Nabeel S. Qureshi
Entrepreneur and essayist; worked at Palantir on health and biology projects, and was a Visiting Scholar in AI at the Mercatus Center.
Nabeel S. Qureshi did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsThe world needs more companies like SpaceX, and Palantir, that differentiate on execution - achieving the outcome - not on playing political games or building narrow point solutions that don’t hit the goal.
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Their wordsGood founders have an instinct for reading rooms, group dynamics, and power. This isn’t usually talked about, but it’s critical: founding a successful company is about taking part in negotiation after negotiation after negotiation, and winning (on net).
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Our reading
A pro-West stance is mostly right: a world more aligned with the CCP or Russia seems a bad one.
Their wordsThe company is unabashedly pro-West, a stance I mostly agree with – a world more CCP-aligned or Russia-aligned seems like a bad one to me, and that’s the choice that’s on the table.
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Their wordsBut it seems to me that ignoring category 3 entirely, and just disengaging with it, is also an abdication of responsibility. Institutions in category 3 need to exist.
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Our reading
Calling for a pause on AI is a fantasy, and not engaging with AI is unlikely to be the best stance.
Their wordsNot engaging with it – or calling for a pause/stop, which is a fantasy – is unlikely to be the best stance.
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Their wordsI’d rather be one of those than one of the pontificators. Sure, it’ll involve difficult decisions. But it’s better to be in the room when things happen, even if you later have to leave and sound the alarm.
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Their wordsThe big productivity gains of this AI cycle are going to come when AI starts providing leverage to the large companies and businesses of this era - in industries like manufacturing, defense, logistics, healthcare and more.
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Their wordsMost activist types are, in my view, deluded about the degree to which we do actually need a strong military.
- 10 months earlier
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Their wordsYou are probably too risk-averse. Write out the worst things that can happen, realize they’re not that bad, then take the leap.
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Their wordsReal learning is extremely hard and effortful. (Podcasts, Atlantic articles, pop science books, anything that’s a bit too digestible is more “entertainment” than real learning).
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Their wordsAny given “bet” you take is likely to fail. Success is making lots of “bets” and trying as hard as possible at each of them.
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Their words80% utilitarian, 15% deontologist, 5% virtue ethics.
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Our reading
Most intelligent people want status, prestige and wealth, even the ones who claim not to.
Their wordsMost intelligent people want status, prestige, wealth and the like -- even the ones who claim not to.
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Their wordsBe very suspicious of a priori arguments on empirical matters (e.g. “AI will certainly kill everyone”), they’re usually wrong no matter how convincing. Reality is endlessly surprising.
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Their wordsLuck isn’t a constant, it increases with surface area: be in the right places, have lots of conversations, put yourself out there, ask for what you want and be optimistic and positive.
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Our reading
Original thinking needs uncorrelated inputs: minor works, older things, obscure journals.
Their wordsseek uncorrelated inputs. Read minor works, older things, obscure journals.
- 7 months earlier
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Their wordsTackling sprawling ecosystems with simple rules is doomed to fail—and, for similar reasons, applying restrictions to deep-learning-based general AIs will not work.
↗Waluigi, Carl Jung, and the Case for Moral AI (WIRED)wired.com
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Their wordsWe need to ensure that AIs adopt prohuman values because we cannot maintain oversight of AI indefinitely.
↗Waluigi, Carl Jung, and the Case for Moral AI (WIRED)wired.com
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Their wordsAll of this suggests that we are not necessarily creating distant, cold, threatening alien minds. AI will be humanlike.
↗Waluigi, Carl Jung, and the Case for Moral AI (WIRED)wired.com
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Their wordsUtilitarianism would tend to create a power-seeking AI, and deontological rules are vulnerable to Waluigi-style attacks. Virtue ethics, in which agents are intrinsically motivated to care about certain qualities such as transparency, may be a more promising paradigm.
↗Waluigi, Carl Jung, and the Case for Moral AI (WIRED)wired.com
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Their wordsAn AI ban, as some have called for, would be short-sighted; we would be giving up on the problem too early.
↗Waluigi, Carl Jung, and the Case for Moral AI (WIRED)wired.com
- 2 weeks earlier
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Their wordsWealth can be created, there is not a fixed amount of it in the world. Somebody doing well doesn’t always come at someone else’s expense.
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Their wordsStatus is fake and transient. Just focus on substance and doing valuable work.
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Their wordsUnderstand power laws. Outlier math rules all.