When AI makes creation abundant, what is still scarce?
If building gets easier, then a lot more things get built.
If a lot more things get built, then a lot more things start to look substitutable.
And if substitutability rises, then the obvious question becomes:
what actually gets harder to replicate over time?
AI does not eliminate scarcity.
It changes where scarcity lives.
⸻
Scarcity didn’t disappear — it moved
A lot of AI discourse sounds like a story about abundance. And in one sense, it is. AI creates abundance in creation. In output. In variation. In implementation.
But abundance in one layer does not remove scarcity everywhere else.
It usually makes other constraints more important.
If building a product becomes easier, then the scarce things start to look more like:
•attention
•trust
•participation
•liquidity
•proprietary behavioral signal
•and, honestly, founder judgment
In other words: AI makes it easier to create software, but it does not make it easy to create the scarce resources that software depends on.
That shift is easy to miss.
It is also where a lot of durable advantage starts to come from.
Because if many people can build something, then the question is no longer just, who can create it?
The better question is:
who can capture something scarce through that product — and keep compounding it?
That is the lens I find most useful.
Not “what features can I ship?”
But:
•what scarce resource does this product touch?
•is it well-positioned to capture it?
•and does the system get stronger as it does?
That scarce resource might be:
•real participation in a network
•trust between counterparties
•actual market liquidity
•behavioral data that only emerges through repeated use
•user habits that deepen over time
•or outcome data that makes the next decision better
That is the real shift.
As creation becomes abundant, advantage moves toward capturing and compounding what remains scarce.
And that is exactly why network effects and feedback loops become more important in an AI world.
Not because they are buzzwords.
Because they are two of the clearest mechanisms for taking scarce things — participation, trust, signal — and turning them into accumulated advantage.
What AI makes cheaper:
writing code
making images
generating copy
answering questions
starting products
What AI makes more valuable:
taste
distribution
trust
proprietary data
judgment
Matt DeSimone retweeted
epic sequencing call #17!
Many founders, including 10 rollup founders, shared their support for based and/or native rollups. Below are some their quotes. 1h45min YouTube recording coming ASAP :)
Part 1—based and native rollups
Ben Jones from @Optimism: "Let's get this right. Optimism is willing to support based sequencing and native execution. It's wartime."
Nick Johnson from @ensdomains: "You can count Namechain as based-pilled and native-pilled [...] and consider us fully onboard."
Jesse Pollak from @base: "We need to scale and connect the Ethereum ecosystem and based sequencing and native execution feel like the tools to do it."
Tomasz Stanczak from @nethermind: "Based and native rollups feel super aligned, they are what we're super excited about." "We will be experimenting with Surge, based rollups, and FABRIC."
Hayden Adams from @unichain: [couldn't make it; see recording for my Unichain take]
Steven Goldfeder from @arbitrum: "Diversity makes Ethereum unique [...] We need to find a common core - which is a native rollup, but not stifle innovation on top of it. [...] We're excited to contribute to this direction [...] All of us want Ethereum to win."
Fede Carrone from @class_lambda: "Based? For me, it clicked within seconds"
Ye Zhang from @Scroll_ZKP: "Based sequencing is an important way to stay in the same economic zone with Ethereum. [...] Native rollups are a super interesting idea!"
Part 2—FABRIC: Fabric to Accelerate Based Rollup Infrastructure and Connectivity
Drew Van der Werff from @Commit_Boost: "FABRIC is a shelling point to coordinate and stitch together some of the fragmentation that has emerged"
mteam from @Spire_Labs: "Spire is devoting developer resources to native rollups." "We believe that a unified set of standards based rollups will lead to greater efficiency in development timelines, bring down costs for users, and establish a compatibility zone which is why we’re excited to announce our support of Fabric"
Daniel Wang from @taikoxyz: "we've been waiting for the FABRIC standards so we can work together and provide a full solution" "Taiko is willing to contribute to the Fabric project to make sure we can divide and conquer the problems"
Amir Forouzani from @puffer_finance: "Based rollups were a no-brainer for us, [...] so were native rollups." "FABRIC just makes so much sense, [...] these standardization efforts are so important"
Demi Brener from @OpenZeppelin: "We see based rollups as a promising path towards scaling Ethereum and billions of user." "We are supportive of the FABRIC efforts and are willing to contribute."
Sam Batternally from @risechain: "I am here to voice my support for FABRIC" "the signaling from Ethereum that this is the direction scaling is going which will be huge to pull off and attract more builders"
Vitalik Buterin: "our community thrives on open source, open research [...] It's amazing to see all of this interest and willingness to work together on sequencing and interoperability
Matt DeSimone retweeted
Silicon Valley's dirty secret:
Most AI testing is fundamentally broken.
But a cryptographic breakthrough is about to change everything.
Here's the revolution nobody saw coming:
Matt DeSimone retweeted
The first ever SNARK proving ASIC 👀
Real-time proving, real-time settlement, universal synchronous composability—coming sooner than most think :)
We can fix Ethereum fragmentation!
Matt DeSimone retweeted
When Albert Einstein met Charlie Chaplin in 1931, Einstein said, "What I admire most about your art is its universality. You do not say a word, and yet the world understands you." "It's true." Replied Chaplin, "But your fame is even greater. The world admires you, when no one understands you."
Going to be showing this to my sons tonight when I get home from the office. This is the mindset I’d like to instill in them in literally everything they do.
“Michael Jordan played 15 years, won 6 championships. The other 9 years were a failure?"
Giannis on the Bucks 2022-2023 season nitter.gq/NBATV/status/165145930…
With an ever-increasing # of rollups, Ethereum is becoming more fractured by the day. Applications, users, and their liquidity, once united on Eth L1, are now dispersed across L2s. We've solved cheap, secure transactions, but at the cost of fragmentation.
Speed via Tendermint: By leveraging Tendermint consensus, ETH validators restaked on Omni can agree upon the state of rollups much faster than they can on ETH L1. As such, Omni is a fast settlement layer for rollups.
Matt DeSimone retweeted
The Personal AI Revolution Has Begun.
____
There is a revolution taking place, just like it took place in the garages of Silicon Valley in the mid 1970s.
That was the moment hobbyists had the audacity to take a calculator CPU and make a personal computer.
IBM laughed.
Today now 1000s of garages are glowing from personal AI platforms that are based on Stanford’s Alpaca and @cocktailpeanut Dalai LLaMA.
This new revolution has ended the 2008-2020 “Build an App” or “Uber of”, of stagnant “innovation” in the technology world. The entire edifice was lead by pied pipers trying to make this year look like last year supporting the same people with the same idea.
This new revolution will take AI technologies far past any 1970s “IBM” mentality.
Personal AI will once again liberate users from the “IT Department” permissions to use the time share computer.
Personal AI cares not of the agendas of anyone but you.
Personal AI not directly connected to the Internet and encrypted into a local blockchain cares not of anyone’s attempt to make your private thoughts public.
Personal AI does not care to sell you anything or claim all of your attention.
The early computer pioneers called the Pope using an illegal Blue Box phone Phreak device.
You are using their later technologies today.
The early Personal AI revolution will elicit fear in some. And there will be AI Phreaking.
Yet it was only when the computer was pulled out of the cathedral of a powerful elite with the proper papers and pedigree to use computers did the world really change.
The same will be for Personal AI. The high priests and priestesses should not be the grantees of access.
In history nothing grand for humanity came from encasing anything behind the walls of “safety” of the high priests and priestesses. From language to reading to the very books of wisdom and knowledge. When it was controlled it lead the world into dark ages.
There is a path from the first Personal Computer to the device you are using to read this today.
This device is a power and a curse based on how you use it—and how it uses you.
The seeds of Personal AI has been planted in this light of glowing garages of 2023 and just like all great and worthy human endeavors it will have extraordinary impacts to our future.
Personal AI is a power and a curse.
Let there be millions of powerful minds that make Personal AI be the best of what humanity can become.
Do not for a second let anyone tell you the you are not part of this revolution. You are no matter what age or pedigree. You already have the tools to participate and you will soar.
Let the dark ages end.
Let there be light.
I am very excited to announce I have been successful in installing and operating a full ChatGPT knowledge set and interface fully trained on my local computer and it needs no Internet once installed.
There are no editors and there is no censorship.
I am using Alpaca (crfm.stanford.edu/2023/03/13…) from Stanford and Dalai Lama.
The training model cost about $530 to build locally yet has the abilities of GPT 3.5.
The software is free and open source and I am working on preconfigured packages for anyone to have local training and access to a LLM GPT AI.
This model is now in a live connect with all of my other AI systems and the results have been absolutely stunning.
I will be writing more about this soon.
But today know, you will own your own AI and it will only answer to you.
