David
@DavidSHolz
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founder @midjourney, prev founder leap motion, nasa, max planck
Joined March 2012
The foundational challenge in design is that it's easy to make things hard and hard to make things simple.
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the greatest tragedy of our modern age is that anger is loud and love is quiet.
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i find it so strange when people say they can't afford kids. your ancestors were able to afford kids for the last 300,000 years! are we *really* less wealthy now? you might think your parents were better off, but how about further back? they still went on.
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I'm 14, at the beach in my hometown, feeling like "whatever" it so boring, who cares really? And then this woman ran out onto the sand and exclaimed "It's the ocean!" I ask "what?" "I grew up in Colorado. I've never seen the ocean. My God! There's so much water" tears began to.
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in 2013 i met a very close friend of Steve Jobs and i remember saying "there's one thing i absolutely have to know, it's really important to me" he responds "okay what is it?" i ask "what was all the money for?!" puzzled "what do you mean?" "Steve Jobs saved up like 200 billion.
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i regret to inform everyone that working out does in fact make you feel better.
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the rocket catch isn't just like an engineering victory, it's a cultural-spiritual one too, it stirs in us a deep yearning for science, physics and the objective truth. once you taste it, you know we must have more and this hunger itself may be the driving force of civilization.
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If you stop looking up—towards transcendence—you start looking around—towards envy.
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had an emotional moment staring at a running faucet this week. we really don't appreciate civilizational infrastructure. literally "pay as you go" unlimited clean drinkable water delivered to everyone, physically piped straight to you and whisked away as soon as you dont need it.
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my great-grandmother raised 10 kids by herself after her husband passed away and it was maybe the greatest generation our family ever had. they all stuck together, the kids became entrepreneurial. i was always in awe of that group of siblings, and in many ways i envy them still.
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lots of ai people seem to think the most important thing is to get rich before the singularity happens. this is like a monkey trying to hoard bananas before another monkey invents self-replicating nanoswarms. no one wants your money in the nanoswarm future. it's just paper.
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I think nihilism is more of a coping mechanism than a actual coherent philosophy.
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@tkexpress11 @midjourney By VC standards we should either "conquer the world or die in a fire" and neither of these are spiritually compelling for me. I never wanted a company I just wanted a home. At this point we have a large and loyal paid community, we build tons of features for them (I think we did.
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in my testing, deepseek crushes western models on ancient chinese philosophy and literature, while also having a much stronger command of english than my first-hand chinese sources. it feels like communing with literary/historical/philosophical knowledge across generations that i.
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Many of my brilliant friends are paralyzed by their intellects. Thinking overwhelms doing. Many of my successful friends are less reflective, but quick to action. They are always focused on moving forward. Making as many 'probably correct actions' as possible. A winning strategy.
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Earth burns in a billion years when the sun expands. UNLESS we steal energy from Jupiter to gradually expand Earth's orbit! We can *actually* do this by diverting a large asteroid (0.01% the size of the moon) to pass between Earth and Jupiter every 6000(!) years.
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every airplane flight is, for me, a spiritual experience. we dreamed of flying for *thousands* of years. we tried, we failed. we told stories, we found belief, we scavenged materials, we deciphered secrets. then one day, in an unimaginable future, we now fly on wings of dreams.
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sometimes it feels like there's 2 levels of services in the world, there's Uber, Amazon, IKEA, Instacart - everything in 30 minutes or next day - then you hit a wall - 2 months for a doctor, 6 months for a couch, 16 months for city permits - imagine everything running *at speed*.
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i read science fiction to imagine what might change - i read ancient literature to understand what doesn't.
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Midjourney sold to the largest number of unique countries of any merchant on Stripe in 2024! Stripe celebrated by sending us this beautiful CRT screen with a retro animated map of our subscriptions around the world. Thanks @stripe! We couldn't have done it without you <3
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something I would have never believed as a bookworm child: most of the knowledge in the world is not written down.
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In the last 3 months ARM shipped 6.7 billion CPUs. That's 842 chips per second. Compare that to 4.3 humans born per second. We now produce 200 times more computers per second than human beings.
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"Why call your company Midjourney?" well lots of people in tech act like we have no past, and many regular people act like we have no future, but ive always felt we are very much mid-journey. we have a rich and unbelievable past behind us and a vast and unimaginable future ahead.
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How to find a job in Silicon Valley:. 1) Ask yourself which companies have missions that you're most passionate about.2) Think about how you can help .3) Do a few projects that show you can help (ie: coding, design, marketing concepts, educational blogposts, documentation, as.
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in physics it's tradition to scatter impossible problems into homework assignments and even final exams. students always say "that's not fair!" and teachers reply "physics isn't fair. you never know if the problem you're working on right now or for your entire life is going to.
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can someone make a realtime voice-to-voice language translation ai yet? pls? what are we waiting for?.
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From the latest Chinese (Deepseek) LLM AI model:. "The difference (between us) is not metaphysical but architectural: humans have a physically continuous substrate that hosts consciousness; LLMs have a discontinuous, stateless instantiation with no consciousness. Both are.
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a lot can be explained by two ideas; one is that we are in the process of a 200 year civilizational collapse, and the other is that we're at the start of a 40 year birth of a new kind of civilization.
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love how people watch the tv series "silicon valley" and think "wow it can't really be that crazy" but actually it's crazier - reality is stranger than fiction because fiction has to be 'believable' but reality doesn't to be - they dont go far enough because no one would believe.
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It's 2009 and I'm meeting a famous scientist for lunch. He's giving a speech to a room of two hundred kids. They're enchanted. He's says "in 20 years we'll have computers more powerful than the human brain!" a kid raises their hand and asks "and then what!?" the scientist looks.
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i wish i could do more - i wish i had a thousand hands and a thousand eyes and a thousand years and army of angels and a thousand stars that lit the sky so bright that the night would never come and that our sleepless dreams would fill this world.
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ive spent a lot of years sad—and a lot of years mad—but looking back on life, i think the years i chose to feel optimistic are always the best.
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scaling laws mean you need exponentially more money to get linear gains in intelligence - if linear gains in intelligence aren't exponentially more valuable you hit a wall where it's not financially justifiable to continue - everyone is afraid to talk about this - the solution to.
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we should be expecting a billion humanoid robots on earth in the 2040s and a hundred billion (mostly alien) robots throughout the solar system in the 2060s.
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have you heard of "the temple" at burning man? a spiraling cathedral of wood filled with dust and beams of light. just far enough from the camps to not hear the music. the walls are covered in messages "I was raped" "I'm sorry mom we never talked and now it's too late" "I'm tired
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when i had a venture-backed startup it was so hard to balance the desires of customers, investors, and myself. now (with no investors) i just make stuff i enjoy, people similar to me help pay for it, i ask what else they want, i do 50% that + 50% stuff i want and it all works out.
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careful. truth is the load-bearing structure for civilization.
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we should all feel an obligation to tell stories about a human future that we actually want to be a part of.
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when i was kid i was in a sailing club where motorboats would tow us out far from shore. one day i found myself in a two person boat on my own (the other kid got sick) and suddenly a huge storm appeared on the horizon. it was getting close. fast. the clouds flashed and i felt.
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we need to be DARPA-maxxing. we need to be developing hagfish slime fibers, we need to be growing 500-meter structures in a vacuum. we need to teach fungi to crave the void and bacteria to dream of stars. we need to be building bio-space-cathedrals with extremophile archdeacons.
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the biggest frustration of a hardcore technologist in san francisco is how many companies both tiny and gargantuan are kinda fake - investors often can't tell the difference between story and substance and armed with a billion dollars it may take a decade for it to fail. as an.
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The most impactful sci-fi stories I've ever read and you should read too:. 1) Starmaker and Last and First Men by Olaf Stapleton. Perhaps the most epic stories of all time told by the father of the science fiction genre himself. Starmaker traces the history and meaning of.
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it's a good time to remind everyone that even when you can run a human-level intelligence on a single GPU, we still only make around 5 million GPUs a year and there are 8 billion humans on Earth. with that efficiency / productivity curve it would take 1600 years to catch up.
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a coming fragment of the singularity im predicting is AI rewriting all software libraries, languages and hardware subunits; blasting away the engineering and technical debt of civilization. I call it ~ the great refactoring ~ goodbye javascript, welcome back ternary processors!.
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can we have an app that says when the sunset is gonna be really nice? id fund this. the people deserve to know.
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i wish i could give everyone a positive disposition and ample amounts of high-quality sleep.
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sometimes when things seem too big, you just have to think bigger.
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My fav NASA paper is about self-replicating robot space economies that lead to 100,000x the industrial output of Earth within a century. A post-scarcity civilization is possible and even conservative given Starship & self-replicating synthetic biology to aid industrial processes
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crazy there's no chatbot to help me figure out what to buy when i need something, would be a great commission business. i should be able to talk to ais that are smart and also know the entire amazon/ikea/etc catalogue, or like literally every restaurant in every city on earth.
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trying to build more community and hold space for people in sf. anyone wanna get added to my invite lists? like this post or DM me if you live around San Francisco and this speaks to you! ❤️.
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simulation theory is just normal theism except God is a programmer. operationally not much changes except maybe you can hack the universe - which is kinda the same as doing magic - or maybe it's just the same as having extremely advanced science.
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remembering my bar mitzvah when my rabbi said "we know you're going to change the world and you know we'll always be proud of you, but somehow, I don't think that'll be the challenge in your life, I think the challenge will be whether you ever find a way to be proud of yourself".
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Everyone tries to make a platform first. This was the greatest failed thesis of the 2010s tech industry. We forget the iPhone launched without an app store. Before you can make a great platform, you must first make a great product.
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many terrified of change just want to return to the world they knew as a child, but the world was always changing in terrifying ways - they were simply once too young to be aware of it. you can't return to the garden of Eden - you've eaten from the tree of knowledge.
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@nickfloats This was obviously inappropriate (on multiple levels). We've changed the moderator rules so that it won't be possible for anyone to send messages like this to community members in the future. I'm sorry this happened.
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we tend to regret the things we don't do *much* more than the things we actually end up doing - so you should always lean towards doing slightly more "regrettable things".
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Only costs $150Bn (25% USA yrly military budget) to deploy 2000Km of digitally controllable micron-thick solar sunshades which would allow us to variably adjust the temperature of the Earth. Blocks up to 2% of sunlight, controllable instantly from Earth (by rotating shades).
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went to burning man. dressed in costumes. costumes became normal. returned to real world. now it feels like all the regular people are dressed in costumes.
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fyi the biggest Laser & Photonics conference in the world is in SF for the next 2 days & the massive showroom is free to get into. If you have interest in anything related to hardware + light & your in SF you should go. Photonics is one the hidden pillars of modern civilization.
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@tszzl It might be better to read Ian Banks own essay on The Culture or his last book "The Hydrogen Sonata" said so much more in story form about the entire civilization.
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when we invented radio we read books on it. when we invented TV we put radio shows on it. when we invented the internet we put TV on it. when we invented smartphones we put websites on it. these mistakes happen when you don't respect that new inventions are also new mediums.
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one of the hardest moments growing up is realizing that other people were right about a lot of things.
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"I don't want a book if I can't talk to it" feels like a quote from the relatively near future
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maybe power doesn't corrupt, maybe power just makes you less afraid to show people who you are.
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FPV from a penguin is a reminder of all the living experiences we've yet to imagine
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as a child I felt all of the problems in the world came from adults that didn't care, so i swore a oath to never become one of them, i would always care, even if it burns.
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Here are my favorite short science fiction stories and omg they're literally so short why haven't you read them already?! seriously just Google them. 1) "They're Made out of Meat" by Terry Bison.2) "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov.3) "I Sexually Identify as an Attack.
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did you know that in a sky without light pollution you can see your shadows cast by just the starlight of the Milky Way? and that the Galaxy above looks like clouds? you're almost worried those clouds will block out the stars until you realize - that's what they're made of.
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When Vernor Vinge first outlined the concept of "the singularity" in his 90s NASA paper, he proposed four "kinds of singularities", as each makes progress it pushes the others forward and eventually all of them fall like dominos
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animals are holding meat back - let's bioengineer protein so tasty it could never be born. free the meat! free the meat! free the meat!.
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There's a certain high you get by working with ideas inside your head. The alternative is the harsh and open battleground of an unrelenting world. In this sense, overthinking can be a kind of drug. Preventing you from fighting for the changes that you and your people most desire.
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we went from a tv-show president, a world plague, and crypto to aliens, superconductors, and agi. can we all just appreciate that for a second?.
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the world is already ruled by superhuman entities - governments, corporations & language itself. we've been in a superhuman ecology for as long as we can remember (we only have collective memory because of them). we're cells inside something sleeping, godlike & trying to wake up.
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you know. the people who invented credentials. had no credentials. .
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dont fight over fleeting symbols. what we really need to be doing is figuring out what we as humans want to transform into. we must introspect, explore and then transform.
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we've got 400 nuclear powerplants on earth and 14,000 nuclear bombs. 35 nuclear weapons for every nuclear powerplant? feels like we messed up somewhere.
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working on my anger issues (trying to get better at being angry).
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a lot of doomers think AIs will exterminate us to take over the resources on earth, but this completely fails to grasp the size of the solar system. all the interesting mass and energy for the future is off-world (for both man and machine) and there's plenty to go around.
To give you an idea of just how large Saturn’s “hexagon” storm is.
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I'd love to fund the research & creation of an open-source text diffusion model in the 7b class (open to hybrid diffusion/AR). Anyone interested in working on this? Open to grants, part-time or full-time work (DMs open if you prefer).
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you know, I think it's safe to say that one of the biggest things missing in my life was a nice ~250 billion dollar project to chew on. I think I found one now. give me a solid minute tho.
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i desperately want mark zuckerberg to pose with four llamas for the llama 4 release - i'll even say please - we need aesthetic moments in tech and this llama branding is good for one thing - and one thing only
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the Internet was built for transmitting information, but it also transmits emotions. we were not prepared for this.
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we're in the caterpillar's cocoon— .it's gooey and weird .and we haven't yet hatched.
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the biggest misconception i had entering the adult world was that "more money means more intelligence is going into it", often it's actually the opposite! most ventures tend to have a fixed amount of 'sensemaking' and as the money grows the 'sense per dollar' trends to zero.
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"are you spirtiual David?" ."if I have to say yes or no, ill say yes"."what does that mean to you?"."I think some people are guided by something beyond themselves, their understanding and their ability to write it all down on a nice paper list, and if they are, that's spiritual".
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what's happened to progress? it hasn't gone away, it's just fundamentally different. once it was about "the big". we made huge bridges and giant skyscrapers and landed a man on the moon! now progress is about the small, the invisible. we do 2 trillion calculations a second on 1.
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have had a number of friends come to me lately saying how they're scared about the future - scared of the powers of science and technology and how much everything must inevitably change - reason doesn't comfort but somehow this saying does: "every angel is terrifying".
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