Then, a decade later, Francisco Pizarro did the same thing to an Incan Empire of some 10 million inhabitants.

In both cases, the Conquistadors consistently beat native armies while being literally 100x (or even in some cases 1000x) outnumbered - and in many cases, did so without taking a single casualty.

And they did this with 99% of their military forces being made up of the very natives they were trying to subjugate.

We often forget how wild human history is. People talk about AI takeover as if it would be some crazy, unprecedented sci-fi outcome. But this would not be the first time an alien force whose motives the defenders barely understand use more advanced technology and diplomatic cunning to outmaneuver and then take over a much larger and long established existing order.

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 * Transcript: dwarkesh.com/p/si-sheppard * Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s… * Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/1fN4B8…

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 * Jane Street’s intern projects are even more ambitious than I realized. One intern spent his summer researching LLM memorization, figuring out how to quantify and reduce it. This matters because, when Jane Street tests their models on historical data, they need to know that performance reflects predictive power, not just memorized outcomes. Another intern spent his time developing a new activation checkpointing scheme: his custom version ended up outperforming PyTorch’s native one. If you want to read about more 2026 intern projects or apply for Jane Street’s 2027 internships, go to