Paul Helmick

High School Priorities for My Kids While most high schools are still optimizing for a world that no longer exists, these are my non-negotiables: 1. Classical Education Great books. Philosophy. Rhetoric. Writing. Debate. Logic. The ability to think clearly, argue precisely, and write with force. Be more human. 2. Build with AI Agentic coding. Workflows. AI agents. Engineering. Not “using ChatGPT.” Making things of value. 3. Entrepreneurship $100k+ by 18. The only durable path to wealth is building a business. In the world that’s coming, two things will separate the winners The ability to think deeper and more independently than the models (aka be more human) The ability to wield the models to create value better than everyone else I want my kids to inherit the wisdom of the past, master the tools of the future, and have the courage and imagination to build something entirely their own♥️

America's K-12 crisis in a nutshell: The average 18 year old student scores at the same level as a top 10% 9 year old in Reading

Sequoia Capital just hosted AI Ascent and gathered 150 of the top AI minds like Demis Hassabis, Andrej Karpathy, Greg Brockman, Boris Cherny of Anthropic 🤯 And Sequoia just gave one of the clearest frameworks for where AI is going. The core idea: - AI is not just another software wave. - Cloud expanded the software market. - AI expands the services market. That means the next giant AI companies may not sell tools, dashboards, or copilots. They may sell the work itself. The full breakdown: 1/12. AI is the biggest platform shift yet Cloud took software from roughly $350B to $650B. AI opens something much larger: A $10T+ services market that machines can now start to address. 2/12. This wave is moving faster than cloud or mobile Every technology wave creates billion-dollar companies. But AI companies are reaching massive scale much faster. What took decades in cloud may take years in AI. 3/12. This is a computation revolution, not just a communication revolution The internet changed how information was distributed. AI changes how information is processed. That is a much deeper shift. 4/12. We are moving from faster horses to cars The first AI apps made workers 10–40% more productive. Useful, but not transformational. The next generation creates 10–40x improvements. 5/12. Sequoia’s practical definition of AGI is simple Forget the philosophical debate. If a system can be dispatched to do a job, recover from failure, and keep going until the task is complete… For business purposes, that is what matters. 6/12. The race is now for the services economy Software companies used to sell systems of record. AI companies can now sell outcomes. Not “here is software to help your lawyer.” 7/12. The best moat is not the model In AI, the underlying technology changes too fast. Today’s breakthrough becomes tomorrow’s baseline. So the moat is not just technical capability. The moat is customer intimacy. 8/12. Founders should wrap around customers, not model releases Most technical founders want to chase the latest model. But the model layer keeps shifting. 9/12. Affordance matters more than people think Raw model power is not enough. A terminal, API, or blank chat box may be powerful, but most users don’t know what to do with it. 10/12. The diffusion gap is the opportunity Frontier models improve every week. Enterprises absorb change over months or years. That gap is massive. 11/12. 2026 is the year of agents 2022–2024 was chat. 2024–2025 was reasoning. 2026 is agents. 12/12. Services is the new software AI is moving from helping humans do cognitive work… to replacing entire categories of cognitive work. Actual work, done end-to-end. Full breakdown here: Sequoia AI Ascent 2026: The future of AI theaiopportunities.com/p/seq…

Paul Graham one-pager on how to start a startup:

We are living in a time where we have access to infinite intelligence. People decades ago could only dream of having the tools we have right now to build a business, a career change, or a world-changing discovery.  This is the best time to be alive, and I won't get tired of saying it.

Neuralink’s first product is called Telepathy. It enables high-speed communication with computers or humans simply by thinking. Output bandwidth will vastly exceed the fastest human speech or typing in a few years. Read that sentence again.

Elon Musk on why his companies move faster than anyone else. "I'm constantly addressing the limiting factor. Whatever the limiting factor is on speed, I'm going to tackle that. If capital is the limiting factor, I'll solve for capital. If it's not the limiting factor, I'll solve for something else." He then said something most managers never figure out: "If something is going really well and making good progress, there's no point in me spending time on it.The irony is if something's going really well, they don't see much of me. But if something is the limiting factor, they'll see a lot of me." He spends his time entirely on whatever is blocking the next step. Not on what's interesting or what he's best at. But on whatever is the bottleneck right now. Most leaders do the opposite... They gravitate toward what they're comfortable with and away from the hard problem.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to: Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund    alzresearch.org/giving/ Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources     alzfdn.org/donate/ Photo Credit: Tommy Garcia

What is life like at different levels of GDP per capita? In this new chart I visualised it for 12 different dimensions.

Day 25/ We are doubling all usage limits for all Pro 100/200/500 tiers and Business Premium, effective today. We heard your kind feedback and won’t be reducing usage limits for Pro 200, so your Work and Codex usage will stay the same. We’re also going to continue offering extended limits for dots for now, and usage of your dot will still continue to be separate from your default usage. And we'll of course also keep shipping better models and other efficiency improvements that increase your effective usage over time.

very weird thing happening rn technical people are sad, they think their skills are now useless non-technical people are desperately wishing they were more technical so they could use agents better

Humanity’s Last Great Invention: The Beginning of Everything Else I went all in on AI several years ago, based on a simple first-principles thinking and a profound realization: virtually everything humanity has ever created, from our technologies and scientific discoveries to our industries, institutions, & the entire global economy, is ultimately the product of human intelligence. Think about it. Every invention, every factory, every medical breakthrough, every business, and every technological advancement began with human minds figuring out how to understand, manipulate, and transform the world around us. Intelligence is the fundamental engine behind civilization & economic progress. Now imagine new super intelligence that surpasses human intelligence across virtually every domain, can be replicated millions or billions of times at a fraction of the cost of human labor, operates continuously at millions of times faster than us, and improves its own capabilities. Then combine that intelligence with increasingly capable billions of robots that can perform every imaginable physical work. The civilizational implications are almost unimaginable! For the first time in history, intelligence itself will become an abundant, rapidly expanding resource. Scientific discovery, engineering, manufacturing, medicine, agriculture, and virtually every other industry will advance at rates previously impossible. AI will increasingly design better technologies, improve production processes, and accelerate further AI development, creating powerful feedback loops of innovation & economic growth. My prediction is that within the next few decades, AI systems & robots will perform more than 90% of all economically productive work, measured in human-equivalent labor hours. This means that the overwhelming majority of tasks required to produce goods & services will eventually be performed autonomously, with humans increasingly determining goals, priorities, & how the resulting abundance is used. And here is the crucial economic implication: the global economy would not simply be today’s economy with fewer human workers. It would become an economy several times, potentially even orders of magnitude, larger in real terms, at the level of quadrillions of $ value as AI dramatically expands our capacity to discover, invent, build, and produce. Of course, intelligence alone cannot eliminate physical constraints such as energy, materials, and infrastructure. But increasingly intelligent AI will also greatly help us overcome many of these bottlenecks through better engineering, automation, and scientific breakthroughs. We have spent thousands of years building civilization with the limited intelligence and labor of human beings. We are now approaching an era in which both intelligence & physical labor could become massively scalable. That changes the fundamental economics of civilization itself. And we are only at the very beginning of what will become the greatest economic, scientific, and technological transformation in human history. My message to everyone is simple: Do not underestimate what is coming, it’s much larger than even most optimistic projections, and do not remain a passive observer of this greatest transformation in human history. If you are a scientist, use AI to accelerate discovery. If you are an entrepreneur, build companies that solve problems previously considered impossible. If you are an educator, prepare the next generation for a world of abundant intelligence. If you are a student or professional, start mastering these tools today and go all in on abundant intelligence. And if you are shaping public policy, help create the conditions for this extraordinary new productive capacity to benefit humanity as widely as possible. We have an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate the discovery of cures for diseases, extend healthy human lifespans to hundreds of years, eliminate much of the scarcity that has constrained civilization, expand access to education and opportunity, and unlock entirely new frontiers of human creativity and exploration So my call to action is this: Go all in on understanding AI. Learn it. Use it. Build with it. Rethink every assumption about what is possible in your field. And most importantly, help shape the future you want humanity to experience. The next few decades could accomplish more than all of human history combined. We are not merely witnessing the next technological revolution. We have the opportunity to help build an entirely new era of civilization. The future is being created right now. Don’t just watch it happen. Be one of the people who builds it!

All employees come in 5 levels, choose wisely: Level 1 - tells you there's a problem Level 2 - tells you there's a problem and what caused it Level 3 - tells you there's a problem, what caused it, and options to fix it Level 4 - tells you there's a problem, what caused it, options to fix it, and which one they'd pick Level 5 - tells you there was a problem, what caused it, how they fixed it, and future proof’d it

50 legendary internet rabbit holes you can spend hours exploring👇 1. zoom.earth — Watch the world via live satellite imagery 2. flightradar24.com — See every plane currently in the sky 3. marinetraffic.com — Track all ships at sea in real time 4. windy.com — Live map of winds and storms 5. lightningmaps.org — Watch lightning strikes hitting Earth in real time 6. earthquake.usgs.gov — Live list of recent earthquakes 7. submarinecablemap.com — Ocean cables carrying the internet 8. globalforestwatch.org — Watch forests disappear from space 9. worldometers.info — The world's statistics, second by second 10. internetlivestats.com — Current number of tweets and searches being posted 11. thetruesize.com — Compare the true sizes of countries 12. oldmapsonline.org — Maps from centuries ago 13. davidrumsey.com — Archive of 150,000 historical maps 14. openstreetmap.org — World map drawn by volunteers 15. window-swap.com — Look out the window of a random person around the world 16. virtualvacation.us — Virtual walks through cities 17. mapcrunch.com — Teleport to a random spot on Earth 18. atlasobscura.com — Catalog of the world's strangest places 19. neal.fun — Interactive knowledge experiences 20. htwins.net/scale2 — Scale journey from atom to universe (Updated HTML5 link) 21. eyes.nasa.gov — Explore the solar system in 3D 22. stellarium-web.org — Real sky map in your browser 23. apod.nasa.gov — NASA's astronomy picture of the day 24. images.nasa.gov — NASA's entire visual archive, free 25. pudding.cool — Visual articles told through data 26. ourworldindata.org — The state of the world with real data 27. gapminder.org — What we mistakenly think we know about the world 28. informationisbeautiful.net — Visualizing complex data 29. data.worldbank.org — World Bank's open data 30. data.tuik.gov.tr — Turkey's official statistics database 31. archive.org — Archive of millions of books, films, and software 32. gutenberg.org — 70,000 free books whose copyrights have expired 33. openlibrary.org — Record of every book in the world 34. loc.gov — U.S. Library of Congress digital archive 35. europeana.eu — Europe's cultural heritage archive 36. dp.la — America's digital library collection 37. artsandculture.google.com — Tour museums from home 38. rijksmuseum.nl — Download artworks in high resolution 39. wikiart.org — Archive of 250,000 artworks 40. publicdomainreview.org — Forgotten visual treasures of history 41. openculture.com — Free archive of culture and education 42. metmuseum.org — Met Museum's open collection 43. musicmap.info — Family tree of music genres 44. radiooooo.com — Pick a country and decade to listen to that era 45. listen.hatnote.com — Turn Wikipedia edits into audio 46. wikipedia.org — Random knowledge well 47. timeanddate.com — Time, sunrises, and sky events 48. sciencedaily.com — Live stream of science news 49. arxiv.org — Free preprints of scientific papers 50. observablehq.com — Visualize data with live code Save this. You’ll definitely need some of these later. 🔖 Follow @The_techAI for more useful websites, AI tools & tech resources.

I’m convinced that most stress isn’t from the hard things you’re doing, but from the hard things you’re avoiding. A good life is built by simply doing uncomfortable things sooner. The delayed conversation gets harder. The ignored problem gets bigger. The small repair gets more expensive. Peace is found through direct early action.