocketed in the intervening years (and as its primary use case has evolved from being a medium of exchange to a theoretical store of value), the Satoshi puzzle has continued to prove irresistible to journalists. It also represents a particular instance of something like reportorial quicksand, leading mostly to public embarrassment or, more often, a kind of hazy but impassable indeterminacy. Nothing is ever really proved; nobody is ever entirely ruled out. For their part, Bitcoin boosters largely view these investigations as something between dull and blasphemous, a faceless founder being more useful both to the decentralized vision of the protocol and to the quasi-religious dimension that has emerged around it. Anyone who has followed this story over the years will find this account to be, more or less, a survey of the usual suspects, if an entertaining one. Wallace spends a significant portion of the book, for instance, favoring the computer scientist Nick Szabo, a founder of the Bitcoin precursor BitGold and a longstanding subject of speculation. (The reporter Nathaniel Popper laid out the case for Szabo a decade ago in The New York Times.) Another portion is dedicated to the Australian pretender Craig Wright, whose saga has previously been told memorably and at great length by the novelist and London Review of Books contributor Andrew O'Hagan, Wright's erstwhile ghostwriter. Wallace draws up criteria for plausible candidates ranging from 'coding quirks' to 'emotional range.' He attempts both textual and code stylometry to see if Satoshi's identity can be sussed out via statistical analysis. Nearly 200 pages in, he is still spinning his wheels: 'I was making little headway in my own investigation and beginning to despair.' (A reader could be forgiven for feeling similarly.) When later he writes, 'I'd always wondered whether the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto might turn out to be more compelling than its resolution,' one begins to discern the familiar shape of a shaggy dog story. Most disappointing, perhaps, is that Wallace doesn't meaningfully delve into some of the more left-field prospects to gain prominence over the years. There is the Bitcoin 'lab leak' theory, for instance, in which Satoshi was a cryptology unit at the N.S.A. and Bitcoin an experiment that broke containment. Among other things, these theorists point to a 1996 paper published by the agency, 'How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash' — enough to make it no less absurd than certain other possibilities (that Nakamoto is actually Elon Musk, for instance, the first candidate examined in the book). If Wallace doesn't close the case, he is an engaging narrator, and his book serves as a useful introduction to one of the century's true riddles. It's a mystery that will only become more salient as the current administration explores the concept of a strategic Bitcoin reserve, impishly quoting the community's neo-'gold bug' ethos at White House crypto summits. Nevertheless, at least for the time being, a riddle is all it stubbornly remains.
Yahoo
26-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
With Trump win, Silicon Valley's right flank takes on Washington
One week into his second administration, Donald Trump has put technology at the forefront, featuring tech billionaires prominently at his inauguration and announcing major AI infrastructure deals from the White House. Looking beyond household names like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, here are several lesser-known tech figures also wielding significant influence: - David Sacks - Sacks, Trump's newly appointed AI and Crypto Czar, is an investor and cryptocurrency advocate who stood beside the president Thursday as he signed an executive order to deregulate that scandal-scarred industry. Like Musk, Sacks was born in South Africa and belongs to the "PayPal Mafia" -- early internet pioneers who became Silicon Valley power players. He co-hosts the All-In podcast, popular among conservative tech leaders, and recently co-organized a Trump fundraiser that introduced the president to cryptocurrency. Sacks is a vocal advocate for deregulation and has already seen the cancellation of an executive order from the administration of Trump's predecessor, Joe Biden, that set certain guardrails on AI technologies. - Peter Thiel - Thiel, who gave Sacks his start at PayPal and famously fired Musk as CEO of the company, has been a conservative force in Silicon Valley for three decades. The German-born investor, who spent part of his youth in southern Africa, first showed his right-wing stance at Stanford University before becoming an early Facebook investor and mentor to Zuckerberg. As a leading conservative intellectual in tech circles, Thiel has long advocated against what he sees as liberal overreach in higher education and government regulation. He has influenced a generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs through his writings and investments. While less directly involved in Trump's 2024 campaign than in 2016, Thiel's influence continues through his protege, Vice President JD Vance, whom he introduced to Trump. It also comes through his investments in defense contractors Palantir and Anduril, which are expected to expand their Pentagon footprint. A political animal, Thiel owns a stately mansion in the US capital Washington, where he threw an inauguration party on the eve of Trump's swearing-in. The guest list included Meta's Zuckerberg, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Vance. - Marc Andreessen - Born and raised in the US Midwest, Andreessen rose to prominence as founder of computer services company Netscape in the 1990s and has become an intense advocate for Trump, even if his support came late. Despite previously backing Democrats, Andreessen grew frustrated with the Biden administration's strict cryptocurrency regulations and has built an expansive lobbying war chest to reverse them. During the transition, he regularly visited Mar-a-Lago and helped fill administration positions as what he called an "unpaid intern." His venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has backed major tech companies including Twitter (now known as X), AirBnb and Coinbase, and he is one of longest serving members on Meta's board alongside Zuckerberg. Andreessen, like his peers, is a committed "effective accelerationist" -- part of a Silicon Valley movement that believes any restrictions on technological development, whether from government regulation or social concerns, are fundamentally harmful to human progress. - Palmer Luckey - Palmer Luckey, while not directly involved in the White House, carries weight as a self-made tech billionaire who challenged Silicon Valley's liberal bent. The home-schooled prodigy was just 21 when he sold his virtual reality company Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. His outspoken Trump support made him a misfit at Facebook, which he left in 2017 amid questions over his activities in support of the Republican. His current venture, Anduril Industries, has emerged as a major player in military technology, developing AI-powered systems including autonomous surveillance towers and drone interceptors. The company, with Thiel as a major backer, has rapidly expanded its defense contracts and its technology has been deployed in various military applications, from border security to battlefield operations in Ukraine. arp/st
