this California wealth tax thing is just incredible. so in October 2025, a California healthcare union proposed a "one time" 5% tax on any billionaire's wealth. the ballot measure will be voted on next month. In early December 2025, California announced that it would be a retroactive tax if passed, applying to anyone with CA residency as of Jan 1, 2026. The objective is to pay for Medi-Cal, California's incredibly dysfunctional healthcare system. (which also functions as a glorified welfare apparatus, but that's a discussion for another time). polls reveal that the CA electorate is split around 50/50 on the tax, but prediction markets only give Prop 40 a ~23% chance of passing (there are competing measures on the ballet that would nullify it). there are 200 billionaires in CA, worth collectively somewhere between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion. 5% of that is around $100b, accounting for a small amount of attrition. proponents of the tax forecasted a significant windfall, assuming only a 10% departure rate. supporters thought they were being clever with the retroactive concept. no billionares would leave CA in the few short months between the tax being proposed and the residency cutoff date, without the tax even having passed yet, right? well as it turns out, they did. a new paper [1] from two academics at Stanford called "The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act", argues that not only did more billionaires leave due to the proposed tax than its proponents expected, but that the value of the tax, if it does pass, is actually negative. proponents of the tax only assumed 10% avoidance, that is, only 10% of the taxable base of targeted billionaires would leave CA within the very short Oct-Dec 2025 window. Jaros and Rauh, the Stanford academics, find that a lower bound of 28.6% of the taxable base managed to leave. just based on known departures, those departures total $577b in net worth, or $28.8b in potential tax lost. this of course does not capture everyone (many left without announcing their departure), so the authors normalize to departure rates estimated from other wealth tax events, and apply other discounts for litigation, arriving arrive at a figure of only $28-$36b in forecasted tax revenues. but this isn't all! all of the income taxes paid by the departed billionaires are also forsaken. the authors estimate that CA billionaires pay $3.3- 5.8b in annual income taxes. they assume a midpoint of $2b lost in annual collections from departed billionaires. the net present value of that lost income stream is -$68.9 billion. so when you add it all up you get: + $30b one-time tax windfall (estimated) - $69b in present value of lost future income taxes = - 38.9b overall net present value of the tax of course, this analysis is highly estimate driven. the authors simulate the parameters 100k times and find a negative NPV of the implemented tax 85 percent of the time. and if the tax doesn't pass, which it's not looking like it will, California still ended up losing at least $577b in departed net worth, and they have permanently poisoned the well with entrepreneurs who will now worry about future wealth taxes. [1]: nber.org/system/files/workin…

In July 2025, Eric Schmidt predicted "world-class AI mathematicians will emerge in the next one year." @GaryMarcus said this prediction was "pure fantasy." I think the evidence now shows Schmidt's prediction has been vindicated.

This Asari approach works, imagine the improvement in inference and the reduction of data center serving costs when people adopt this! The power of agents that are incredibly smart.

Selina and myself on the China US race - we need to understand the critical importance of the arrival of reasoning by computer and make sure we get the right products to benefit everyone, not just a few nytimes.com/2026/07/11/opini…

Another great step in AI reasoning: Samaya now has a super hard benchmark for people to compete against.

We are launching FrontierFinance, the world’s hardest benchmark for measuring frontier financial intelligence of agentic systems. FrontierFinance is fully open, and differentiates itself by measuring agentic performance across the entire investment workflow. Our finance and AI experts created FrontierFinance for realistic and reproducible comparison of frontier AI systems, consisting of 220 diverse queries and a total of 11,543 expert-crafted rubrics, making it the largest open benchmark of its kind. Unlike existing benchmarks which largely focus on financial data extraction, FrontierFinance covers a diverse range of use cases essential to an investor’s workflow and are harder to evaluate: from screening to research to analysis to monitoring. The benchmark tests for an agent’s ability to exhaustively find information, perform numerical analysis and most importantly synthesize information using the taste and judgement of professional investors. This makes FrontierFinance hardest among existing finance benchmarks with a ~50% pass rate for the best system currently. @samaya_AI's agentic system outperforms frontier models with 50.8% on the same benchmark, at roughly a 4x lower inference cost than Fable 5 and ~2.7x lower than Opus and GPT. Among frontier models, Claude Fable 5 is the best-performing on FrontierFinance, scoring 49.2%, followed by Claude Opus 4.8 at 45% and GPT 5.5 at 43.5%. We are releasing the data, code and analysis for use by the community. See link in comments. Samaya’s mission is to take us from information to conviction and FrontierFinance takes a large step in that direction. FrontierFinance comes from a larger internal set of almost 5000 examples, and we plan to release subsequent, harder benchmarks in the future.

well worth watching. Much progress in the best vision model

This is a major advancement in robotic reasoning and control. See the video !

China is moving very fast in robots watch the videos ! time.com/7382151/china-domin…

This is really interesting, what happens when the math no longer works due to capital and the models have to differentiate. How will they do it?

Why Ukraine is important to all of us: ft.com/content/9c7542d4-1b2b…

Another step forward in the agentic revolution

Astronomy is ripe for new ideas, and we are working with scientists globally to build four new telescopes - one in space, three on the ground ! schmidtsciences.org/schmidt-…

Lou Gerstner was one of the great American businessman, and someone I learned a lot from. He died two days ago, and after turning around IBM (a historic feat) became the Chair of the Broad Institute (I followed him in that role). He had great business skills of course but his real insight was in people - he had an uncanny ability to find the great leaders within every company he worked with. He was devoted to his family, his friends, his companies and science and education. He will be missed.

The US might run out of energy for AI data centers by 2028, here is my attempt to help solve this problem. We are just getting started ! texaspacific.com/investors/n…

This is a seriously cool achievement

Very happy to announce we have also used our @Nvidia H100 on Starcloud-1 to run inference with @GoogleDeepMind's Gemma model - the open source version of Gemini. These are Gemma's first words in space. << Greetings, Earthlings! Or, as I prefer to think of you – a fascinating collection of blue and green. Let’s see what wonders this view of your world holds. I’m Gemma, and I’m here to observe, analyze, and perhaps, occasionally offer a slightly unsettlingly insightful commentary. Let’s begin!

Two years after his death, Kissingers concerns become more clear and more true. See my piece in Time time.com/7338013/ai-risks-pr…

My friend Bill Joy on 50 years of computing; the gains are just incredible due to Moores law and hard work from many of you . What a story. piped.video/watch?v=rByrD_R9…

investing and winning with AI in the financial markets is going to be a huge goal for the United States, its the biggest complex system we have and we need to really master it wsj.com/opinion/how-ai-can-e…