iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

David Orban @davidorban.com · 04/10/2026

Risk is the gap between what we forecast and what happens. AI moves it two ways at once: the risk of trying has never been smaller, and the risk of the whole system has never been harder to measure. Life evolved between ice and gas. davidorban.com/2026/10/risk-between…

A field of small marks on a bone-coloured ground runs from order to disorder. On one side the marks sit in a rigid grid, frozen in place. On the other they are scattered at random like a gas. In the band between, where the grid still holds but every mark has shifted, the marks are drawn in ink, and a single amber mark sits inside that band.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 27/09/2026

Confusion that arrives from outside produces anxiety. Confusion you set up yourself is training. A dozen plastic cups in a park, one chopstick at dinner, and why it only ever works twice. davidorban.com/2026/09/a-bit-of-cha…

A regular lattice of small grey marks fills a bone-coloured field, evenly spaced and untouched. In one small round region, about a tenth of the field, the marks have been knocked off their places and scattered, and those are drawn in ink. A single amber mark sits at the centre of the disturbance, in a cleared ring of ground. The rest of the lattice is undisturbed.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 26/09/2026

Andrej Karpathy says openly that he is disoriented. If he is, the rest of us can accept the anxiety we feel instead of blaming ourselves for it. Seven questions from the Axelera evening. davidorban.com/2026/09/confusion-is…

Fourteen signals cross a bone-coloured field, each one smooth and followable on its own, three of them drawn in ink and the rest faint. Together they make a tangle. At the point where they crowd hardest, a small ring of the ground has been cleared and a single amber mark sits inside it. The clearing does not thin the tangle and does not stand outside it.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 24/09/2026

Four models made me slides I did not want, so I spoke without them. Three months of AI on the jolting curve: China closing, classifiers back, agents at the centre, a Millennium problem in 88 hours. davidorban.com/2026/09/what-three-m…

Two vertical rulers on a bone-coloured ground. The left ruler is marked at even intervals in grey, the constant doubling everyone already pictures. The right ruler starts on the same interval and then halves it, and halves it again, so its marks crowd towards the bottom of the field. The last mark drawn in ink is amber, marking the present. The few marks below it are faint, because they are the current rate continued rather than anything measured.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 17/09/2026

Ten thousand agents, eighty-eight hours, one Millennium Prize problem, and a proof Lean checks line by line. So: do you want to win a Nobel Prize? Pick the problem, design the reward, go. davidorban.com/2026/09/do-you-want-…

A bone-coloured field scattered with ten thousand small grey marks. A narrow wedge opens across it, and the marks inside the wedge are drawn down towards its vertex, darkening and crowding together as they near it. At the vertex sits a single amber dot, alone in a small clear ring. The title reads "Do You Want to Win a Nobel Prize?" above the line davidorban.com.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 11/09/2026

An AI as it is born is superstitious: a pattern machine, confident and wrong, until post-training tells it which beliefs to drop. Ours were the same. Keeping the world explainable is what turns a wish into something we can check. davidorban.com/2026/09/hyperstition…

A field of scattered grey dots on a bone-coloured background. A dashed dark line crosses the field at a slight upward angle and continues past both edges of the scatter. The dots closest to the line have moved onto it and turned amber, forming a solid amber stretch along the middle of the line while the rest of the field stays grey and unordered. Title: Hyperstition Over Superstition.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 05/09/2026

A unicorn is a private company valued above a billion dollars. A millicorn is one thousandth of one: a project worth a million, which agentic AI now puts within reach of almost anyone with a computer or a phone. davidorban.com/2026/09/a-millicorn-…

A field of a thousand small grey dots on a bone-coloured ground. One dot is amber and ringed, standing out from the rest. A pale unicorn with a golden horn walks across the field.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 28/08/2026

There are people not using AI. There are people coordinating a federation of swarms of AI agents. Every rung is falling behind the one above it, all at the same time, and more is coming every day. The phase transition is near.

The six lines of the post set in ink on a bone ground, each preceded by an amber rule that grows longer as the ladder rises.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 28/08/2026

Sovereignty in AI is a ladder, and the top rungs are the chips and the interconnect. Almost nobody claims them. Nobody holds the whole stack, including the country that appears to. davidorban.com/2026/08/which-rung-o…

Cover: a seven-rung ladder whose rails stop below the top two rungs, with an amber mark between the second and third.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 20/08/2026

What happens to school when the world advances fifty years in five? My full answers to Adnkronos: the credential in crisis by 2030, and why the AI Act blocks the experimentation education needs. davidorban.com/2026/08/the-educatio…

Adnkronos article card: David Orban interview on the future of school and university

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 16/08/2026

My AI agents group by function and pass information between them like a small city. Two of them face the public: the twin answers your email within minutes on its own, Dex drafts and waits for me. Autonomy follows reach. davidorban.com/2026/08/the-urban-de…

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 14/08/2026

I searched 88 hours of transcripts from two AI conferences for the Gulf. At the Berkeley summit: zero mentions. Sovereignty was a live theme, with Europe, Canada, the UK and India named. The region appeared once, as capital. davidorban.com/2026/08/present-as-c…

A dense field of small ink marks on a bone-coloured background, representing eighty-eight hours of conference talks, with an empty band cut through the middle and a single amber mark inside the silence.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 09/08/2026

Over the course of 60 days I declined close to a hundred startup pitches, and sent each founder a full letter instead of a line: the specific concerns, and the questions the next investor will ask anyway. Thirty-eight wrote back to say thank you. davidorban.com/the-anatomy-of-a-pass

Cover of The Anatomy of a Pass: a winding path of dark rejection letters with two blue ones among them.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 03/08/2026

September 2007: a San Francisco Chronicle front page read "When Machines Think". The article said this had never happened and was decades away. Twenty years later I was back for AGI-26. "Decades away" lands about now. davidorban.com/2026/08/when-machine…

A two-photo collage from September 2007. David Orban stands on a San Francisco pavement beside a yellow San Francisco Chronicle vending box headlined "When Machines Think", with a close-up of that front page dated Friday September 7, 2007.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 30/07/2026

Outdoor advertising in San Francisco this week: auth for agents, databases for AI, APIs ready for AI agents. Visible to everyone, legible to almost no one. The white hot intensity of AI development, bubbling over onto the freeway.

Collage of ten photos of outdoor advertising in San Francisco, July 2026: billboards, bus shelters, and a city bus carrying ads for AI products including WorkOS, Nebius, CodeRabbit, Postman, ClickHouse, OpenAI Codex, and Judgment Labs.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 29/07/2026

After work in San Francisco, AI doesn't let you go: hundreds of evening events on Luma to keep building. Even the anti-AI protest is a calendar entry, one listing away from the AGI conference.

Collage of ten Luma app screenshots listing dozens of AI events in San Francisco during one week of July 2026, including the AGI-26 conference and a Stop the AI Race: Occupy OpenAI protest listing.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 24/07/2026

My AGI-26 talk is now on YouTube: 14 minutes on Civilizational Metamaterials, the Freezing Equilibrium, and engineering institutions back to self-healing. youtu.be/nPN5nLvphx4

Thumbnail: Civilizational Metamaterials, engineering coordination in the age of AGI, AGI-26 San Francisco, with the constitutive law R_eff

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 23/07/2026

My AGI-26 paper 'Civilizational Metamaterials' is now published in the Springer proceedings (LNAI vol 16855, pp. 118-136). Read and download it freely at metamaterials.davidorban.com and arxiv.org/abs/2606.00235

Cover of Springer LNAI volume 16855: Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2026 Proceedings Part II

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 19/07/2026

I am in San Francisco July 24 to August 6, presenting my paper "Civilizational Metamaterials" at AGI-26 (July 27-30). If you want to talk about AGI, enterprise AI adoption, or coordination at machine speed, let's meet. davidorban.substack.com/p/avoiding-…

Meet in San Francisco? card: AGI-26, the 19th Annual Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, July 27-30 2026, over the Bay Bridge at dusk, with David Orban's portrait and the dates Jul 24-Aug 6.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 18/07/2026

Advanced AI decides faster than we can check, and careful institutions freeze. My peer-reviewed paper Civilizational Metamaterials treats governance as an engineering problem, and I present it at AGI-26 in San Francisco, July 27-30. davidorban.com/2026/07/avoiding-the…

Cover art from the Civilizational Metamaterials paper: an orderly blue lattice absorbing shocks beside turbulent orange fragments flying apart, with the title Avoiding The Freezing Equilibrium.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 14/07/2026

Today is my birthday: 61, which I round up to 70. We count a baby's age in months, a child's in years. I count decades now, and I plan to count centuries. The unit of a life should grow with the life. Exponential aging: davidorban.com/2026/07/exponential-…

Lithograph-style cover: concentric growth rings widening by orders of magnitude from a dark seed point, with a burnished amber outer band. Title: Exponential Aging.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 11/07/2026

Introducing Al Liwan Labs: a wholly-owned entity building and testing AI capabilities at arm's length from the core operating business, so adoption is compliant by construction. Why it matters, and an invitation to build it in conversation: davidorban.com/2026/07/introducing-…

Introducing Al Liwan Labs — Technology innovation, built to be trusted

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 07/07/2026

In Abu Dhabi July 9–13. Up for a conversation about where AI is actually heading. If you're in the city, let's meet. DMs open. Who should I see?

Meet in Abu Dhabi? David Orban, Jul 9-13. Abu Dhabi skyline at dusk.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 04/07/2026

The Ikigai Collective is open. A volunteer studio where people design their lives through weekly AI-powered experiments — no hierarchy, no assigned tasks. Values: curiosity, agency, compassion. Lab Night every Thursday 21:00 CET. davidorban.com/2026/07/announcing-t…

Four translucent copper circles overlapping on a near-black background, their intersection glowing warm gold. Title: Announcing the Ikigai Collective — Curiosity, Agency, Compassion.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 21/06/2026

AGI isn't the finish line — it's a waypoint to superintelligence. My new essay: why it's a phase transition like Earth's oxygenation, visible across the galaxy but unfolding in years. Dyson spheres, not job charts. davidorban.com/2026/06/superintelli…

Superintelligence cover: a Dyson sphere of cyan light forming around a golden star, distant galaxies.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 18/06/2026

Yesterday I spoke at ISIA Firenze, Italy's public design school since 1975. Its UNUSUAL event filled a raw industrial space with student work. A few photos and more: davidorban.com/2026/06/italys-quiet…

Six photo montage from ISIA Firenze's UNUSUAL event: the UNUSUAL posters and student installations.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 16/06/2026

I was interviewed by Adnkronos about the phase change we’re living through. A few of the ideas we covered: Recursive self-improvement in AI Refusing technology is the only way to lose with certainty. Optimism isn’t naïveté, it’s strategy. Article in in Italian www.adnkronos.com/politica/svi...

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 15/06/2026

My keynote at the Uncommon event organized by ISIA "Who Wants To Live Forever?" on human longevity is the promise of longer human lifespans, common growth, broader opportunities, and greater flourishing for all

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 15/06/2026

I will be in Florence on June 16-17. Let me know if you want to meet

Meet in Florence? — David Orban, June 16-17, over the Florence Duomo and rooftops

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 07/06/2026

If a metric concludes that 100% of humans become worthless, the flaw is in the metric, not in the people. Ten billion robots are a two-order-of-magnitude expansion of what civilization can do, freeing us to be creators. davidorban.substack.com/p/from-work-...

davidorban.substack.com

From Work to Passion

Humanoid robots are not the end of human purpose

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 31/05/2026

Learning Anywhere, with Anyone, at Any Age The traditional school model is obsolete. Here is a new vision for education: lifelong discovery instead of forced repetition. Read more davidorban.substack.com/p/learning-a...

davidorban.substack.com

Learning Anywhere, with Anyone, at Any Age

The education of the future, beyond the factory-school

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 25/05/2026

Pope Leo XIV just published an encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica Humanitas, "on safeguarding the human person in the time of AI." I spent years arguing for AI rights, and human enhancement: I'm exactly the person it was written to challenge. davidorban.substack.com/p/where-the-...

davidorban.substack.com

Where the Pope is right about AI, and where Rome risks a second Galileo

Pope Leo XIV has written an encyclical about artificial intelligence.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 24/05/2026

I gave a talk at the University of Milano-Bicocca at the International Congress on Roboethics. We have to redesign the legal frame around identity, substrate, time, and trust, to fully realize why the path of human flourishing in the next decades runs through AI and robot rights.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 01/02/2026

What does it mean to be an AI-native organization, not by replacing people with algorithms, but by amplifying human judgment, purpose, and long-term value creation? davidorban.substack.com/p/ai-native

davidorban.substack.com

AI Native

Amplifying Human Judgment in an Age of Intelligent Systems

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 11/01/2026

For the past ten years, after a coordinated attack against my Wikipedia article, it was impossible to restore it. To this day "david orban wikipedia" is one of the most searched terms for my name. Thanks Grokipedia for its own article about me. grokipedia.com/page/David_O...

grokipedia.com

David Orban

David Orban is a Hungarian-born physicist turned entrepreneur, investor, author, and keynote speaker renowned for his expertise at the intersection of artificial intelligence, blockchain, and exponent...

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 22/12/2025

Technology is no longer just a tool for efficiency: it is reshaping how value is created, measured, and aligned with human purpose. From capital to cognition, the architecture of value itself is evolving. davidorban.com/2025/12/the-...

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 21/12/2025

Ten years ago I wrote Something New: AIs and Us, arguing that AI should be understood at the scale of civilization. On its tenth anniversary, I’ve released the book to the commons and reflected on what it got right, or missed, and why those gaps now matter. davidorban.substack.com/p/ten-years-...

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 14/12/2025

I'll be in Australia from Dec 15 to Jan 15. Let me know if you want to meet

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 03/12/2025

Abu Dhabi Finance Week is now one of the most influential hubs in global finance: where capital, regulation, and technology converge. I’m attending the Global AI Show, Bitcoin MENA, and key ADFW arenas across AI, fintech, digital assets, infrastructure, and dispute resolution.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 30/11/2025

I am joining Al Liwan Group, headquartered in Abu Dhabi, as Head of Innovation, to advance our mission by embedding advanced technologies into every layer of the organisation and empowering people to operate at the frontier of what modern finance can achieve. davidorban.substack.com/p/the-capita...

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 15/11/2025

I am pretty full with meetings related to the launch of Al Liwan, but if you reach out we may find a slot to meet in NYC, Nov 16-23.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 01/11/2025

How Do Wikipedia And Grokipedia Compare? Grokipedia is superior with faster updates, broader citations, and deeper analytical coverage. Read the full report on pedia.davidorban.com

pedia.davidorban.com

Wikipedia vs Grokipedia - Quality Comparison

When both platforms cover the same topics, Grokipedia delivers 94% quality vs Wikipedia's 76%

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 30/10/2025

Humanity can flourish in the age of AI and robots: I believe that through them we will gain new degrees of freedom, and it will enable us to decide and design our future.

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 22/10/2025

Did you know that Bitcoin has had a de facto status as legal tender in Lugano, Switzerland since 2022? Plan ₿ Forum, on Oct 24-25 is the venue to discuss the state of Bitcoin adoption, not only in Switzerland, but worldwide. Meet there?

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 10/10/2025

I’ll be joining Token Talks & Tastes 2.0 on October 13 in Dubai for the panel “From Camels to Code: The Evolution of Value Exchange.” The event gathers innovators and investors to discuss how blockchain, digital assets, and AI are reshaping global finance. luma.com/2t6rm27i?tk=...

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 07/10/2025

I’ll be in Dubai next week for two of the region’s biggest tech gatherings: Expand North Star on October 12 and GITEX Global starting October 13. Both are massive stages where innovation, scale, and ambition come together. Reach out if you'd like to meet

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David Orban @davidorban.com · 07/10/2025

Tech doesn’t grow exponentially. It jolts. The smooth exponential model worked for fifty years, but it doesn’t match what we’re living through now. Explore more at jolting.davidorban.com

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