Garry Tan: Own Your Intelligence

**Garry Tan** (0:07)
So, the Internet calls me one of the most AI psychotic people online. So it's only right that I start my talk with a story about one of the most canceled men in history.
His name was Baruch Spinoza, and in case the philosophy elective wasn't your thing, here are the highlights you need to know.
In 1929, a New York rabbi challenged Einstein by telegram. Do you believe in God? Answer in 50 words. Einstein answered in 25 I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and doings of mankind. The most famous scientist alive asked the biggest question there is, pointed at Spinoza. But here's what Baruch Spinoza's own community did to him. Amsterdam, July 27th, 1656 Spinoza is 23 years old, a member of a tight-knit Sephardic Jewish community. He stands in a synagogue while the elders excommunicate him with the most violent curse the community ever produced.
Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night. Cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up.
Nobody may speak to him. Nobody may trade with him. Nobody may come within four cubits of him. Nobody may read anything he writes. And this ban, uniquely among the roughly 40 bans, Spinoza's community issued that century, has no repentance clause. It has never been lifted. It technically is still in force today.
Spinoza was 23 His crime was evil opinions, expressing forbidden thoughts. His punishment was complete deletion from the community.
Before his community cursed him, they tried to buy him a thousand guilders a year, serious money. All he had to do was show up at synagogue once in a while and keep his mouth shut. Hear that in founder terms. They offered him a salary to stop building. He said, no, not for 10,000, he said. He wanted truth, not comfort. Shortly before his excommunication, a fanatic came at him with a knife. The blade tore through his cloak and missed him. He kept that cloak scar unmended for the rest of his life. He wanted to remember what ideas cost.
So what does the most canceled man of the 17th century do next? He grinds lenses. By day, he makes optical instruments, tools that let human beings see further than their eyes allow.
He makes them so well that the best scientists in Europe seek them out. And by night, he writes a book so dangerous, he cannot publish it while he is alive.
When he dies at 44, lungs full of glass dust, from making other people's lenses, the manuscript is locked in his writing desk. His dying instruction, ship the desk by Canal Barge to his publisher in Amsterdam. That manuscript became his posthumous works, which attracted immediate attention across Europe and inspired some of the most important philosophers of the Enlightened.
What does Spinoza have to do with start ups, you might ask? Well, here is a man, canceled by everyone he knew, offered a salary to stop, nearly killed for shipping. And his response was to build precision tools by day and write the most dangerous book in Europe by night alone with no permission from anybody. If you're going to start a startup, you could do well to learn from Spinoza.
He had a name for the engine that kept him going.
It means your striving, the drive in every living thing to keep going and to increase its power to act. Not your resume, not your title, not your job, the striving itself. This talk is about the tools that amplify it.
So what did he actually say that was worth deleting a man over? The gist of the heresy was that God is not a king on a throne. God is spread through everything that exists. God or nature, he wrote.
400 years later, we are making a similar mistake about intelligence. Everyone is waiting for AGI as a singular event, a god in a data center, some announcement, some threshold, some day when the sky changes color.
So now I'll say a version of Spinoza's heresy, updated 400 years later. Everyone is watching the sky, and the thing they're watching for is already in the room. It doesn't look like a god. It looks like infrastructure, a terminal window, a folder of markdown files, a job that finishes while you sleep. Spread through everything, which is exactly where Spinoza told you to look. AGI isn't arriving as an event, it's arriving diffused as your agent, running on your context, doing your work.
I call it personal AGI, not artificial general intelligence for everyone all at once, general intelligence for one person, you.